In the present day, there appear to be three main schools of mineral exploration. The first is governed most strongly by the view that successful exploration is largely a matter of chance, chance that can only be slightly to moderately augmented by sustained doggedness of exploration effort and expenditure. Because the frequency of economic mineral deposits is naturally low, adherents to this school of exploration are found throughout the mineral mining industry. This school’s view appears to be slowly ingrained into many mineral exploration geologists by the influence of the difficult working conditions that are nearly always part of mineral exploration work.
A second school can best be characterized by its often uncritical confidence in emerging and/or dominant academic hypotheses and fashions — and the most recent ‘best practices’ constructed from this more external basis of practice. Less flexible, more pedantic, and often less practically-oriented than the first school, many of the adherents to the ‘best practices’ school can be found working in brownfields exploration for mining companies with a well-established resource base. It can be objectively said that misplaced confidence in the correctness of this school of mineral exploration thought is probabilistically supported by the fact that brownfields areas contain greater than a normal frequency of economic mineral deposits, and that — the occasional arbitrariness of an academic approach notwithstanding — the more steady employment and operating budget of the second school’s adherents inadvertently accesses the basic validity of the “doggedness of effort and expenditure” approach particularly favored by the first school.
The third apparent school of modern mineral exploration shares some attributes of both the first and second schools, but differs from the first in that it is less discouraged by training and working difficulty, and can be contrasted with the second school because it consciously discriminates between emerged academic views and ‘best practices’ that are only associatively related to ore discovery success, and those that are causally and concretely related to such accomplishments. Over the long run, the accurate discrimination between associative and causally-related exploration paradigms that is necessary when seeking to usefully integrate academic findings into mineral exploration tends to lead to less working discouragement than that encountered by either the first or second schools of mineral exploration.
Chuang Tzu, a 300 B.C. Chinese philosopher, told a fable that described pretty much the same state of things in the general world of skilled work, a story that suggests that the current ore deposit discovery problem in the mineral exploration world can yet be solved by ‘sizing up the difficulties’ (Burton Watson translation, 1968):
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-Hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-Hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
