Did Wang oppose reading and scholarship?

No. He opposed treating accumulation and recitation as cultivation itself; learning must enter sincere judgement and affairs.

How might one investigate things today?

Define critical facts and an action threshold, inspect evidence bias, then use a reversible test to let reality revise judgement.

Chuanxilu

Investigating Things Does Not Mean Reading the Whole World First

Wang does not reject learning about the external world. He rejects using endless acquisition as a reason to postpone sincerity and action. Rectifying things corrects judgement in the affair where intention is engaged.

Rectifying things is the practice of resting in the highest good. Once you understand the highest good, you understand rectifying things.Chuanxilu, Volume I · Passage 9

What the Zhu–Wang disagreement is about

It is unfair to reduce Zhu Xi to external fact-gathering and Wang to rejecting knowledge. Their dispute concerns how the Great Learning’s “investigation of things” leads to moral achievement. Wang fears that if the highest good is scattered among limitless external principles, a learner can postpone sincerity forever because knowledge remains incomplete. He reads a “thing” as the affair on which intention rests, and investigation as correction. Learning still has objects, but it returns to motive and conduct in this affair.

How knowledge anxiety reproduces itself

Courses, reading lists and long videos make preparation immediately rewarding: saving resembles mastery, understanding resembles completion, and comparing methods resembles progress. Action exposes ability, so we seek “a more complete framework.” The issue is not quantity but whether new material changes a testable assumption. If three sources repeat one conclusion, marginal information is low. If one critical fact remains unknown, design contact with that fact instead of moving endlessly among opinions.

Rectifying things still needs external evidence

Inward practice cannot cancel expertise. Medical decisions require clinical evidence, product claims require users, and legal risk requires current rules. What correction addresses is how facts are selected, interpreted and used: do I search only for support, present uncertainty as certainty, or let identity replace observation? External inquiry and inward clearing are not rivals. They are two sides of responsible judgement.

Set a threshold from learning to testing

Before research, name three facts the decision requires, the acceptable uncertainty and the moment action becomes necessary. Mark each source as supporting, opposing or irrelevant. Once critical facts cross the threshold, take the smallest reversible action. Return to study afterwards with sharper questions. Investigation is neither anti-intellectualism nor endless research; it lets knowledge correct bias in a concrete affair and lets the result correct knowledge in return.