[HN Gopher] The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] ___________________________________________________________________ The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] Author : activatedgeek Score : 42 points Date : 2021-08-09 19:34 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.ias.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (www.ias.edu) | wydfre wrote: | One time I was reading Sherlock Holmes as a kid and ran upon this | passage: | | "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty | attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you | choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he | comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him | gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other | things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. | Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he | takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools | which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large | assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to | think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to | any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every | addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. | It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless | facts elbowing out the useful ones." | | I thought it was right. It was a horrible decision to make. There | are so many times I have looked down upon people who make silly | side-projects, going "It will never succeed" or "You could be | starting a business instead!" and it is subconscious and | terrible. I think that learning new things, and gaining a new | skillset, are important, and I wish I knew that earlier instead | of just wasting my life away trying to feel superior to people | toying on some problem with FPGA's or something. It's a horrible | mindset to culture. | reidjs wrote: | There's validity to both sides. I used to spend so, so much | time reading Wikipedia, watching documentaries, memorizing | trivia for school tests. just trying to absorb sheer amounts of | knowledge in a variety of subjects. | | In hindsight, I would have been better off spending that time | experiencing real life and learning real, tangible, applicable | skills. | | There's definitely a balance to it :) | iamgopal wrote: | In childhood, One of the worst advise given to me was, | "knowledge is power". Which is not only half truth, but a | time consuming advise. Experienced knowledge is the key. | laGrenouille wrote: | The opening of this essay is a beautifully written and | surprisingly timely reflection on the importance of not judging | the worth of time spent on certain pursuits purely on their | direct, material utility. | | I was hoping the rest would build on the deeper importance of | fields such as art, music, and literature at the level of both | the individual and society as a whole. Unfortunately, the rest is | a bit underwhelming. It is mostly examples showing how particular | pursuits in mathematics and theoretical physics eventually | created more practical applications in future generations. | Interesting, of course, but still focused on raw 'utility', just | one step more removed. | kurthr wrote: | Usefulness is in the eye of the beholders. We know much more | trivia about the material properties of silicon, prime number | sieves, and lithium chemistry... only now it's not considered | trivia, it's valuable knowledge. | | Many discoveries are random luck, many are hard focused work, and | some are both. Their value is rarely known at the time and is | likely reflexive (e.g. Silicon became the default because it was | better known, and similarly prime numbers rather than elliptic | curves). Neither would be all that relevant without the markets | for semiconductors or public key cryptography. | | For that reason, I wouldn't discount those first | implementer/inventors that popularized solutions that became | profitable. Without them there would not have been the investment | in continued later focused development required to make those | solutions "win" and elevate trivia to relevance. | | Now adtech on the other hand... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-10 23:00 UTC)