The Hidden Benefits of Useless Knowledge
Monday Map
THE HIDDEN BENEFITS OF USELESS KNOWLEDGE: WHY YOU SHOULD STUDY A SUBJECT EVEN WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE ITS USE
Can someone explain your fascination with Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky to me? To me, these guys just play “stuff” – or noise. Yet I can’t stop the awe I feel when I see people commit themselves to their pieces. A composer’s fascination with these legends tells me more than I can describe. Yet, even they cannot describe it. It is simply contagious.
We dismiss subjects, topics, and activities for one reason or another. But among these reasons is the claim that we don’t see the need to study those subjects. If you ask how they measure this “usefulness”, you may get answers like “doesn’t help my grades,” or “it won’t help me find a job.” We measure real-life uses of subjects and knowledge (primarily) by grades and economics. And I use “real-life” here to describe a materialistic world.
Grades and economics are presentable on paper. Interest, enjoyment, and curiosity are not. No one cares about your passion on your resume. But they care about your work experience (measured in years and duties). Using this filter makes sense that we should prioritize what is useful rather than what is interesting. But what can you gain from “useless” knowledge? And how far should you go with what you consider interesting but not useful?
I will desist from naming the benefits of useless knowledge. I want to avoid the naive assumption that the benefits of useless knowledge are obvious. Because the benefits appear after the fact rather than before it.
You may think that passion, enjoyment, entertainment, and the likes are such benefits. But I will argue otherwise. Passion, curiosity, enjoyment, and entertainment drive us into pursuit rather than benefits. The benefits I argue, are real-life uses that improve the human condition but were never intended from the beginning. These benefits do not feature in a goal, a plan, or a vision. They present themselves spontaneously a long time after we are done with them or even dead. The benefits are “uses without any thoughts of use.”
Useless knowledge entails everything that cannot be measured in an objective sense: art, music, sports (for the enjoyment), bird-watching, and self-slapping.
There is an interesting paper on the Usefulness of useless knowledge. Read and enjoy.
I conclude with a passage from one of my favorite philosophers Roger Scruton:
Although knowledge is useful, it comes about because we value it, whether or not we have a use for it, as people valued the study of the classical languages and ancient history, the study of logic and set theory, the study of probability and statistical inference. Nobody would have guessed that ten years of Latin and Greek was exactly the preparation required by those British civil servants, as they travelled around the globe to administer a multicultural empire; nobody would have foreseen that the abstruse workings of Boole’s algebra and Frege’s logic would lead to the era of digital technology; nobody, least of all the Rev. Thomas Bayes, had any idea of what Bayes’ theorem in the calculus of probability would mean for our understanding of statistics. All such knowledge arises because people pursue it for its own sake, in the context of institutions that are maintained by our curiosity and not by our goals.
Death by a thousand cuts: slowly, then suddenly
“Mistaking the lurid for the empirical”
N.N.T
We are easily shocked by stories of horrors. In hindsight, we detest the Nazis for their monstrous actions during the Holocaust. Any sane person who knows the outcome of that event is right to be shocked. But what do you think of the people who observed these events in real-time?
If you observed the beginning of these events in real-time, could you tell the outcome? Could you tell that your Jewish neighbor will be cake in a giant human oven one day? How could they not see it? Most importantly, how could they not stop it?
I am of the humble opinion that many of us will watch as the world around us collapses and we will do nothing about it. We will do nothing about it because we think that it is not a serious issue. We probably have an explanation, a theory that excuses our bad discernment. I know one explanation: “it is statistically insignificant.”
News sell because they are sensational. They tickle our passions. They are vivid. Meanwhile, the subtle events of a thousand cuts are boring to the one experiencing the cut and to the independent observer. You think they are negligible; that they cannot harm you. But when one drops dead – maybe in a horrific manner, we investigate. We find all the tiny cuts. We declare the cause of death. Everyone acts surprised (or says “I told you so” depending on the arrogance level). But deep down we know that everything became clear in hindsight.
What can you say is the thousand cuts happening in your lifetime?
Multiplication Effect
My latest podcast is out. It is an audio rendition of my post on the Multiplication Effect: The Medium is the message. A summary of the topic is the acceleration that the internet and social media impact on existing vices and how it weakens hope and faith.
Listen to the podcast with these links:
Finally, here is your picture: a tweet with the cynic’s creed:
Have a curious week, and see you in June.