Hi Billy, On May 7, 2012, at 8:08 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> > Ernie : > Most of the article makes excellent sense. But here is a statement about which > I could not possibly DISagree more : > “Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… > Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a > commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the > person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world > cares about is what you can do with what you know. > > To do anything well requires content mastery. Anything, unless you are > talking about recess > in grade school, or lunch hour in high school. I actually agree with the statement, but disagree with the sentiment. > I will start with the social sciences and history. These are absolutely > content driven, you > simply have got to know all the facts in the world, or about the history of > Europe or Asia > or the United States, or you are nothing with nothing to say that is worth > hearing. I call BS. It is literally impossible to know *all* the facts in the world. Sure, back in Benjamin Franklin's time, someone theoretically *could* have read all the books that mattered, and know everything that was known about philosophy, science, history, and politics. And make dramatic advances in all of those fields, as he did. But that ceased being true a long time ago. The very fact that "social sciences" and "history" are two separate fields is a sign of that. I suppose that 20 years ago it might still have been possible to know *everything* that was known about the history of Europe and Asia. But now? Do you really think that even a top history professor in a major American University knows *everything* that has been discovered about the history of Asia in the last 20 years -- unless that is the only thing he specializes in? Facts are both accumulating and obsoleting at an accelerating rate, even historical knowledge. Most people would be better of being trained how to look up and verify the latest facts than risk being stuck having memorized facts that are know obsolete. > But the same surely is true for chemistry or physics or biology or computer > science, > wouldn't you say ? Oh, it is FAR, FAR WORSE in the sciences. That is why there are no general "physicists" anymore. There is simply WAY TOO MUCH information for one person to keep abreast of *everything*. Instead you have a proliferation of sub-subfields (and journals to represent them), like "experimental particle physics"-- who have only a vague idea the 'facts' the "theoretical particle physicists" are working with today. Physics, like most sciences, has moved into the realm of Big Data, where we simply can't keep all the facts in our head. We have to store them in massive databases, and accept that our results may be skewed by the model-depedent schemas and queries we use to organize and extract information. > Or math, or psychology, or geology, or even the arts --to the extent > that you really need to know all the tricks of sculpture to create a statue > or a casting, > or all the tricks of painting with acrylics, and so forth. You're arguing the point you disagreed with above: what matters IS "what you can do with what you know". > I mean, I had a class in drawing > at the U of Illinois in which we learned everything conceivable about how to > use > pencils to draw, and a good number of students did some pretty darned creative > things with so simple a medium. Yes, you *can* master a narrow subdiscipline, or several. And it is incredibly useful IF you know what to *do* with what you know. But you can't memorize all the facts in the world, or even any major discipline. What matters is useful skills, not useless facts. > I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches, needless to say, and think that > strictly > staying within a field stultifies creativity and innovation, but not for one > minute > should content be neglected. That kind of advice is intellectually suicidal. Let's back up a bit. The thesis is NOT that content is unimportant. It is that knowledge is ONLY important if you know how to use it. It is a subtle distinction, but it is critically important. Contemporary education starts from the same premise you seem to be arguing for: that there is a fixed set of knowledge to be mastered, and if you can hold it all in your head you are competent to perform a task. That's how we teach, how we test, and how we deem people worthy for most professions. That is utterly backwards. A far *better* question to ask is, "What are the tasks people need to be able to do?", then help them acquire the content they need to do *that* job. INCLUDING the job of having a rich enough background to ask important questions and engage in cross-fertilization of ideas. Right now our education system idolizes these historic silos dating back to Aristotle, without seriously questioning whether they even make sense for modern humans. Yes, content matters, and the ability to memorize massive quantities of information does matter for *some* jobs. But content should be the *servant* of human beings doing useful things (including, but not limited to, "work"). > Sure, it is a lot of work to turn your brain into an encyclopedia, a huge > investment of time > and a lot of effort, but you've got to do so or you are not professional. And > I'm sure glad > that my doctor took the trouble to learn medicine thoroughly. I'm absolutely NOT. Medical education is ridiculously anachronistic. If we simply used Medical Schools to train every doctor to consistently *wash their hands*, it would save way more lives than requiring all of them to memorize the Krebs cycle: http://www.naturalnews.com/027981_doctors_hand_washing.html Sure, some doctors need to know that, and all doctors need a basic understanding of the human body, but our focus on facts is way out of whack with reality. There's a rule of thumb that the best doctors are a few years out of medical school, so they are old enough to have gained wisdom but young enough that their knowledge isn't obsolete. Yeah, the illusion of knowing everything is very powerful, and for *some* people it absolutely does make sense for them to pick a specific field and memorize all the facts about it. But even there, it is far more powerful if you pick an area you want to *do* something with, and learn about all the various disciplines that touch on it. But for everyone else, it is a far better use of their time to figure out *what* they should be doing, and then develop techniques (or tools) for continually improving their ability to acquire and use the latest relevant knowledge. Not because content doesn't matter, but because what matters is *timely, relevant* content. We need to accept and embrace our perpetual ignorance if we are to have any hope of maintaining useful knowledge. -- Ernie P. P.S. As usual, XKCD has the last word: http://xkcd.com/1053/ -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
