An Autodidact's Bible, #4
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 1, Chapter 4: The Nature of Knowledge From the Knowledge of Nature
This is the fourth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3
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Chapter 4: The Nature of Knowledge from the Knowledge of Nature
Answer: Poor Richard’s folksy proverbs were actually the subversive utterances of this American Founding Father.
Question: Who is Benjamin Franklin?
Jeopardy!: the quintessential geek gameshow and occasional AI test bed for the pocket protector set at IBM.
Every night for the last fifty-odd years (excluding weekends and give or take the occasional programming gap caused by cancellations and pandemics and terminal bouts of cancer), it has beamed into living rooms across North America. It relies on irony, puns, and linguistic inversions (such as replying to answers in the form of a question), but that’s all just a fancy dress-up to one of the world’s oldest games: trivia. Competitive fast recall of facts. Am I smarter than my friends?
Jeopardy!, Six Degrees of [insert name here], Star Trek canonicity discussions—however you want to dress it up, trivia is the fast-food gamification of knowledge.
Well...kind of. Trivia is not exactly knowledge, as the word indicates and as the world’s most popular trivia board game gives away in its title: Trivial Pursuit.
Trivial.
Unimportant. Inconsiderable. Trifling. Not worthy of great attention or consideration.
And yet the curious among us are attracted to trivia like diabetics to a dessert cart, and for much the same reason. It’s a slake to the curiosity drive. A titillation of the appetite. A kind of harmless pornography. It’s also a test of three of the essential autodidactic skills: exposure, memorization, and recall.
But the ability to win a trivia game does not actually prove anything about one’s education. It is possible to know all the facts available on a given topic and still not be educated on that topic, in the same way that it’s possible for the WikiMedia Foundation’s servers to be loaded to the gills with Wikipedia and all its articles and still know nothing about anything, or for AI chatbots to answer any question of fact without understanding or awareness.
Yes, facts have their place. They’re of vital importance when you’re doing practical work like engineering (this mill has a machining tolerance of 65 microns) or carpentry (the cabinet door I’m replacing is exactly 15 and 15/16 inches wide) or logistics (three trucks with three loads destined for the same two delivery spots will each pass the same point as they enter town) or military strategy (the enemy’s artillery batteries have a maximum effective range of twenty-three and a half miles). Sometimes, the facts have life-and-death importance.
But knowledge is not about facts per se, and you can’t get it by acting like a computer. Computers are information processing, storage, and retrieval systems—your brain is not. Your brain isn’t even the sum total of the “you” that you’re educating when you learn things. Education is not about facts, and less about information. It’s another animal altogether.
Speaking of facts, in fact, of all the things you can learn, facts are probably the least useful on their own. You’ll learn some eventually, and they’re not without value, but they’re certainly not what you think they are. They’re not what you’ve been led to believe your entire life.
One of the reasons that schooling doesn’t confer an education on any but the most motivated of students (and then only on some of them) is that schooling focuses on atomized facts. You’re presented with a schedule of facts to learn, such as what years Napoleon marched his armies across Europe. You will be tested on your ability to recall these facts over a short space of time (a few days to a few months) and that’s a test you can cram for if you really need to.
But unless you have an eidetic memory (exceedingly rare), your brain doesn’t remember facts per se. Oh, certainly, you have facts rattling around in your brain—millions of them, I’d wager—but, unless it’s because you drill yourself endlessly to memorize things and have cultivated the ability to hang on to file-drawers full of meaningless factoids, then the fact that they’re facts is, in fact, incidental to the fact that you remember them.
Because brains don’t remember facts.
But that’s okay, because facts are not what you think they are.
So What Are Facts, Anyway?
A fact, as we were all taught in grade school or before, is something which is true:
The sky is blue.
Freckles come from exposure to the sun.
A male child of my parents is my brother.
Up is above my head, down is below my feet.
Gravity pulls me towards the earth.
Hammers are heavy and hard.
Oh, if only it were that easy!
The simplistic equation of fact and truth is a holdover from the clockwork age—a time of rapid scientific and technological development during which most of the everyday-level workings of the natural world were discovered, quantified, harnessed, and explained.
Except that they weren’t.
Explained, that is.
Not exactly.
They were merely explained well enough. As long as the tools of inquiry were more powerful than the questions placed before them, the illusion grew that the explanations those tools produced were complete explanations.
However, one of the properties of a really good tool is that, if you’re creative, you can use it to design tools that are more fit-for-purpose, more effective, and more specialized:
A stone becomes a hand-axe, which cuts wood and shaves it, which helps it become a spear, which becomes an arrow, and a ballista, and a trebuchet, and a catapult, and (with some help from pigs and chickens and alchemists and bellfounders) a canon.
Or, a stone becomes a hammer, which helps shape other rocks into knives, and anvils, and so on.
Sounds crazy, but don’t laugh. Trace it back far enough, and the symbols that you’re currently interpreting as words-on-a-page began as scratches on clay used to tally up business transactions, while the paper or screen you’re reading on or the player you’re listening to started life as sticks and stones.
Poetry, glass, silicon, steel; all of civilization is dirt and fire.1
All our technology is made up of sticks and stones and animal parts—often disguised, but all descended from more rudimentary, hand-fashioned forms of the same stuff. The tools of inquiry that those intrepid philosophers, alchemists, opticians, and explorers used eventually gave birth to tools sophisticated enough to measure the universe—and completely turn our notion of what a “fact” is on its head.
It turns out that facts are...well...not.
Not “facts,” I mean.
That is, they’re not little free-floating nuggets of truth.
Facts are, instead, dependent upon frame of reference and context of discussion. “The sky is blue” is a fact—except when it isn’t. Sometimes, the sky is black with white dots in it. Sometimes, it’s pink or orange or purple. Sometimes, it’s gray or white, blank or mottled. The blueness of the sky IS a fact, but it is not the kind of thing most of us think of when we think about facts.
Because—distressingly—facts have a way of changing. They are the most fragile sort of knowledge. They change so frequently that philosophers of science have a way of measuring/describing their expected obsolescence: “The Half-Life of Facts.”
The Half-Life of Facts is the amount of time that will elapse between now and the time that half of the information in a given field is discovered to be incorrect, incomplete, mistaken, delusional, blinkered, fraudulent, or otherwise wrong. Different fields of human endeavor have different half-lives of facts—fields that are rapidly-advancing (like medicine) have a shorter half-life than fields which are more-or-less well mapped (like classical physics), but the fact about facts is that any fact is subject to change at any time—either through being discovered as having been wrong the whole time, or through natural changes wrought by a capricious universe, or through the actions of other agents on the field.
Chasing facts, fun though it is, is a losing game when it comes to education.
The Nature of Facts
Bear in mind: none of this means that facts do not exist, or that they’re socially constructed. It means that what we’re likely to call a “fact” in any given instance is not so much the fact (feature of reality) itself, but our current best-description of that fact. This is why what we call facts in everyday speech (and in science) sometimes expire, change, or transmogrify. Our articulation of what they are changes—the underlying reality does not actually change with our articulation.
If you are not inclined to idolize facts (at least, not as much as a trivia buff), you have a leg-up on the job of acquiring a real command of any field of knowledge you wish to sink your teeth into.
Why Things Work On A Starship
All right, smarty-pants, I hear your subconscious cry, If knowing facts isn’t knowledge, what is? What is learning if it doesn’t involve remembering things?
And there’s the rub. Years of schooling have taught you that memorizing something is the same thing as learning it, and that displaying the “right attitude” is the same as being a good student—and being a “good student” is the same as learning well.
Our school system was initially designed in and optimized for a time where the thing the world needed most (in the eyes of those designers) were efficient, obedient factory workers. A person educated for that world would need to rapidly memorize a procedure or protocol, readily hew to a clock, perform meaningless work for no readily apparent purpose, read competently, communicate clearly, and, above all, think only well enough to solve such practical problems as might come up during the course of work.
To do this, students are expected to memorize atomized facts, obey a bell, move between classes, do meaningless homework, and submit regularly to standardized tests which fail to reliably measure anything beyond the ability to load facts and procedures into temporary memory during a cramming session.
The trouble is, we no longer live in a world of interchangeable hyper-specific factory jobs, so obedient factory workers are not necessarily desirable. Even if we did, a person so “educated” wouldn’t have learned very much, because facts that they would memorize are, as such, meaningless even when they are accurate.2
But how could this possibly be the case? Aren’t those true facts valuable just by virtue of being true?