The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]
ias.edu
ias.edu
"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.
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 :)
On the other hand, I've always had trouble understanding Kubernetes. I know the general concepts and I can get by reasonably well but there are parts that just don't click. This is knowledge that would help my career and financial well-being in clear ways.
If I were offered a pill that would permanently remove any knowledge of Glass Town and any ability to find out about it again in exchange for perfect understanding of Kubernetes I wouldn't take it.
As for Kubernetes, I already know that stuff.
I have come to believe that recreational play can be a process of reinforcing the ability to acquire new skills. Or play, like dreaming, can be an unconscious way of sorting out new experiences against the frameworks you already possess.
As I wrote this, I was struck by the literal sense of the Engligh word: "re-creation".
My best work as a programmer has always come to me as I am walking, or in the shower as I wake up. My worst work has always been sleep-deprived nonsense.
While the Brontë sisters' imaginary world may have no intrinsic value, it may well be that the experience of creating such a thing led them to success in other ways.
But I would like to understand why you value that trivial knowledge even after admitting it will not affect your life in a measurable way.
The paper was about ideas and exploration about crossing from not-useful to useful and the requirements for that to happen to accumulate a lot of not-useful's for the future to draw on.
This also reminds me of Taleb referencing Umberto Eco's book collection for his anti-scholar/anti-library concept where the 'value' of the library was in the unread books rather than the read ones.
Different people will have different definitions of useful. And different people will weigh usefulness differently in determining value.
My point is that I don't need to find some arbitrary definition of 'useful' to cover something in order to find it valuable.
I think the better contrast would be useful knowledge and having fun with fantasy 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...
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.
Products we use in our society are often based upon huge amount of theoretical work, going back to long time ago.
Our society is heavily focused on entrepreneurs and businesses builders. They work hard, and do their part, but that’s a small part of the whole work necessary to produce commercial applications.
So, usless knowledge might only be useless when initially found and have some application later.
Zettelcasten before it was cool.
Alternately they may have used a Monotype machine, which (per Wikipedia) uses a two-step process (with a paper tape intermediate) and can therefore calculate the necessary justification after the fact, though I don’t know the exact mechanism by which this was done.
Mechanical processing was incredibly clever; these days everything can be done with a couple microchips but the heights that were achieved with mechanical linkages are absolutely astonishing.