The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

ias.edu

141 pointsjkuria41 comments

Reminds me of this delightful passage from the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi (tr. Brook Ziporyn):

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”

Huizi said, “It would be useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.”

I don’t understand why the patch would continue to be useless; it’s all he has to stand on!

But what does the patch stand on?

turtles, obviously

How far down?

Turtles all the way down

I think the point is; where would he go? The ground he is not using fills a purpose for the ground he is standing on.

Searching for a short elaboration regarding "Yellow Springs" (地獄 - dìyù) [0] I ended up digging way too deep:

>In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth – eight dark hells, eight cold hells and 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. All will go to Diyu after death but the period of time one spends in Diyu is not forever – it depends on the severity of the sins one committed. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. Diyu is divided into ten courts, each overseen by a Yanwang. Souls pass from stage to stage at the decision of a different judge

Indeed very much useless!

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyu

Past submissions with discussion: (there are some more with 1-4 comments, but no real discussion)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28121309 - Aug 10, 2021 - 23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683298 - Dec 18. 2018 - 12 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14558775 - June 15, 2017 - 33 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305179 - July 28, 2012 - 22 comments

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28121309 - Aug 2021 (23 comments)

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23791427 - July 2020 (4 comments)

The usefulness of useless knowledge (1939) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683298 - Dec 2018 (12 comments)

A. Flexner – The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656457 - June 2017 (1 comment)

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14558775 - June 2017 (33 comments)

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305179 - July 2012 (21 comments)

As Flexner was recounting to Eastman the many contributors to Marconi's unification of threads that led to radio, I was reminded of the recurring theme of James Burke's great TV series 'Connections' in recognizing the multitude of contributors who are so often overlooked as we grandly laud a masterwork as a solitary act of 'genius'.

Burke would also agree that useless knowledge might be very useful in the future, because we simply cannot predict what might be useful in 2, 20, or 200 years.

> [...] most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.

> "Curiosity?" asked Mr. Eastman. "Yes," I replied, "curiosity, which mayor may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered.

"Curiosity" goes back to a few centuries ago, and in Europe? Short-sighted and eurocentric.

Curious if you could build a time machine, go back to 1939 and give them a earful.

Shameful that this man living 100 years ago isn't as progressive as I am.

He's saying it goes at least that far back, not that Francis bacon invented curiosity.

This seems like one of those examples of looking for a reason to be mad. They were hardly giving credit to Europeans for inventing curiosity.

It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air.

My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.

No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking.

Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.

You are reading too much into my comment, as others have done. "Curiosity" (note "curiosity", not science) does not go back to Newton, Bacon, Galileo. It's a stupid and shortsighted statement by the author. No need to read scientific counter-historiographies, be a post-modern "social constructivist" about reason and science, or a "progressive" cultural relativist to see that this statement is just stupid.

I added that it's eurocentric because that's what it felt when I read it (and it probably is, since even non-human animals are probably curious, too).

There is another source of really great discoveries: goal-driven research which fails to achieve its predefined goals, but discovers something completely unrelated which turns out to be useful.

Anyone who worked in research knows that this is the usual way of discovery. Few people complete a PhD on the topic they originally aimed for.

Interesting to contrast Flexner's great optimism about his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study (which he founded) with the severe criticism the IAS has received from a number of scientists such as Richard Hamming: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#fame-working-cond...

"Of what use is a new-born baby" Michael Faraday, asked about electricity.

There's also David Pye, and his thoughts on "useless work", and how that builds a better world. See "The Nature and Art of Workmanship".

Holy run on sentence, Batman!

"Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women-old and young-detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?"

How would you rewrite it so that it was better? It seems perfectly fine to me. It's a single thought, why would it need to be broken up into separate sentences?

“In a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, is it not curious that men and women-old and young-detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?”

I actually think this helps me understand the sentence better. The use of “fact” is not necessary, and an example of a filler word. When I look at the sentence, it isn’t the length of the sentence, but the amount I had to parse. Taking out that word and reworking the sentence slightly made things clear to me.

That's a different kind of reworking than I though you had in mind when you complained of it being a 'run on' sentence.

I didn't notice ... it reads perfectly naturally to me.

Are long sentences always wrong? Should all sentences contain no more than ten words?

If course not. Good writing requires variation, and is not simply the dolloping, piece by tiny piece, of single pearls of fact.

I have ADHD, and consequently it took me several reads to parse the sentence. It’s a real issue for some people, including myself.

This wants a (1939).

If you get your useless information from some of the world's top scientists and mathematicians, it might turn out to be useful.

Uselessness is one of those attributes.

Many things are totally useless until they aren't and predicting what will and what won't be useful means you are able to predict the future.

Sure, one could imagine totally useless facts, but I could just as quickly imagine social situations in which they could be put to use.

TL;DR: finding things that will be 100% reliably useless in the future is impossible

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