The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

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93 pointsjohnr820121 comments

If there's one thing I did correctly bringing up my children, it's to foster their natural curiosity. It's so easy to amplify that curiousity but our society seems to want to quell it at an early age. When a toddler asks a question, do you answer it thoroughly and ask them a leading question ... or do you purposely provide a minimal answer and go back to reading on your iPad?

I suspect that most of this crowd is pre-child, but you can still interact with someone else's kid. And it can be fun. Think of how Randall of xkcd explores topics and lead them on a humorous quest for knowledge. And it's good practice when/if you have kids of your own. Maybe you'll end up with one of these kids: http://bama.ua.edu/~chytrid/Hughes/HHMI.ugst12.html

I have kids (4 and under) and I sometimes wonder if my 'daddy answers' are a bit much. The kids sometimes get bored, sometimes overwhelmed, and generally have to do very little research themselves as I've covered the obvious bases. I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on this topic.

My daughter isn't at that age yet, but I imagine that helping to lead the conversation/exploration with the right questions (rather than providing complete answers) might be a sound approach?

I think that's a good idea, but in practice it can be hard to strike a balance that I like. If you get to the question part too soon, or if the question requires too much of a leap or background knowledge, you can hit a brick wall.

I think the fact that you're thinking about how to guide your kids through their early years indicates that you're going to do well at it. Sometimes you won't give enough detail and sometimes too much but overall, they'll hear the parts they need at the time.

A funny anecdote - I taught my daughter the principles (not the mechanics) of trigonometry and the unit circle when she was in 6th grade. Simply because she asked. When she was taking trig in 10th grade, she said "remember when you told me about ...".

I guess I should come clean and admit that I'm older than most of the people here ... my kids are 21, 19, 16 and 10. I think when they're younger, you try to answer the question in a fun way that makes them continue to think about the topic. Remember though ... the impulse to tell them they're too young for the question can be pretty strong. Counter this in your mind by reminding yourself that they weren't too young to ask the question. You just need to think a bit to make the conversation age appropriate.

When they're a little older, you can start to send them off on fun "quests". Instead of answering, say "Hmmm ... I think you should go try <insert a "life-experiment" here>". And you won't need to cover the bases at all. Guide their curiosity to the answers instead. Once you get used to it, your conversations will happen this way naturally.

We didn't really push our kids academically, but we did push them to be critical thinkers. We also never really conversed with them in "baby talk". We used college-level language around them and gave them definitions for the words they didn't already know (you'd be amazed how well context works even with young kids). By the time our oldest two were 8-10, they were comfortable having long conversations with adults (the adults were generally surprised).

I also want to give a lot of credit to my wife. Her undergrad degree is in early childhood development and her masters is in counselling education (focused on elementary school grades). I am a far better father through watching her and getting occasional tips.

But my final thought is the most important ... give them your time! It's so easy when we're busy to just put them off, but you can always afford 15 minutes to engage with them more deeply on any topic.

Have fun :)

EDIT: Given the mind-set of the HN crowd, I should also point out that we also encouraged entrepreneurship in our kids. I've reposted an article I wrote six years ago on my site for those that care to read my thoughts on kids and business. See http://www.selesy.com/news/17

I also make a conscious effort to answer the questions my daughter asks very thoroughly and ask questions of her.

I have conditioned myself to feel really guilty if I do not do his and that helps immensely in engaging with her.

I spend enough time on the computer as it is.

This:

"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times."

edit: it's interesting to look back at my school/college career and be able to pick out those educators who taught this above all else vs. those who taught 'by the book'. Each had their place in my education, but the former certainly had a more profound impact.

Whenever someone comes up with "Who needs pure math research?", I'll send this their way :)

People don't realize that "standing on shoulders of giants" implies that the giants had conditions to grow and reach for greater and greater heights.

> Who needs pure math research?

Every single human being who banks over the Internet, which, given how banks work now, is every single human being who has funds in a modern money economy.

I know, I know, but it's my favorite example: Number theory was held up as the exemplar of math-for-math's-sake pure mathematics until suddenly it was the foundation of cryptography. In the words of Chuck Berry, "Goes to show you never can tell."

This Russell quote seems appropriate:

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Bertrand Russell -The Problems of Philosophy

Well, I would say that Marconi and those who followed in his footsteps have made a huge contribution to human welfare and to glorify Hertz and Maxwell to the expense of the engineers and businesspeople who've made radio a reality is a big mistake.

When I hear this kind of thing, however, I immediately realize how science itself does most of the work of turning people against science.

When I was in graduate school I quickly got the message that a son of a construction worker wasn't going to get a permanent career in academia. In all the time I spent around an Ivy League school, I met just one professor who didn't have at least one professor for a parent -- and I can say he was a thoroughly miserable twisted soul... the epitomy of the nasty physics professor.

Although the image of science is beautiful, the reality is that it's a system that runs young people like racehorses and disposes of most of them. Because of that, it's hard for me to reccomend a career in science to a young person, like my son.

That same university is now going through some drastic changes and the astonishing thing is the lack of resistance. Students don't resist because they're only there for four years and don't have a picture of what's going on. Tenured profs don't care because their motto, to a man, is "aprois moi le deluge."

That's the motto of a man (or woman) who can't be fired. If the personal fate of academics was tied to the fate of their institution, the fate of their field, the fate of their students and of mankind, we might see a major upwelling of humanity and morality in the academic class.

I would argue Marconi and Maxwell share equal credit. They both stood on the shoulders of giants to accomplish something they could never have done alone, and it is likely that if either hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have done so fairly soon.

But critical to the argument, Marconi stood on Maxwell's shoulders. The wireless would not have existed without the fundamental, "pointless" work of Maxwell and others. I would imagine cell phones were far from Maxwell's mind when he did his work, yet those, too, are a legacy of his discoveries.

I look at things like the LHC and really question whether anything practical will come of it. In the end, I don't care, because we are learning, and our species seems to do better when exploring new frontiers, no matter where they are. (I do question whether we could learn more by funding a lot more smaller experiments, but that's a different issue.)

Particle physics needed the LHC. In particle physics, the fastest way to answer the question "are there new particles at higher energies?" is to collide particles at those higher energies. Also, $4.4 billion dollars isn't that much. For the price of Zynga and Instagram, you get to push out the limits of our understanding of the interactions of fundamental particles.

I'm still hoping know the Higgs mass will lead to hover boards. I don't really believe it will, but I'm sure Maxwell never thought his work would lead to something like always-connected pocket computers. I don't begrudge spending the money at all, as there is little question that particle physics has massively impacted everybody's lives.

That said, we have limited amounts to spend on tese things (more limited than it should be!), so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we spend it. We should not be asking, "What experiment will yield something I can sell?"

> so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we spend it.

Understood, but isn't the point of not saying "What experiment will yield something I can sell?"", is that we don't know the answer to the question "What experiments help us learn the most?"

Again, the LHC isn't that expensive. Mark Zuckerberg lost more money over the last two days to pay for both the LHC and the Hubble.

Strange experiences, and I can see why you wouldn't much like science after that. I haven't spent any time at Ivy League institutions, but in computer science at other research universities, my experience is exactly the opposite, that most researchers come from non-academic families, and in many cases from immigrant families. I've run into lots of tenured professors who are either immigrants themselves, or born to working-class or middle-class immigrant parents, but I can't think of anyone I've met who has some kind of 3-generation Yale pedigree, like the kind you find among politicians.

I didn't like the part about Marconi vs Maxwell. There is a positive feedback loop between technology and science. Science investigates nature providing basic knowledge upon which technology can build. Technology applies these principles in practice building and improving devices. These devices are then used by scientists to study nature in more detail, to observe what was previously impossible to observe, to discover new laws of nature.

I've had people ask me where I got my great store of useless facts from (not quite trivia). I've always told them I'm working on a book: A Million and One Useless Facts. I was hoping this would tell me that there is some great advantage to being full of useless information.

The author's definition of useless differs from mine. I wish I had Maxwell's level of useless knowledge! :)

(And, yes, I realize the author is being ironic.)

FFS Maxwell wasn't the giant. That was Faraday. Maxwell just came along and turned Faraday's work into Greek squiggles and now everyone says what a genius he was, when it was Faraday who did the real work.

Oh, and Faraday had a real, useful job, and his discoveries were part of that. It was the norm for science to be useful all the way back to when it started, which was with Archimedes - who was very applied, building siege engines to defend Sicily against the Roman Navy.

This curiosity-driven "pure" research stuff was restricted to rich people being "gentleman scientists" until the 1940s, when governments decided to fund everything under the sun in case some scientist might come up with a way of very quickly killing large numbers of Germans/Russians.

We have that to thank for the "citations are king", "publish or perish" and "postdoc purgatory" nonsense that is producing so many bad papers today, and I wish science could go back to being useful like it was in the first place.

A cursory look at Faraday's wikipedia page suggests that he started off as an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and succeeded him as the Director of the Royal Institution and became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry without any teaching obligations. Faraday's accomplishments are hardly unacknowledged when he is considered as one the greatest experimentalists in the history of science. Maxwell's genius lay in unifying the disparate experimental observations of Faraday into the 'right' squiggles, predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves from his equations and in the process suggesting that visible light itself may be an electromagnetic wave; an achievement worthy of celebration in my opinion.

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