One time I was reading Sherlock Holmes as a kid and ran upon this passage:
"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.
There’s validity to both sides. I used to spend so, so much time reading Wikipedia, watching documentaries, memorizing trivia for school tests. just trying to absorb sheer amounts of knowledge in a variety of subjects.
In hindsight, I would have been better off spending that time experiencing real life and learning real, tangible, applicable skills.
Usefulness is in the eye of the beholders. We know much more trivia about the material properties of silicon, prime number sieves, and lithium chemistry... only now it's not considered trivia, it's valuable 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.
The opening of this essay is a beautifully written and surprisingly timely reflection on the importance of not judging the worth of time spent on certain pursuits purely on their direct, material utility.
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.
If there were no 'useless knowledge' in the world, it'd not be right to call mere survival 'living'. The mind not free to roam is enslaved. 'Uselessness' is in the mind of the beholder.
I don't believe there is such a thing as "useless knowledge". Such knowledge is often deemed useful in retrospect. A good example is the years of "useless" microbial ecological research resulting in the discovery of extremophiles, a discovery that revolutionized biotechnology and made PCR possible. According to Brock, his initial research was considered useless by his peers (who deemed it "exotic", a euphemism of sorts for useless).
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.
I'm just reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and one of the central theses of that book is that discovery was always random and only later was applied useful.
So, usless knowledge might only be useless when initially found and have some application later.
Linotype machines were well established by that point. The way they justify text is with spacebands, wedge-shaped widgets inserted at word breaks during composition. After the operator completes each line, the justification vise squeezes the spacebands up until the line expands to the appropriate width before it’s cast. (If the composed line is too short this process can fail, potentially dumping molten lead all over the place.)
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.
I was curious too, it might be with a justifying typewriter. It sounds like it requires typing entries twice since you can't easily know the justification until after you type it.
[+] [-] wydfre|4 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] reidjs|4 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] kurthr|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] laGrenouille|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sammalloy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aborsy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
So, usless knowledge might only be useless when initially found and have some application later.
[+] [-] cheschire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfgang42|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iratewizard|4 years ago|reply
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2379862A/en