There is an interesting post (and comment thread) on Kevin Kelly's blog about the exponential growth of available information. It is quite thought-provoking, but there are a couple of issues I have with it.
First issue is that Kevin took the old adage that "every answer leads to at least two new questions", perhaps tongue-in-cheek (I hope), as if it was true:
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn't know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance. New and better tools permit us new and better questions. All our knowledge about subatomic particles derived from the new questions generated after we invented an atom smasher.
This was probably necessary for the point he was trying to make, but it is of course not true - just a quip that scientists like to say to each other every now and then. Most scientific papers, for instance, do not attempt to answer questions, just like many scientific questions do not test hypotheses. Some are making observations, some are tabulating surveys, some are sequencing genomes, some are following hunches. There is much more to the scientific method than just question-answering or hypothesis-testing. This does not stop people from, in their grant proposals, shoehorning everything into the hypothesis-testing mode, e.g., silly stuff like "we will shoot all our heavy artillery into this dark void of the Unknown and we hypothesize that we will discover something useful" - which is not hypothesis-testing, but a brute force approach that comes before hypothesis-testing, a method to provide enormous amounts of information that can then be looked at in order to formulate hypotheses or, yes, ask questions.
And even when a scientific paper answers a question, sometimes it just closes the book on it without generating any new questions. Sometimes it generates one or two or more. But there is no mathematical or empirical proof of the saying as it stands.
My second issue with Kevin's essay is the blurring between the concepts of information, knowledge and expertise despite his effort to differentiate them:
The fastest growing entity today is information. Information is expanding ten times faster than the growth of any other manufactured or natural product on this planet.
---------------------
We see the expansion of information everywhere. Less visible, harder to track, but exploding the same is the expansion of knowledge. The number of scientific articles published each year has been increasing in a steady rise for more than 50 years. Over the last 150 years the number of patent applications has increased. By this rough metric, knowledge is growing exponentially.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but for me information is something that just sits there, in computers or on the Web or in scientific papers, pretty useless on its own. It is when humans take a look at that information, filter it in an organized manner, and make sense out of it, that the information becomes organized and useful - which I think of as knowledge.
Furthermore, even this definition of knowledge is fuzzy, as it describes our collective knowledge. Collective - as in 'collection of individual knowledges'. But some knowledge resided in individuals who make that knowledge widely available, while others do not. Thus some knowledge is more strongly integrated into the fuzzy global knowledge, and some is more or less hidden from most of us. Not to mention that not all knowledge is correct, either, or useful for anything for that matter (e.g., theological treateses come under both of those headings).
But, is individual knowledge the same as 'expertise'? What does expertise mean?
Is it possessing knowledge or having the abilities and skills to apply it? Knowing where in the brain the pineal gland resides, or being able to surgically remove it?
Is it having a PhD (or equivalent) in the subject, or is it being recognized by others as an expert?
Is it knowing everything there is to know about a subject? Or is it knowing more than most other people about it?
Are we all experts on breathing, eating and sleeping? What is so expert about that kind of expertise if it is shared by everyone?
If it is knowing something that most other people don't where is the cutoff point - what percentile are we talking about? I can say that I am an expert on circadian rhythms in quail - something I share with about a dozen other people in the world - as I have read the entire literature on the subject, did my own experiments and published papers on the topic. I guess I am still an expert when it comes to my field as a whole - a couple of thousand chronobiologists - although I could not possibly read all the papers or pay attention to all the sub-field research directions.
But am I an expert on blogging just because I am one of the 20 million bloggers out there? It is still a pretty small proportion of the planet's population, after all. Am I an expert on Serbia just because I am one of 10 million or so people who was born there?
I surely write on this blog about many things, not too atrociously, I hope: politics, religion, science, technology, food, etc. I do not think of myself as an expert in any of this, but some people may think of me as one: because they know less than me about some of these topics, or because I have a blog on scienceblogs.com, or because I appear to be a nice guy.
The question is, once we agree on a definition of expertise, does it matter? Is my expertise in avian chronobiology useful to me? To the rest of the world? Or is my thinking (and then writing) about various other subjects better?
Victorian scholars knew everything about everything. With the growth of knowledge, we swung in the opposite direction, rewarding very narrow expertise. Are we now seeing the pendulum swing back? There is too much knowledge available for anyone to be able to know everything, so we cannot all become Victorian scholars. But perhaps we can all choose a range of subjects in which to become semi-experts - knowing a lot about it but not worrying about how many other people know LESS about it than we do.
The Stupid Blogger says it nicely:
Unfortunately, there's a very simple fact in life, and it's the knowledge that not everyone is going to be an expert.
---------------------
What so many people fail to realize is that being an expert is in many ways overrated.
--------------------
The other option, of course, is a breadth of knowledge rather than depth of knowledge. Obviously, breadth of knowledge is knowing a little bit about a lot of things, and it's more useful than you might think.
--------------------
Having a breadth of knowledge can make living in the real world easier, not to mention more enjoyable, but it is only useful so long as you're aware of the limitations of your knowledge and you know where to turn for more information.
Thoughts?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
On being an expert:
You probably are an expert on avian chronobiology for the reasons you mentioned, namely your studied it thoroughly and did experiments, and got post-graduate degrees in it.
You are not an expert in breathing, sleeping or eating simply because you do a lot of those things. For example, fish are not experts in oceanography.
A nutritionist is a kind of expert. Someone who simply eats a lot is not.
I agree with your distinctions between information and knowledge. Information is passive data. Knowledge is the integration of information inside the brain. Expertise would mean having studied the subject thoroughly, integrated a large amount of the available information, and being able to apply that acquired knowledge to real-world situations with satisfactory results.
The old adage is not literally true or mathematically provable. It does underscore a point however, that we can go on endlessly acquiring more information, integrating more knowledge, and finding new unanswered questions to explore. I don't think such statements are presented as mathematically provable formulations.
Agree with you (and with first comment) - it is not the quantity of information accumulated that makes one an expert, it is the ability to derive new (original) insight from that information.
I like the last quote above:
'Having a breadth of knowledge can make living in the real world easier, not to mention more enjoyable, but it is only useful so long as you're aware of the limitations of your knowledge and you know where to turn for more information'
In my own research I cross the disciplines of botany, zoology, ecology, genetics, archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology, and I have certainly not been able to go deeply into all of these. It has helped me in the real world, for example, by giving me broader job options than most graduates - I have been able to skip between very different kinds of institutions, while still following a particular thread, the history of just one crop plant. To some, it seems that I have been incredibly specialized in my study, and it is true, with regard to the object of study. But I have also avoided specialization, in the methods I use.
In my field work I depend literally on my peripheral vision to see things that most people do not see at all. It is a kind of technique, in field biology, and also in field anthropology, to pick out the unfamiliar thing (a plant, an animal, a statement) before it is even consciously seen or heard, and then hold on to it long enough to ask the question: Why am I looking at this? Why am I hearing this?
So having breadth of knowledge may also be a pre-requisite for having an open mind. Having breadth of knowledge is really the same thing as having breadth of ignorance: we know what we do not know when we see it, if our knowledge is broad enough. Otherwise, we might not see the unknown thing at all.
For most purposes in life, it is possible to live from day-to-day on the basis of existing knowledge. The strange thing about science is that we become accustomed to living with ignorance and uncertainty, and we actively seek out the things we do not know.
Of course, if we go too far out on a limb (primates that we are), we may fall, but usually our intimations can be loosely tied to various certainties while we investigate them. Those that survive investigation may eventually be incorporated into our nest in the tree of accepted knowledge.
My nest has lots of tidbits of information, including some that you may not have seen before; I know what these twigs and leaves mean, and I would like you to think I am an expert in nest building.
Hmmm, time for me to go and make drumming noises on my chest. Pressing the post button should do the trick.
A wise man once said, "There is no such thing as an expert; there is only the integrity of doing and having done."