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The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

by jkuria on 1/6/24, 11:21 AM with 41 comments

• by liangzhihaver on 1/7/24, 7:44 PM

  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.”

• by Jtsummers on 1/7/24, 8:38 PM

  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

• by randcraw on 1/8/24, 8:03 AM

  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'.

• by zvmaz on 1/7/24, 8:13 PM

  > [...] 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.

• by gwern on 1/7/24, 9:55 PM

  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...

• by BarbaryCoast on 1/7/24, 9:15 PM

  "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".

• by chris_wot on 1/8/24, 4:59 AM

  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?"

• by MaxBarraclough on 1/7/24, 6:54 PM

  This wants a (1939).

• by Animats on 1/8/24, 6:43 AM

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

• by atoav on 1/8/24, 9:20 AM

  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