How Useful is your Knowledge?
by Joseph Rowlands

When you study a topic in school, how useful is it? Is it something you will end up using? Is it ever relevant? Is it even easy to tell?

There are two ways of viewing these kinds of questions. The first way is the most literal way. Was the concrete knowledge you gained useful later in life? If you learn how to solve the quadratic equation, will you use that knowledge later? If you study the history of the civil war, will there be a time later in life where you need to know exactly which dates it occurred or where the most significant battles were? Perhaps if you become a teacher, or specialize in mathematics or history. But for many people, this information may never come up, or if it does, it may have little impact in your life.

This view of usefulness is relatively easy to judge. Ask an adult whether they ever used the quadratic equation in their job. Ask whether they even remember which battles were fought in the civil war, and then ask whether it ever came up. We'd probably find that much of what we learned in school as not absolutely necessary.

There is a different way to look at this, though. Whenever we are trying to understand something new, or using logic to integrated and deduce, what we learned before becomes a powerful tool that is used in countless ways.

One of the ways a wide assortment of knowledge is useful is in the process of concretizing new ideas. If you are discussing the concept of betrayal, it helps if you have a large foundation of knowledge to draw upon for many concrete examples so you can determine whether or not something applies or not. How do people respond to betrayal? What motivations do people have?

This is true of abstract thinking and ideas in general. Whether you are discussing politics, justice, responsibility, good relationships, respect, or almost anything else, the more knowledge you have, the better you're able to grasp these concepts and utilize them well.

This is an unexpected consequences of knowledge. You may read books, or watch television or movies, or gossip about your friends, or live an interesting and exciting life. All of these things can provide you with the tools to deal with more complex concepts and provide a deeper understanding.

Another unexpected benefit of knowledge is in the ability to integrate information. Integration is a kind of connecting of ideas and facts. You can retain the information by categorizing it, or by seeing connections between facts, events, or ideas. But if you have a very limited amount of information, there's no way to connect it.

Studying history in a piecemeal way has this problem. When you look at any particular era, the ideas and context are connected to events that happened before, and that will happen in the future. But if you have very limited knowledge about history, you'll learn each piece in isolation. You won't see how it fits into a larger picture. You may not even grasp the significance of studying it because you can't see which aspects were important or that stood out. They can't stand out if there's nothing to stand out from.

While history is an example, this unexpected benefit is vastly more widespread. We are constantly gaining new information and we need to recognize which aspects of it are significant and how it connects with other things. The more you know, the clearer the bigger picture is. If you only know random, disconnected topics, each will appear useless. And they will be less useful. You won't be able to appreciate and understand the topics in isolation as well as you could in a bigger, more integrated understanding.

A different unexpected benefit of knowledge comes with the ability to foresee consequences. The more knowledge you have, the less surprising things are. When you are making predictions about the future, having an enormous amount of information behind you allows you to better see the likely consequences. This is why older people are thought of as wiser. They may not be smarter than you, but having a full life of information and details allows them to better foresee the possible consequences.

Consider teenagers crying over the end of the world because someone they like doesn't like them back. Adults know that ultimately it's of minor importance, and they may not even remember it in ten years. Of course, explaining that to a teenager may be impossible because they will think you just don't understand what they are going through. But this is just another example of how knowing little means not knowing what's to come.

Another things that we learn is how to think and solve problems. There are countless ways in which we use logic and figure out how to solve problems in our lives. But this isn't some kind of a priori ability, like a natural talent that we just automatically know. We learn hot so solve problems by seeing lots of different kinds of problems and how they were solved.

This is another place where the benefits are unexpected. Sure you've probably seen a riddle or puzzle that you learned how to solve years ago. That would be an example of how figuring out how to solve a problem was directly applicable to your future. But you also learn techniques that are only loosely applied to new situations. You learn a method of analyzing a problem.

Maybe you've learned some lateral thinking techniques where you learn to think about the problem in a different way so you can solve it. Maybe you've learned that defining the boundaries of the problem make it easier to see the solution. Or maybe you've learned that often you have enough information to solve the problem, but the information is in the wrong form. And you may know how to manipulate the information. Or maybe you learn that if you don't have information, you can get it through a variety of methods.

There are countless techniques for solving problems, and the more you've seen and understood, the more likely you'll think of the method that you need. Maybe the problem will remind you of another problem. Or maybe you'll try a few techniques that you've seen before. Or maybe you'll come up with something entirely new because you knew where to look.

Problem solving is just a kind of thinking. And so the same unexpected benefits applies to thinking in general. You learn proper techniques and you also learn improper techniques. You see how certain approaches lead to dead ends, or how certain things that may sounds logical are not. While you may have taken classes in logic, a significant amount of what you know is based on information gathered indirectly and unintentionally.

There are other things you learn indirectly. One thing you learn is how other people think about things. You may remember your own mistakes, and see others making the same. Or you may see how some people get focused on certain aspects of a problem and can't see the big picture. Or may they want to prove everything deductively, and ignore degrees or inductive argument. Again, you learn this stuff indirectly.

Or how about skills in developing a good relationship? You learn a lot from seeing how other people do things, and what works or doesn't. But you also learn to make predictions and have expectations of consequences. You might realize that if you don't communicate a problem, it will never be fixed.

This list goes on and on and on. Much of what we learn we don't necessarily use directly. But there are countless ways in which we utilize ideas, or see connections, or anticipate consequences.

Actually drawing a connection between each subject and what you might have used it for is not a trivial topic. Because you utilize a massive amount of this knowledge as a kind of backdrop to your thinking, it isn't always clear what information you depended on. Nor is it always direct. Maybe one thing led to another which led to another. Maybe knowledge about history allowed you to recognize certain elements of today's life that weren't typical, which drew your attention to potential causes for these qualities, which allowed you to recognize factors in your life that you otherwise wouldn't have.

Our minds work with a massive body of knowledge, with various kind and degrees of integration, and we're always adding more and more to it. Trying to define the consequences of our earliest knowledge can never be more than a vague guess. Easy answers are only available if you think of knowledge as that which is directly beneficial.

Discuss this Article (19 messages)