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.
Browsing Wikipedia last night I learned that the Brontë siblings created a fictitious world called Glass Town with its own history, geography, politics, and interconnected plots and characters. I don't think this will ever be "useful" to me.
On the other hand, I've always had trouble understanding Kubernetes. I know the general concepts and I can get by reasonably well but there are parts that just don't click. This is knowledge that would help my career and financial well-being in clear ways.
If I were offered a pill that would permanently remove any knowledge of Glass Town and any ability to find out about it again in exchange for perfect understanding of Kubernetes I wouldn't take it.
And yet, because you read about Glass Town the other night, now I and others know about Glass Town. Looking into it further, I also now know about "Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës," written by Isabel Greenberg. Knowledge of these works is definitely useful to me.
Yeah, there are things that I wish would "click" for me, too.
I have come to believe that recreational play can be a process of reinforcing the ability to acquire new skills. Or play, like dreaming, can be an unconscious way of sorting out new experiences against the frameworks you already possess.
As I wrote this, I was struck by the literal sense of the Engligh word: "re-creation".
My best work as a programmer has always come to me as I am walking, or in the shower as I wake up. My worst work has always been sleep-deprived nonsense.
While the Brontë sisters' imaginary world may have no intrinsic value, it may well be that the experience of creating such a thing led them to success in other ways.
But doesn't that in and of itself therefore make it useful? In fact its useful in enabling discussion on HN right now.
The paper was about ideas and exploration about crossing from not-useful to useful and the requirements for that to happen to accumulate a lot of not-useful's for the future to draw on.
This also reminds me of Taleb referencing Umberto Eco's book collection for his anti-scholar/anti-library concept where the 'value' of the library was in the unread books rather than the read ones.
The posts I was replying to talked about 'keeping in the brain-attic tools which may help do work' and 'real, tangible, applicable skills'. That's a different definition than what you're proposing.
Different people will have different definitions of useful. And different people will weigh usefulness differently in determining value.
My point is that I don't need to find some arbitrary definition of 'useful' to cover something in order to find it valuable.
In childhood, One of the worst advise given to me was, “knowledge is power”. Which is not only half truth, but a time consuming advise. Experienced knowledge is the key.
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.
+1 on the astonishingness (hm...) of mechanics in general, and Linotypes in particular. Some time ago I watched a fairly good movie on how they work. I think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus . Those things not jamming every fifteen seconds is nothing short of a miracle. Some useless knowledge for everyone who is curious. =)
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.
"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.