What Makes Knowledge Valuable?

Avoiding "Knowledge as Diversion."

Imagine that you are a sincere (though absentminded) scientist in a forest-green lab coat. You begin an open-ended experiment with a Petri dish that has been seeded with a vast diversity of microorganisms. These microorganisms are all adapted to different environments and you are changing the conditions of the Petri dish every so often. You vary and add new kinds nutrients, vary the temperature, and add different substrates, etcetera. But, because you are a little absentminded, you do so haphazardly, without purposefulness. You are very attentive to the actions you take, reacting immediately if things take a turn for the worse, but otherwise you don’t take any pains to record what you’ve added or how the organisms in the dish are adapting to changing conditions.

The Petri dish becomes a totally different ecosystem. Then, you discover by accident that this hodgepodge array of chemicals and organisms produces a wonderful medicine that cures cancer. This is a joyous discovery! Yet, you are unable to replicate the exact conditions of the Petri dish, and so you retain your single sample. It is able to produce a lot of benefit for you: you save your Aunt Sally from Stage IV lung cancer. However, it turns out that this Petri dish is incredibly complex and it will take years or perhaps even decades to replicate. This is a tragedy: if only you had been a little less absentminded! How many lives could you have saved?

The question behind this morality tale: what makes knowledge valuable? It should go without saying that knowledge isn’t physically real. I know what makes a spoon valuable: it helps me eat soup. Can knowledge help me eat soup? Well, yes, obviously. It requires knowledge to understand that the spoon is useful for eating soup and to understand the mechanics underlying that utility. This illustrates the central point: knowledge is valuable when it alters behavior in a positive manner.¹

Returning to the Petri dish, did you (the sincere and absentminded scientist in a forest-green lab coat) produce knowledge or value? You produced value, but not knowledge. You did a thing in the realm of the physical (i.e. made a very interesting Petri dish), and doing things in the realm of the physical is nearly always valuable². However, because you did not capture the knowledge, the valuable Petri dish cannot be replicated.

Let’s zoom into the idea of capturing knowledge (also called “learning”). What does that even mean? It means committing the knowledge to memory so that it can be retrieved at a later time. Retrieval is core to learning. What would it mean to say that you know Shakespeare but be unable to produce any meaningful facts about him, like where he lived and what he did? Recognizing the name Shakespeare is not the same as knowing Shakespeare. Knowing implies that the name is connected to a sphere of meaningful information in your mind, it means that you have a mental map of who Shakespeare was and what he did and what it means. Building this mental map requires the ability to retrieve a lot of information, hence retrieval being essential to learning.

In the case of our morality tale, what should the scientist have done differently in order to “learn”? Well, he/she/they should probably have taken notes.

Part 2: In Which Geoff Discovers That Taking Notes Is Basically Mandatory for Adult Life

The question that spurred this essay arose because I am the scientist from the morality tale. When I was in undergrad, I remembered everything. It is strange to look back on it, but I really didn’t need notes. I had a really good memory. I also designated most things that were not school or League of Legends as “not important to remember” (such as birthdays or writing my Mom a card).

I am not this person anymore. Two reasons: one, I think my memory may have actually gotten worse, not sure. Two, my life has gotten more complex and my Mom is less forgiving when I don’t write her a card for various occasions. The strategies for retrieval that used to work no longer work. They really haven’t for quite some time, but new habits form slowly.

This summer, on the excellent Hacker News forum, I discovered the Zettelkasten method through an essay titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything” by Sascha. The focal quote of the essay:

Culturally, it is increasingly the case that the first step is to go online, search for the desired end result of a thinking process instead of engaging in learning. This means that we are using the internet less and less to our advantage, because we have less and less prior knowledge: We detrain ourselves out of the ability to access the quality of the information and turn it into actual knowledge.

I love this quote although it requires a little bit of exposition. Here’s one objection that you could make: why is it wrong to circumvent learning by using X technology for retrieval (where X is Google Search, ChatGPT, Alexa etc.)? Why does it actually matter that I practice retrieval and analytical/critical thinking skills, when the answer can be summarized or delivered to me, wrapped all nice in a bow? Or perhaps another objection: how exactly does using a chat bot detrain me out of the ability to turn information into knowledge? Wouldn’t the use of Google Search or AI, by giving me access to nearly unlimited information, complete my knowledge?

To these objections, Sascha provides two answers further down: if you engage with information superficially, you will not integrate it with other stuff that you know, meaning it will not become knowledge. Second, if you do not retain information, you will not have enough context to evaluate the truth of “deep knowledge.” Because there are varying degrees of knowledge. You can understand stuff in high resolution or in low resolution. You can have “surface” knowledge or “deep” knowledge. In order to evaluate the truth of deep knowledge, you need to be able to compare and synthesize knowledge that is closer to the surface. If somebody tells you that they have a blue apple, you first need to know that apples are typically green or red in order to be surprised.

The more knowledge that you have, the better equipped you are to acquire more knowledge³. This proposition led me to consider the necessity of note taking and to the adoption of Zettelkasten as a formal method. To which I can only say, its tremendously improved the quality of my thinking and writing⁴. Taking up the practice of note taking has done two things for me: it has helped me to remember stuff and it has helped me to integrate the stuff that I know into a more coherent whole.

Back to Value

But let’s return to value. Knowledge is valuable when it meaningfully alters behavior. You can take all the notes that you want, but until you connect that knowledge with concrete actions or habits, there is no value gained. You must learn how to implement and must not become trapped in implementation details. There are a million ways to design a note taking system. The one that drives value is the one you can form habits around.⁵

I almost feel bad writing an essay that contains such trivial insights. None of this is groundbreaking stuff. In fact, everything I’ve written so far is something that I’ve vaguely “known” since elementary school. These insights are encoded in some of the common aphorisms of education:

• “Practice makes perfect”

• “The more you read, the more you know”

• “Knowledge is power”

• “Slow and steady wins the race”

Yet there is a world of difference between vaguely knowing something and really knowing something. It has only been in the last year or so that the importance of systematically developing knowledge has become real to me. I’ve always loved learning, but the way that I’ve approached it has been driven by unguided curiosity. Wandering around haphazardly from subject to subject, novelty taking the place of integration. Which isn’t to say that I never went deep; I have a tendency to become obsessive when I’m nerding out. But after abandoning a topic I would fail to integrate what I’d learned with the rest of my knowledge and so would quickly lose the benefit thereof.

But that was an unserious approach to learning, childish in the wrong kind of way. It was “knowledge as diversion.” Learning to keep myself occupied, not learning to change my life (in both senses of that sentence). Until, finally, it hit me: if “knowledge is power,” why would I treat it like a fidget spinner?

---

Some additional essays that have really inspired my thinking on this topic:

• On Sincerity by Joe Carlsmith

• “Great Books” is for Losers by Alex Petkas

• On Agency by Henrik Karlsson

• Surely you can be serious by Adam Mastroianni

1. We live in a knowledge economy. If you’re on Substack, it is likely that you are a knowledge worker. Knowledge workers produce value by coordinating the behavior of groups of people. This is totally obvious. But it is very easy to miss amid the constant stream of information that flows around us.

2. There are a couple caveats to this statements. First, what I mean is that humans doing things in the realm of the physical is nearly always valuable. Second, humans contain a massive amount of innate knowledge (instincts) that naturally orient most actions to being valuable. Third, humans have a tendency to make things that wouldn’t be valuable (like splotches of watercolor on a canvas) symbolic and therefore valuable. Fourth, we have a moral aversion to things that are definitely not valuable like murder.

3. Either through the synthesis of knowledge you already possess or proper evaluation of new knowledge from others.

4. I would bet that almost any method of systematic note taking would produce similar results. Zettelkasten is simply a method that went viral in a small corner of the internet that I frequent.

5. As it turns out, forming habits around a system is actually quite difficult. It is also an intriguing game against yourself that never ends. Every time you think you’ve finally outsmarted your reptilian mind, it finds a novel path towards failure.