Ratios of Understanding

Ratios of Understanding

I am going to deal with numbers and ratios not that I think my numbers are accurate but I think they may be useful for comprehending certain things.

Suppose we establish a knowledge-to-understanding ratio, i.e. the amount we know divided by the amount we understand (i.e. need to create).

I would say that a frontier family might have K/U ratio of 20/1. As time passes and there is less need for understanding (creativity) and more need for knowing because the demands of the frontier diminish and ‘civilization’ encroaches I would say the K/U ratio might go to 50/1.

After one hundred years I suspect the ratio might easily move to 100/1; after leaving the farm and moving to town and going to work in the factory the ratio might very well go to 1000/1.

Today’s modern man or woman may very well have a ratio of 10,000/1. The person with a PhD might very well have a ratio 100,000/1.

I have heard college professors say that you never really understand a subject until you try to teach it. I suspect a PhD who is also a long time teacher might have developed an understanding of many things and thus dropped the ratio back to 10,000/1.

Your numbers are absurdly arbitrary to the point of almost being meaningless, but I think I grok the general point you are getting at.

You seem to be saying that individual people continue accumulate so much knowledge (i.e. semi-useless facts?) but fail to have a deep understanding of it (or of how it fits together?). Is that about right?

I really don’t think this sort of situation is the kind of thing that changes much over time. People in the past were just as much collectors of facts, even though we may now see their facts as wrong, and I doubt they had significantly more or less understanding. I think, if anything, you underestimate the understanding that does go into our knowledge. But then I guess it depends on what sort of things you’re going to count as knowledge.

At any rate, I think a much more interesting observation is the amount of knowledge humans have accumulated as a species, not how much individuals accumulate. We now have so much knowledge that even those who specialize and dedicate their lives to one small area of one science have trouble becoming master of that tiny domain. The experts are only experts of their very own little rock on a vast, vast mountain range that extends across a continent.

Given that, I suspect we humans may lose some of the ability to understand things in a holistic manner that we had before. That is, even if you know a lot of subjects well, and are an expert in one or a handful, if you then try to formulate some grand view that encompasses all of that, you are bound to make all sorts of mistaken assumptions simply because you lack the knowledge and expertise of all these other areas (even the ones you are familiar with, if you aren’t an expert you likely don’t know all the details, have missed the decades of accumulated peer-reviewed studies on the minutia of that sub-field).

We can still, of course, speculate holistically (as if humans could stop attempting to do such a thing), but we have to acknowledge that we will always be doing so in a rather uninformed manner. The days of the intellectual renessaince man (or woman) are gone for good. So we have to hope either that the truly important stuff is easy enough to understand without really grasping and groking all the knowledge available at the time (not to mention future knowledge!) or else we have to look forward to a transhuman era where we are no longer limited in the ways Homo sapiens sapiens is. Even then, I suspect knowledge will continue to outrun thought for a long time (maybe forever? maybe until a Matrioshka Brain is created?).

I like to pretend the former of the two possibilities mentioned above. That is, I think the truly important stuff in life can be gotten at even if you aren’t an expert in everything imaginable. But I do think that increasing your knowledge base helps inform that understanding, if for no other reason than to provoke new ideas and speculation (but also it implicitly programs the basic framework under which we are able to work – we are controlled to a large extent by the times we live in, which is why no matter how good a thinker, no Dark Ages philosopher ever came up with quantum mechanics).

Strange

“You seem to be saying that individual people continue accumulate so much knowledge (i.e. semi-useless facts?) but fail to have a deep understanding of it (or of how it fits together?). Is that about right?”

Strange Loop you have nailed it. That is what I am trying to say.

I spoke of a ratio of understanding because I think this ratio is a good way to quantify our degree of self reliance. The higher the ratio of knowledge to understanding the lower is our confidence in our ability to rely upon our self. The less confidence we have in our self the more we are inclined to turn to experts and dogma. We seek to let the experts make the decisions that are too big for us to make or we turn to some religious dogma.

Compare the level of self reliance of the frontier family with the modern family. I choose this association because the answer is so starkly evident.

If we continue to doubt our ability to control our destiny then we cannot continue to depend upon democracy as a practical means for government.

I think the truly important stuff in life can be gotten at even if you aren’t an expert in everything imaginable. The question then becomes: how to arrange our life such as to retain our ability for self determination?

I think that the physical sciences might be a good focus for our attention. How can we lay persons know enough to make decisions regarding global warming, or stem cell research, or matters relating to genetic modification? We can and must because like war is too important to leave to the generals government is too precious to be left to the experts.

I think it is within the capacity of all normal humans to develop the intellectual means to make such judgments within a democratic system of government.

If a person understands the nature of the scientific method and the nature of rational thought that person can qualify him or her self to make such decisions with reasonable confidence. Any normal person can understand the scientific method and the nature of rational thought.