Sometimes, my brain disagrees with my wish to sleep. It takes a concept, and begins to ruminate on it. Since I haven’t learned yet to quiet my thoughts enough to go back to sleep, I usually run with it and see where it leads. Most of the time, it’s irrelevant minutiae of day-to-day life. But occasionally, it actually ends up somewhere interesting – at least to me. It certainly did this morning.
The Pledge: The fact that many things adults told us when we were kids actually contain kernels of truth – even though it sure sounded like they were just corny proverbs. Which of course brings up “I wish I had known then what I know now”.
The Turn: With the Internet and Google available, we actually often can know now what in the normal course of events we’d have to learn via experiences later on. We can glimpse into millions of people’s lives and learn from their experiences.
The Prestige: “I wish I had known then…” talks about of knowledge in the sense of experiences. While it certainly would be nice to know stock prices or lottery numbers in advance, this is not the kind of knowledge it talks about. So I started wondering if there are two words to express the different kinds of knowledge. And how you classify knowledge.
And it turns out that it’s a topic that many great minds have spent a large deal of time on. It starts with Aristotle and the concept of “scientia”, gets mulled around for a couple of centuries, and then Francis Bacon starts looking at this. And turns out a whole book1 – “Of the Advancment of Science And Learning”, in which he develops a catalog of knowledge.
This idea then bounces around in lots of other brilliant minds for another 250 years or so, when it leads to the Dewey classification.
And then it gets weird. In the 19th and 20th century, we start classifications based on principles. We get classifications based on logical positivism, Marxism, sociology – you name it. (To be fair, previous classifications were also based on assumptions – it’s just that we’re starting to explain our bias at that point). We also get Scientometrics, which discusses how to measure science.
I still don’t have my word, though. According to the Library of Congress Classification System, this knowledge probably falls under AY – General Works/Yearbooks, Almanacs and directories. But that’s about as good as it gets. “Raw Data” is probably the best description for this kind of knowledge.
The irony? Raw data – lists of words matched to websites, without any deeper meaning – makes Google work, which gives us access to all kinds of knowledge. The one thing that no classification really covers enables us to create and think about classifications. There’s a moral somewhere in this…
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I really wonder if he would have blogged it, had he lived today. ↩