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Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 2: Knowledge is personal

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In the natural world, few (if any) things grow without limits.  In the case of information volume, one of those limits may be our ability to turn information into knowledge.  (Note: This is a continuation from a previous post, here .)

Knowledge is personal

The reason knowledge might constrain the growth of information is due to the nature of knowledge itself.  Knowledge is what you have when you know something -- which means it's a fundamentally personal.  Acquiring knowledge, and even knowing, is something we do.   It requires access, capacity, energy, attention, and time. 

One strategy people seem to have at the individual level for coping with the increasing workload required to turn available information for a given field into personal knowledge is the classic strategy: Avoidance.  I'm not saying this perjoratively or saracastically.  There was a time long ago when doctors were expected to cover the entire range of human health concerns. 

Now doctors choose from a very wide range of specialities, which gives them the freedom to NOT be an expert in areas beyond their specialty.  Even "General Practitioners" are specialists in a way, trying to be moderately knowledgable in many areas.  This kind of "knowledge fragmentation" pressure exists in virtually every field.  Driven by discoveries and advances that create new domains of expertise, and a simple limit to how much individuals can reasonably know, people select themselves into increasingly narrow fields over time. 

Aside: I'm not sure, but my guess is that the horizontal "breadth" of a field may be defined by the amount of vertical "depth" knowledge required to make discoveries that grow the vertical "depth knowledge" further.  What do you think?

While it may look like (and be) avoidance on an individual level, at an aggregate level it's possible to see specialization as an natural mechanism to scale human knowledge capacity.  Compared to the past, my knowledge and your knowledge may have less overlap, but together we have more unique knowledge. 

But here's a conundrum: if knowledge is personal, how do I benefit from what you "know"?  One, if you help me learn you can reduce the transaction costs for me acquiring that knowledge.  Two, you can be an abstraction layer for me.  That is, I might not gain your knowledge myself, but you might help me gain the use of that knowledge in a practical way.  Of course, we're just talking about you and me, here.  What would this look like if you scaled it up to a few billion people? 

Next in this series: Strategies for Reinforcing Loops and the Hive Mind.

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