
We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge - Petiver
http://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Need-More-Useless-/239365?key=sp0x03E8c0EpmAD1jKoY1bfV4sUT5Q4XEgqPwngvKWO9K3tB2ItsT7NqOgfc52k3dEZob2E0Tmk2MGVTWEZwZGRZUHdxczhkclJ1U1YyRE0tbFlVMVViMHdPbw
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komali2
"the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The institute was the
brainchild of its first director, Abraham Flexner. Intended to be a "paradise
for scholars" with no students or administrative duties, it allowed its
academic stars to fully concentrate on deep thoughts,"

I highly recommend reading "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. The basic premise is
there are institutions known as "Maths" that are essentially walled temples,
the gates of which only open once every 1, 10, 100, and 1000 years (outermost
gate annualy, 2nd innermost decmntennially, etc). Inside, a bunch of monks
hang around studying "useless knowledge," which in this universe includes
things such as particle physics (there's one "thousander" temple in which the
monks just sit deep in a mountain staring at a giant pool of water to see if
they can glimpse a flash of light).

I always thought it would be really cool to have something similar in our
world, I hadn't realized it's been pursued before.

~~~
beloch
In Anathem, there was a global catastrophe of an unspecified nature caused (or
at least blamed on) science. Physicists, mathematicians, etc. are segregated
from broader society (and high technology) to prevent future reoccurrences of
this because their disciplines are viewed as being too dangerous to allow in
the "saecular"(sic) world.

A mountain retreat for "useless" science is a nice idea, but Anathem's "Maths"
were something else entirely. They were actually quite dystopian.

~~~
komali2
I don't know if they were necessarily dystopian. In the book, the Maths
survive throughout global wars and other saecular catastrophes. So sometimes
they'd come out of the gate and everyone would be cavemen, other times, 1980s
style civilizations with televisions and cars. Seems like a pretty rosy
situation to me.

~~~
db48x
Yea, they are a weird mixture of prison and lifeline for civilization. Until
they get Sacked.

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teddyh
The article heavily promotes the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J, where both the authors of the article are situated. Richard
Feynman rather famously argued _against_ places like that:
[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm)

“Nothing happens because there’s not enough _real_ activity and challenge:
You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how
to answer questions from the students. Nothing!”

~~~
js8
I didn't read it completely yet but the opening sentence "At least I’m living;
at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution" is resonating with
me strongly.

Coming from an academic family, I tried to do PhD but it was just 2 years of
procrastination. So I decided, screw it, I'll find a job, and I am a
programmer in a corporation since.

It's pretty good, but somehow I wish I had more time to pursue things that go
beyond one quarter. So I wish, like Feynman did, there was a place where I
could do normal programming most of the time and yet when I have an idea, to
pursue that idea. Google 20% time comes close (although it has really been
dead for maybe 10 years), but it's still not quite that.

And you could have that for any field, not just software. So perhaps we don't
need ivory towers where people pursue basic research full-time, but something
more balanced.

~~~
nostrademons
20% time isn't dead, but it's also not useful for what you want it for. 20%
time rarely works for projects that stretch much beyond a quarter. The amount
of attention you can devote to them prevents you from finishing them in a
timely-enough manner that the initial conditions which made you think of the
idea still hold.

(Trust me, I spent 3 years of 20% time writing an HTML5 parser that was
largely obsolete by the time it was released. It was desperately needed when I
started it in 2010 and the only options were validator.nu and html5lib. It
wasn't so needed by the time it was released in 2013 and you also had JSoup,
Hubbub, html5ever, and probably others to choose from.)

Same reason part-time startups usually go nowhere.

I think that the system that actually does work is something like Silicon
Valley, where if in the course of your job, you see an idea, you can just quit
and try it. If it doesn't work out, there's always another job out there
waiting, which won't hold the work you spent on that idea against you. Anyone
with a modicum of financial discipline should also be able to save enough
money off a Silicon Valley engineer salary that they have the option to go a
year or two without income, too.

~~~
js8
That's actually my objection to 20% time, I would much rather take a 100%
sabbatical for certain things. It could actually work out to 20% or more on
the average, it's just there isn't enough institutional trust in large
corporations to pull it off, IMHO.

Anyway, I am glad that 20% still works, it's better than nothing IMHO. I
wouldn't do startup because I am not really interested in the logistics of
pitching etc.

It's interesting that even though perhaps a majority of people believes that
some freedom on the job would be beneficial, we cannot create a society which
has this freedom.

~~~
nostrademons
I think it's somewhat unfortunate how people have come to associate "startup"
with "pitching". Basically 0% of the great technology companies have come out
of a businessman pitching a VC on an idea they just had. Rather, it's usually
a technologist who builds something, gets a few hundred of his friends to use
it, and then happens to meet a VC who says "Look, if you took our capital,
your hundreds of users could be billions."

You do have to be really ruthless about what features you cut from v1 of the
product for this to work, though, and you have to be somewhat unorthodox about
problem selection.

As for freedom - you actually _do_ have freedom to work on whatever you want
at work, and this applies to most corporations, not just Google and its 20%
time. Most employers would actually _rather_ that you take full ownership of
getting the task done, and give them a better outcome rather than blind
obedience. The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility. As long as
you do exactly what your boss tells you to, you can't be blamed when things go
wrong. If you do something additional or contravene your boss's orders, they
will usually not mind _as long as it works out better than expected_. Your
boss will usually be happy to claim credit for it, and if you're lucky, you
may even end up with a promotion & a raise. But if it works out poorly and
your boss has to clean up the mess, you're going to get fired. As long as
you're willing to take responsibility for getting fired, you can do whatever
you want at work.

I feel like a lot of my effectiveness at Google (and that of many of the
coworkers who I considered effective) was that I was willing to get fired. And
when, after 5 years there, I felt myself getting a little complacent and
hewing a little too closely to the party line, I quit. You still have agency
as a human being, even in a big company.

------
mtdewcmu
In other ways, it's a great time for useless knowledge. One, barriers of entry
are lower in a lot of cases (the internet, computers). Two (partly as a
corollary of #1), there are more people empowered to seek useless knowledge
(greater education, better communications technology).

This affects some fields more than others: computer science research is cheap,
but molecular biology research is still dependent on expensive equipment.

------
minikites
> A committee of the U.S. Congress found that in 2012 business only provided 6
> percent of basic research funding, with the lion’s share — 53 percent —
> shouldered by the federal government and the remainder coming from
> universities and foundations.

Yet another instance where "big government" is good for society, despite the
bad rap that it gets these days.

------
devindotcom
Looking forward to reading this, but as I don't see a link in the comments
here or the body of the article, you really should read the essay by Flexner
that's referenced in the headline. It's stored at the IAS here:

[https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf](https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf)

And it's being reprinted with commentary here (the occasion for the essay
linked):

[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html)

------
ChuckMcM
It worked for me, but the summary is that in the past there has been a place
for 'pure' research (which is to say not motivated by a particular financial
goal and without restriction). The article argues that the good that has come
of that has been greatly in excess of the investment and so "we" should do
more investment like that.

I don't disagree, and open ended research is really helpful in furthering the
good of the community. It is also not possible to predict which means typical
economic forces are not present to keep it funded.

I've wondered sometimes if the lottery proceeds would be better spent on this
sort of activity rather than public schools. The reasoning for that is that
the public schools don't have any visibility into how much (or how little)
they will get from the lottery in a given year so they have a hard time
allocating funds for on-going projects, instead doing one-offs like new
classrooms or some other self contained project. Whereas if you dumped that
money into a grant pile and people could apply for grants out of it for
research, that might work better.

Sadly, because (and the article points this out) you can't say definitively
"this research is going to give you these benefits in 10 years" you can't
really say that you haven't just wasted all the money you spent. And that is
where unconstrained research gets killed.

~~~
hackuser
Perhaps public schools should be funded with something more fair and reliable,
such as income taxes. (I'd go for wealth taxes as more fair, but that's a long
shot.)

------
thisrod
The humanities should get a chance here too. There's a wonderful quote from
Peter Berger. Roughly, he said that sociologists had so far escaped public
attention in America, except perhaps among the few southern racists
sufficiently literate to read the footnotes to Brown vs. Board of Education.

------
leoc
Well, that's the most von Neumann-and-Turing-centric account of von Neumann's
role in the invention of computing that I've ever seen: no trace of Eckert,
Mauchly, U. Penn or ENIAC in the story _at all_!

------
JoeDaDude
In ancient times, there was a television show called "Connections" [1] in
which the host followed the multiple links and serendipitous events that led
to some modern inventions, technologies, and scientific achievements.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_\(TV_series\))

------
hackuser
Useful, applicable factoid: The Institute for Advanced Study is also in
Princeton, NJ, but is not affiliated with Princeton University.

------
vannevar
There may even be theoretical support for this idea, in the form of Ken
Stanley's (now with Uber) work with "novelty search."

[https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI](https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI)

------
ganfortran
Well we have plenty of them already. I am not worrying the ability of human
producing useless things, it is in our nature.

------
sriku
"premium content for subscribers"

~~~
jjawssd
what do you mean by that?

~~~
27182818284
Article seemed to load fine for me even in Incognito.

~~~
rhizome
Maybe it's geofenced unless you're subscribed. "Freeofenced?" ;)

------
debt
I feel like HN is a huge repository of genuinely 100% useless knowledge on
most days. Hopefully this dude is right.

------
nine_k
We need more resources, so that we could dedicate more to open-ended research
without expecting it to pay off in any predictable way. You literally never
know what can come out of a particular purely theoretical piece of research.

Well, would be great! It would be great to have such a surplus, and spend it
on esoteric things that will pay off in a century or two, or mere 30 years
maybe.

Are you personally happy to fund it? I'm sure a number of donation programs
exist.

Otherwise, I'd concentrate on minimizing resource waste, especially in
institutions like government, to obtain that resource surplus in the first
place.

~~~
hackuser
The U.S. is far wealthier than any nation ever, including the U.S. of the
1930s and 40s (it's not even comparable). Whether or not it's funded has is
not due to affordability.

------
leggomylibro
I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending
and entitlement programs, but I would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded
initiative designed to funnel money towards anybody who wanted to put it
towards use in citizen science or research.

I'm not sure what a program like that could look like in practice, though. You
could put money directly into peoples' pockets through a sort of grant-like
application process, ("I want to buy $250 worth of resistors, capacitors,
chips, wire, and breadboards to make a new kind of fitbit prototype") but that
would be an easy system to game, and a lot of the costs associated with
experimenting with theoretical ideas comes from equipment anyways.

Because not everyone can afford or find room for a scanning electron
microscope or a CNC lathe, right? Many cities have hackerspaces, but their
capabilities often stop at hand tools and working with thermoplastics unless
you're very lucky. So what about universities? They're present throughout the
entire nation, often already publicly funded, and have access to functional
research and manufacturing equipment.

Sadly, my experience trying to get even a few hours' use of any sort of
university equipment, whether supervised, paid, through night classes, or
otherwise, has been met with absolute stonewalls. If you don't pay full
tuition, you can fuck right off.

So I'm not sure what the solution here is. What's an average person who wants
to get into science supposed to do, besides be independently wealthy?

~~~
RobertoG
"I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending
and entitlement programs [..]"

It worries me how that assumption is never challenged even by people who
"would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded initiative ". The deficit-
mania narrative is really hegemonic nowadays.

~~~
leggomylibro
I don't think we need to cut programs, I just think that our current programs
aren't administered effectively. We spend trillions and it seems like there's
just so much graft and waste.

~~~
hackuser
> it seems like there's just so much graft and waste.

I hear this claim, but I've never seen evidence of it. How much graft and
waste is there? In which department?

Every large organization has some of it - name one that doesn't. I have yet to
see evidence of how relatively efficient or uncorrupt the U.S. government is.
I do know that anti-corruption groups generally rate it highly relative to
other governments worldwide, but many of those governments are in poor
countries with high corruption (the latter being a major cause of the former).

