
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - johnr8201
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/27/the-usefulness-of-useless-knowledge/
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smoyer
If there's one thing I did correctly bringing up my children, it's to foster
their natural curiosity. It's so easy to amplify that curiousity but our
society seems to want to quell it at an early age. When a toddler asks a
question, do you answer it thoroughly and ask them a leading question ... or
do you purposely provide a minimal answer and go back to reading on your iPad?

I suspect that most of this crowd is pre-child, but you can still interact
with someone else's kid. And it can be fun. Think of how Randall of xkcd
explores topics and lead them on a humorous quest for knowledge. And it's good
practice when/if you have kids of your own. Maybe you'll end up with one of
these kids: <http://bama.ua.edu/~chytrid/Hughes/HHMI.ugst12.html>

~~~
henrybaxter
I have kids (4 and under) and I sometimes wonder if my 'daddy answers' are a
bit much. The kids sometimes get bored, sometimes overwhelmed, and generally
have to do very little research themselves as I've covered the obvious bases.
I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on this topic.

~~~
rudenoise
My daughter isn't at that age yet, but I imagine that helping to lead the
conversation/exploration with the right questions (rather than providing
complete answers) might be a sound approach?

~~~
henrybaxter
I think that's a good idea, but in practice it can be hard to strike a balance
that I like. If you get to the question part too soon, or if the question
requires too much of a leap or background knowledge, you can hit a brick wall.

~~~
smoyer
I think the fact that you're thinking about how to guide your kids through
their early years indicates that you're going to do well at it. Sometimes you
won't give enough detail and sometimes too much but overall, they'll hear the
parts they need at the time.

A funny anecdote - I taught my daughter the principles (not the mechanics) of
trigonometry and the unit circle when she was in 6th grade. Simply because she
asked. When she was taking trig in 10th grade, she said "remember when you
told me about ...".

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josscrowcroft
This:

 _"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity
and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application,
the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the
equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be
said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times."_

edit: it's interesting to look back at my school/college career and be able to
pick out those educators who taught this above all else vs. those who taught
'by the book'. Each had their place in my education, but the former certainly
had a more profound impact.

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currywurst
Whenever someone comes up with "Who needs pure math research?", I'll send this
their way :)

People don't realize that "standing on shoulders of giants" implies that the
giants had conditions to grow and reach for greater and greater heights.

~~~
derleth
> Who needs pure math research?

Every single human being who banks over the Internet, which, given how banks
work now, is every single human being who has funds in a modern money economy.

I know, I know, but it's my favorite example: Number theory was held up as the
exemplar of math-for-math's-sake pure mathematics until suddenly it was the
foundation of cryptography. In the words of Chuck Berry, "Goes to show you
never can tell."

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nkh
This Russell quote seems appropriate:

 _Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to
be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since
no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the
sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our
conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and
diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but
above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy
contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that
union with the universe which constitutes its highest good._

Bertrand Russell -The Problems of Philosophy

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PaulHoule
Well, I would say that Marconi and those who followed in his footsteps have
made a huge contribution to human welfare and to glorify Hertz and Maxwell to
the expense of the engineers and businesspeople who've made radio a reality is
a big mistake.

When I hear this kind of thing, however, I immediately realize how science
itself does most of the work of turning people against science.

When I was in graduate school I quickly got the message that a son of a
construction worker wasn't going to get a permanent career in academia. In all
the time I spent around an Ivy League school, I met just one professor who
didn't have at least one professor for a parent -- and I can say he was a
thoroughly miserable twisted soul... the epitomy of the nasty physics
professor.

Although the image of science is beautiful, the reality is that it's a system
that runs young people like racehorses and disposes of most of them. Because
of that, it's hard for me to reccomend a career in science to a young person,
like my son.

That same university is now going through some drastic changes and the
astonishing thing is the lack of resistance. Students don't resist because
they're only there for four years and don't have a picture of what's going on.
Tenured profs don't care because their motto, to a man, is "aprois moi le
deluge."

That's the motto of a man (or woman) who can't be fired. If the personal fate
of academics was tied to the fate of their institution, the fate of their
field, the fate of their students and of mankind, we might see a major
upwelling of humanity and morality in the academic class.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I would argue Marconi and Maxwell share equal credit. They both stood on the
shoulders of giants to accomplish something they could never have done alone,
and it is likely that if either hadn't done what they did, somebody else would
have done so fairly soon.

But critical to the argument, Marconi stood on Maxwell's shoulders. The
wireless would not have existed without the fundamental, "pointless" work of
Maxwell and others. I would imagine cell phones were far from Maxwell's mind
when he did his work, yet those, too, are a legacy of his discoveries.

I look at things like the LHC and really question whether anything _practical_
will come of it. In the end, I don't care, because we are learning, and our
species seems to do better when exploring new frontiers, no matter where they
are. (I do question whether we could learn more by funding a lot more smaller
experiments, but that's a different issue.)

~~~
archgoon
Particle physics needed the LHC. In particle physics, the fastest way to
answer the question "are there new particles at higher energies?" is to
collide particles at those higher energies. Also, $4.4 billion dollars isn't
that much. For the price of Zynga and Instagram, you get to push out the
limits of our understanding of the interactions of fundamental particles.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I'm still hoping know the Higgs mass will lead to hover boards. I don't really
believe it will, but I'm sure Maxwell never thought his work would lead to
something like always-connected pocket computers. I don't begrudge spending
the money at all, as there is little question that particle physics has
massively impacted everybody's lives.

That said, we have limited amounts to spend on tese things (more limited than
it should be!), so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the
most?" when we spend it. We should not be asking, "What experiment will yield
something I can sell?"

~~~
archgoon
> so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we
> spend it.

Understood, but isn't the point of not saying "What experiment will yield
something I can sell?"", is that we don't know the answer to the question
"What experiments help us learn the most?"

Again, the LHC isn't that expensive. Mark Zuckerberg lost more money over the
last two days to pay for both the LHC and the Hubble.

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grn
I didn't like the part about Marconi vs Maxwell. There is a positive feedback
loop between technology and science. Science investigates nature providing
basic knowledge upon which technology can build. Technology applies these
principles in practice building and improving devices. These devices are then
used by scientists to study nature in more detail, to observe what was
previously impossible to observe, to discover new laws of nature.

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SoftwareMaven
I've had people ask me where I got my great store of useless facts from (not
quite trivia). I've always told them I'm working on a book: _A Million and One
Useless Facts_. I was hoping this would tell me that there is some great
advantage to being full of useless information.

The author's definition of _useless_ differs from mine. I wish I had Maxwell's
level of useless knowledge! :)

(And, yes, I realize the author is being ironic.)

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ucee054
FFS Maxwell wasn't the giant. That was Faraday. Maxwell just came along and
turned Faraday's work into Greek squiggles and now everyone says what a genius
he was, when it was Faraday who did the real work.

Oh, and Faraday had a real, useful job, and his discoveries were part of that.
It was the norm for science to be useful all the way back to when it started,
which was with Archimedes \- who was very applied, building siege engines to
defend Sicily against the Roman Navy.

This curiosity-driven "pure" research stuff was restricted to rich people
being "gentleman scientists" until the 1940s, when governments decided to fund
everything under the sun in case some scientist might come up with a way of
very quickly killing large numbers of Germans/Russians.

We have that to thank for the "citations are king", "publish or perish" and
"postdoc purgatory" nonsense that is producing so many bad papers today, and I
wish science could go back to being useful like it was in the first place.

~~~
abhinav
A cursory look at Faraday's wikipedia page suggests that he started off as an
assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and succeeded him as the
Director of the Royal Institution and became the first Fullerian Professor of
Chemistry without any teaching obligations. Faraday's accomplishments are
hardly unacknowledged when he is considered as one the greatest
experimentalists in the history of science. Maxwell's genius lay in unifying
the disparate experimental observations of Faraday into the 'right' squiggles,
predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves from his equations and in
the process suggesting that visible light itself may be an electromagnetic
wave; an achievement worthy of celebration in my opinion.

