Knowing Things Other People Don’t
Some things are worth knowing for their own sake; some things are worth knowing because nobody else knows them.
At Oxford, I studied mostly medieval history, especially medieval political thought. Some people might say this is a waste of time; but it was a conscious decision, taken for two reasons. First, I had an unfair advantage; thanks to the efforts of a brilliant teacher called Matthew Bryan, I had much stronger Latin than almost anybody else on the history course, and second, I emphatically didn’t want to study things that other people knew about.
Partially that was driven by ego; I wanted to have my own special things that nobody else knew about. But also it was that I thought it would be genuinely helpful to know about periods in the past that others didn’t. If I studied the French Revolution and WW2, what would there be to contribute? But if my political thought was based on John of Paris and Marsilius of Padua, with examples drawn from the Investiture Contest and the battle over ecclesiastical poverty, then I might have something new to add. To find something original to say about WW2 is very hard; but fourteenth-century politics is awash with ideas and framings that challenge our thinking.
Put differently, if two things are equally valuable to know about, then you should pick the one that your friends and interlocutors know less about; then you can help them more. Knowledge becomes more valuable when fewer people have it.
CS Lewis wrote a brilliant introduction to St Athanasius’ De Incarnatione, called On The Reading of Old Books. In that piece, he says:
“Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.”
I think he’s got a great point there; the challenge, in so much of our thinking today, is to break our ways of thinking, and find a fresh approach.
Sometimes I think that this is a particularly humanities-brained way to think about the world. Things like, I don’t know, FFT or Bayesian statistics are valuable regardless of how many people know them. But actually, scientists sometimes think in this way too.
For example, this famous passage from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman has the same thesis:
“One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me.
One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again."
So every physics class, I paid no attention to what was going on with Pascal's Law, or whatever they were doing. I was up in the back with this book: Advanced Calculus, by Woods. Bader knew I had studied Calculus for the Practical Man a little bit, so he gave me the real works. It was for a junior or senior course in college. It had Fourier series, Bessel functions, determinants, elliptic functions, all kinds of wonderful stuff that I didn't know anything about.
That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign; it's a certain operation. It turns out that's not taught very much in the universities; they don't emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.
The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”
It’s easy for me to suggest that, like, my having read William of Ockham gives me a unique perspective on the great issues of the day. Such a suggestion certainly helps justify why I spent lots of time reading the Dialogus and Octo Quaestiones when I could have been practicing integrals. But Feynman’s story demonstrates the existence of problems that only he could solve, as a consequence of his unconventional background. That’s evidence to me that an unusual background can be equally valuable in debates about politics.
Palmer Luckey recently made a similar point on Patrick O’Shaughnessey’s podcast, Invest Like the Best:
“If I want to understand what's going on in the modern day, you want to go back to the future and say, what were people saying, back then, what are the ideas that people aren't even discussing right now? Because I don't want to be too pessimistic on present, but if you look through a lot of the academic literature and government literature today on energy solutions for the United States, they're really, really narrow minded.
They are really, really politically driven, it's all about what is aligned with the current debates going on between political parties. The people in these agencies are largely tied to the things that have already been deemed important. And if you go back on the other hand, to let's say, post-World War II America, where we were really thinking from first principles, what do we want the world to look like? What do we want the United States to look like?
And what are all of the ways we could get there? They were thinking very expensively. And so this idea of extremely cheap synthetically manufactured biofuels that would get rid of strategic dependence on limited oil supply or allow us to sell off our oil supply to make money in the near term while still having a robust renewable base of energy to power our industrial machine, our war machine, you name it.
That was an idea that was of interest to people in the '40s, the '50s, the '60s. I think mostly all of this fell apart when it became clear that we were not going to be a nuclear economy mostly in for political reasons, not practical or technological reasons. So this was the case, right?
I didn't actually have to be a big thinker. I just had to go say, what were people thinking when they were allowed to think whatever they wanted and when they could think really, really big things?”
Same line of thinking; originality is valuable, but often originality just means looking where other people aren’t.
But not everything is about originality. In particular, there are certain ideas that you want to establish as table stakes, as a basis for further work. A phrase that often runs through my mind at this point is per genus et differentiam - ‘through type and difference’. In order to define something, you say first that X belongs to a given family, and then explain what makes it different to the other members of that family.
In the same way, we all need basic concepts of, like, arithmetic and calculus. Once we have those, we can do fancy integration tricks. One place you might see this applied is in software engineering - everyone on the team needs a shared understanding of how the work is done, and then individuals can apply their skills where they’re best suited, all the while building in such a way that integrates with the code produced by the rest of the team. Per genus et differentiam.
So the value, then, comes from having enough shared context that you can work together, while still being different enough to contribute in an original way. And this comes back to an absolutely fantastic essay by Alex Danco, called Social Capital in Silicon Valley; I recommend it to everyone:
“The Silicon Valley tech ecosystem is a world of pattern matching amidst uncertainty. We pattern match ideas, we pattern match companies, but most of all we pattern match people. If you are new, and you already speak the language and look the part well enough to be able to fit the pattern, but have just enough novelty and freshness to you that you don’t fit the pattern exactly, then people will be interested in you.
If you’re too different, you won’t fit the pattern at all, so people will ignore you. (Did I mention tech has diversity issues?) And if you’ve been in tech too long, you’ll fit the pattern too well, so people will also ignore you. But if you’re a newcomer who speaks the language? Then you’re interesting. You have “Goldilocks novelty”: a valuable form of social capital, which you can cash in immediately. You’re different enough to have unique potential, but similar enough to fluently use all of the leverage that the tech ecosystem offers you.”
So that’s the challenge: speak the language, look the part, but maintain novelty and freshness.
I’m sure CS Lewis would approve.