How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)

How to Be a Know-It-All (2017)(newyorker.com)

60 points by Foe 3 years ago | 21 comments

kashunstva 3 years ago |

ricardo_nh 3 years ago |

people tend to forget that the very process of knowing is as important as the thing known. no one can be a know it all aiming for a collection of "the most important things to know". You are a know it all by being curious, attentive, willing to study and learn. It's the form, the process, the way of living. The separation between form and content has reached an all time high

bluetomcat 3 years ago | |

You have to start with an attempt to define knowledge. It is rooted in observation and experience, and has the ability to invalidate itself in the face of new observations and experiences. In that sense, it is transient and ephemeral in the temporal domain. You can try to derive laws and models which have practical utility here and now, but those laws will always erode with the passing of time.

ricardo_nh 3 years ago | | |

yes of course, I agree. but you don't need to define knowledge for that. all you have to do is see the cases where knowledge is attributed to subjects and what are the requisites for that in each context. if we are talking about scientific knowledge, yes I agree with your definition. but there are other types of knowledge. And my point was that to be a "know it all" it has more to do with one's approach to things, to a constant epistemic approach, than having an actual list of things one knows. A "know it all" is not an expert, but someone who looks for what is to be known in every situation of life

tacone 2 years ago | |

This. Logical reasoning is not that hard. Understanding the context is much more difficult,. Acquiring information is comparatively incredibly hard.

trabant00 3 years ago |

How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life.

Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the information does not come as an answer to a question that bugged you, so you value it close to worthless. Water tastes the sweetest when you are thirsty and so on.

kashunstva 3 years ago | |

Alternatively, possibly for some, these little introductions are the first, albeit imperfect and incomplete step toward answering those recurring pesky questions. By developing a skeletal cognitive framework on a subject that relates to a relevant question I have, I can better map a route to the answer(s).

xyzzy123 3 years ago | |

IMHO facts "come to life" with more context, e.g:

* How do we know that fact / how was it measured or determined? How sure are we that the fact is true? How accurately / precisely do we know it?

* Who figured it out / generated / measured the fact? Why did they do that?

* What is the "distribution" the fact is drawn from? e.g. for "height of highest mountain", what are the next 3 tallest mountains, etc, what is deepest trench, how far to space? etc.

abecedarius 3 years ago | |

I'm mildly curious: about how many of the books in this series have you read?

I'm with you on feeling jaded by pop science in general, but I'm struck by the lack of specific comments on this specific series in the HN reactions here.

My opinion from reading 10 of them in the last few years: 3 were worthwhile to me (The ice age, Stoicism, and planetary systems), and a couple more in the sort-of-OK range. An 11th I quickly gave up on (Anatomy: A VSI -- I'm still on the lookout for a book in that niche).

I'd really value a series like this which presumed a reader comfy with basic freshman math for a STEM major, or even high school math -- it's some kind of indictment of modern education that educated adults are taken by the whole industry to be repelled by even that much math in pop science.

bluetomcat 3 years ago | |

Once you've read a couple of those pop-science and "big history" books, every other such book tells you the same story. It always starts with the Big Bang, the forming of the stars, the Earth, life, agriculture, writing, the Industrial revolution and the modern era. You can certainly do better than spend significant amounts of time on books with that narrative.

teddyh 3 years ago | | |

Compressed to under 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

jokeneversoke 3 years ago |

My high school librarian has been very interested in the series; around 10% of the library budget has been spent on solely on buying books in this series. We currently have collected around 370 of them[0].

Most of my time in the library was spent reading sci-fi and world history. Of the few encounter with these books, I've found them as a great initial boost. Apart from their own content, the references and further reading sections serve as a fantastic reading list. All _without_ the need of a knowledgeable expert by your side. As I'm applying to computer science, the introductions to classical philosophy and economics were really helpful as I did not take relevant courses.

I wouldn't bother reading a random one of them out of boredom though. Many of the topics may not be relevant to what you already know, and would be quickly flushed away and not survive a single week in your brain unless you do further reading.

p.s. as of this comment I have a cart full of newly arrived Short Introduction books behind me, about 130+ in count.

[0]: I am a long time volunteer at the school library, so statistics are available.

dpflan 3 years ago |

It’s fun to learn facts, especially when presented well, indeed, but this article feels like it is really just an ad for the Very Short Introduction series, a project of Oxford University Press.

dmurray 3 years ago | |

It's much more like a book review. A long and wandering one, with a digression into the subject of encyclopaediae in general, but it has as much criticism of the books as it has outright praise.

dpflan 3 years ago | | |

Good point, there is more content than just discussing the series.

bertman 3 years ago |

>[...] it’s a profound relief, these days, to press our collective feverish forehead against the cold steel of actual information.

Beautiful.

hasbot 3 years ago |

Poor choice of title: the article doesn't fulfill the promise. It's hard to discuss this article because of this large discrepancy.

Does anyone even want to be a know-it-all? While I'd like to be knowledgeable in more topics I know that if I read/study topics that I'm not thoroughly interested in I won't retain the information. So I'm content knowing what I know.

HKH2 3 years ago | |

It seems it's often not expressed well to children that there are hard limits to knowledge and potential. Maybe that might seem defeatist, but it seems that to children it is often unthinkable that adults don't usually have everything sorted. There is always a balance that needs to be found.

piloto_ciego 3 years ago | | |

Those limits exist but they’re certainly not hard and they are seldom permanent outside of brain and cognitive impairments.

thc-27182 3 years ago | | |

Eh I like young people to be naive. Sometimes people can solve things because they didn't know they weren't supposed to be unable to.

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/george-dantzig-real-will-h...

dang 3 years ago |

How to Be a Know-It-All - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15439701 - Oct 2017 (48 comments)