An Analogy for Knowledge Specialization

"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance." - John Wheeler

Training in highly specialized knowledge is a lot like building and growing an island. You learn more and more, but learn that you actually know very little. That is, as you learn more you learn more about what you don't know.

Building islands is still useful, however, as the bigger your island of knowledge gets, the more complex and interesting the edifices you can build on that island become. So what that you go a little stir crazy? So what that you never leave your island? Careers are made out of lush, ever-growing, ever more sophisticated islands.

"A philosopher is a person who knows less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. A scientist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing." - John Ziman

The alternative is little better, and less-well paid. Instead of a single massive island, the generalist builds an archipelago. Generalized knowledge forms atolls, barely subsisting above the waves, perhaps big enough to be substantial, but hardly big enough to exploit.

Instead, the generalist is most productive not in building on individual islands, but in traversing the space between them. But once there are too many you start to know less and less about more and more, and you spend all of your time travelling between islands accomplishing nothing.

I've characterized both of these in the negative, but they have their virtues. The specialist certainly can construct impressive edifices of knowledge, and the generalist can become quite expert in communicating across boundaries. The problem is that, with few exceptions, specialization is vastly better paid and more respected than generalization, even though both are essential to a functioning knowledge economy.

Dialectic is Inequality and (Belief in) its Remediation

The following is a response to a couple questions from a my Education's Digital Future class. The prompt was as follows: 

• How much and what kinds of inequality are we willing to live with?

• Who is responsible for managing inequality and/or its remediation?

I'm going to grossly oversimplify the history of modern social science by saying it all goes back, methodologically at least, to Marxist critique, and thereby to Hegelian dialectic. In short, Marx offers social scientists a fundamentally dialectical way to look at the world and perform critical analysis. The essence of dialectic is inequality: a thesis and an oppositional antithesis collide and are thereby synthesized into a new thesis (which in turn leads to a new antithesis and ever onward unto perfection). Hegel reified dialectic as a way of doing phenomenological philosophy, and offers in his "Phenomenology of the Spirit" no less than an account of the whole of human history through the lens of dialectic. Later Marx took that critical, and somewhat intangible, methodology and applied it to the material and economic world (hence "dialectical materialism").

There are more steps both forward and backward in the history, here, but the inception of dialectic is particularly relevant to any discussion of equality. As Mitchell said in class, "If you had to sum up the entirety of Sociology in one word, it would be 'inequality.'" We might also say that Sociology, as a critical discipline, is a dialectical discipline. It is concerned with what the theses of the society are, and what antitheses such theses presuppose, create, and negate. What inequalities, that is, are the necessary result of social orders? The remediation of these inequalities is also dialectical - synthetic - but necessarily leads to other inequalities. What is interesting, however, is not that we proceed in a never-ending dialectical spiral, but that we are particularly bothered by certain types of inequalities whilst being nonplussed by, or even supportive of, others.

Almost by definition no two things in the world are entirely equal. Certainly even identical twins or two copies of a book are not materially (atomically) equal. Equality, thus, is a concept we engage necessarily at levels of abstraction. If it is not in the atoms of our being or the atoms of our possessions that we are equal, it might be in the way that our beings are allowed to interact with others or in the social value given to our possessions. This may seem numbingly simplistic: of course we're not really equal... But it's too easy to forget that what we mean by equality is not actually all that clear. Even mathematical equality contains abstraction. A = B, B = C, therefore A = C. This is only true if we accept certain abstracted rules and social norms. Clearly A and C, on a basic level, are different, as they appear different. It is the rules that make them the same.

Equality is socially constructed, I argue, and can only exist when things are unequal to begin with. Said another way, equality is a special way of describing two unequal things. In particular, I'd argue that we apply equality to two unequal things when we feel as though they are not worth placing in dialectical opposition to each other for the sake of synthesis (or remediation). I am "equal" to another middle class white male not because we are the same, but because while we are different, we don't need - "according to whom?," is an interesting question - to be intellectually (or phenomenologically, or materially) reconciled. I am "unequal" with my Hawaiian students because the differences between us are at the right level of abstraction to have more social, economic, and academic importance, and thus we might use (or argue about why we should or should not use) some process to remediate those differences.

In short, we have to live with inequality everywhere. The question, to me, is better phrased as a question of justice. The how-to of justice is no simpler than the how-to of equality. And "what is justice?" is, if anything, a more complicated question than "what is equality?" But at least the question "how much injustice should we tolerate?" seems intuitively easier to answer.

I'm Blogging... But not here.

Two posts by yours truly are up at the Stanford Vice Provost of Online Learning office site. Check it out.

White Paper from Stanford's "Education's Digital Future" Course

I wanted to share a paper I co-authored with several other students in a course called "Education's Digital Future." This was our final deliverable at the end of the fall quarter. We're currently working on a similar document for the winter quarter.

Link to Paul's group's paper.
Link to compilation of all papers.

M.E.I.

This holiday, I'm staying at the fancy-pants hotel my brother recently starting working at in Manhattan. Atop their stationary are three words: "Modern | Eclectic | Intimate." This got me thinking about the letters M, E, and I, and variations they might consider if they ever re-design their stationary. I think my revisions tell a better story.

Moderate Eccentric Inmate
Modal Electric Interstate
Module Enchanting Invertebrate
Metal Ectoplasm Inversion
Meticulous Elephant Instrument
Mucus Exposing Invalid
Mules Existing Illicitly
Metronome Elderberry Inkwell
Moss Euphonic Idlywild
Musky Encephalitic Indigestion