Positing A New Field of Knowledge studies

There is an interesting paradox when it comes to knowledge. It is widely recognized that knowledge is supremely valuable and indeed, many human endeavors have knowledge as their goal. However, as a topic in itself, knowledge seems understudied to me. There is epistemology, of course, but that is focused on what we can know and whether we can know it, i.e. more on the nature of knowledge as seen from the outside. It does not tell us about knowledge itself, from the inside and how it develops.

Yet knowledge and its persistence and propagation are deeply fundamental to the future taking the shape we are hoping it will. Therefore, I would like to posit that there should be a separate field of studies – Knowledge Studies. There is plenty of study of innovation, which is simply a derivative of knowledge. And we now have a burgeoning field of progress studies, but again, you can’t have progress without knowledge. Even economic growth, the goal which is the most vanilla and that few disagree with, is dependent on knowledge. It was only when knowledge became storable for future generations that we started having any economic growth whatsoever.

So knowledge needs its own field of studies. This new field of study would have a lot of ground to cover. A rough outline of what the field could look like could be that as the main areas of study, there would be:

·       How Knowledge Grows

·       How Knowledge Decays

·       How Knowledge is Maintained

First, how knowledge grows. Unless we think there is a natural limit to knowledge, that we will one day know everything that there is, which I doubt, this is perhaps the most important area. This area would investigate how new knowledge gets created. Knowledge comes from knowledge and builds on earlier knowledge, so a key question is which types of knowledge are most combinatory, and lend themselves the most to being building blocks for new knowledge.

It would be useful here to create a rough taxonomy of knowledge. Understanding all the different kinds of knowledge there is can help map out which ones of them are most important and where we should disproportionally focus. A taxonomy could have many different high-level categories. We could start with the different fields of study as they exist in a university, say – i.e. physics, medicine, mathematics, psychology. But very different vantage points, such as innate knowledge versus acquired knowledge, could be explored. Creating a MECE framework might be difficult. I’m reminded of Borges’ categories of animals from the supposed ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: “(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (I) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.” In order to avoid such spurious classifications, it would be worthwhile to focus on which types of knowledge have historically had the highest combinatory power, i.e. has birthed the most additional knowledge. This could perhaps be guesstimated by looking at the aggregate number of academic citations across fields and see which fields have the highest usage outside of their own field.

This could overall be envisioned as a knowledge space state. Different lines of inquiry could then investigate how the knowledge state space can be explored in different directions. Does knowledge mostly grow horizontally – within a field over time? Or more vertically by jumping between fields?

Second, one could turn to the opposite question – how knowledge decays and disappears. It is hard to know for sure, but humanity as a whole must have lost more knowledge than it has retained. Just consider all the impermanent storage methods used for knowledge that have been used or that are still being used. Knowledge might disappear for different reasons – knowledge decaying over time, perhaps there is an innate half-life to knowledge; knowledge actively being made to disappear, such as the banning of books; and knowledge being replaced by superior knowledge, when a new paradigm replaces an old one. Knowledge can of course also, albeit only in rare cases, be rediscovered and regained. Recently, the value of old Roman techniques for creating concrete were rediscovered after not being used for millennia.

Third, one has the all-important question of how knowledge is maintained. This area of study would have first to look at how knowledge should best be maintained in normal times – whether it is best to maintain knowledge in written format or orally, or whether depth over breadth wins out when it comes to knowledge surviving. This could be done through studying how knowledge has survived over the course of human history (albeit with a not insignificant survivorship bias!) It would be fruitful to e.g. investigate how knowledge moved from one civilization to another. However, equally if not more important, is how knowledge survives abnormal times and catastrophic events. The classic example here is how we rebuild civilization after e.g. a nuclear war. There has been books in this area, such as Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, but they focus on what knowledge is needed rather than how we can ensure as much as possible of that knowledge does survive.

That is a rough outline of what this new field of study could go after. I believe a field of Knowledge Studies could have great potential for a number of purposes. Knowledge maintenance and decay is key to understand to make humanity more resilient for existential risk. Knowledge growth is essential for humanity to continue on its trajectory which will hopefully take it into future millennia, beyond this planet. And finally, as we expect to soon be joined by AI scientists who help us on our knowledge building journey, knowing the rough outlines of the knowledge state space and where knowledge is most combinatory would be useful for focusing their efforts.