Why I Know So Much

This is the first in a series of posts adapted from old Facebook notes, in the hopes that reworking old material will get me back into the groove of writing and perhaps I will start putting out more new material. The original was published on November 8th, 2010.


Back when meeting new people was actually a thing that happened from time to time (i.e., when I was still in school), I would frequently experience people asking me "how do you know that?" or "how do you know so much?" or some variation on that theme. Usually I would give a short answer like "I read a lot", but I've decided to go into the issue a little deeper. Why do other people perceive me as knowing an unusually large quantity of stuff?

Part of it is that I know stuff about lots of widely differing fields. People often have often had misconceptions of what my degrees were in based on whatever topic I may have expounded on in their presence first, and when they encounter me then discoursing intelligently on something wildly different (like when someone who knows I'm good at physics first hears me get excited about linguistics), they are surprised. Why should they be surprised? I think it's because most people only have expertise in a very few fields, and it doesn't elicit surprise when someone reveals how much they know about Their Field. There's something surprising and impressive about having depth in more than one area. Especially since we are all so used to the fallacy of people who are experts in one area proclaiming bullcrap about other domains.

So, answering the question "how do I know so much?" at a deeper level means answering the question "how did I become knowledgeable about so many different things?" Or, "why am I not stuck on a small range of topics?" I won't tackle that directly, because I don't think I can really come up with a better answer than just "I'm interested in it all." It's a fundamental feature of my brain and my personality. And then because I'm interested in it, I go looking for it. And once you go looking for knowledge, especially when you go looking for knowledge in apparently wildly divergent directions, you get compound interest. The more you know, the easier it is to understand even more things, and the more your rate of learning will increase. Richard Hamming once said

Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.

So if I spend even a few more minutes every day acquiring new knowledge than some other person of equivalent ability, over a year, or a few years, or 30 years, I'll end up far, far ahead. And I try not to let time go by when my brain is idle. If I can read something, I'll read it. If I can talk to someone who knows more than I do, I'll try to get them to answer my questions. If I can't read anything, and I can't talk to anybody, I'll philosophize, and try to solve problems I already know about, or try to come up with new problems that are easier to solve. Note that bit about "someone who knows more than I do": if you maintain a good, accurate understanding not only of what you have learned, but also what you know that you don't know yet, that can greatly increase your efficiency at learning new things. Now, all that philosophizing time helps make new connections, and the more stuff you have to connect, the more connections you can make. You still get compound interest if you're just studying one subject, but the exponent gets even bigger when you find that you can start making correlations between highly divergent domains. So, not only is it true that the more you know, the faster you'll know more, but also, the more different kinds of things you know, the faster you'll learn even more different kinds of things. And pretty soon, you realize that most of what you know cannot be easily put into nice neat boxes like "Math" and "English" and "Biology". Did you know that natural language processing and protein folding simulation have a lot of overlap in the types of algorithms used to run them? I know that because I happened to have lunch with a guy working on natural language processing, and a guy working on protein folding in bioinformatics. And then I went and got a degree in computational linguistics so I'd know what those algorithms were!

So, start taking a few minutes every day to think about things you don't know much about yet. Wikipedia is a great help for getting started with that. Keep it up, and pretty soon, you'll know a lot of stuff, too.