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by eli_gottlieb
3550 days ago
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>I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations. Then these scientists should be devoted to producing textbooks and courses which can then be taught to non-research students. Yes, all knowledge about the scale of what a single individual knows (and keeps on their shelves, hard drives, etc) is embodied as communities and traditions, but we still get far greater redundancy of that knowledge from teaching it as undergraduate or master's-level coursework than from passing it down only via research mentoring. If 25% of the population gets an undergraduate degree, 11% or so gets a postgraduate degree, and only about 1.7% get a PhD, then we need to be embodying society's knowledge among the larger cohorts for that knowledge to survive. We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work. |
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Textbooks and courses exist for everything but the most cutting edge stuff (which are still in flux anyway), but they are a very inefficient way of transferring knowledge. I would say they are practically useless without expert guidance. At the most basic level, there are so many of them that an expert has to tell you which ones are both good and relevant to what you want to learn. I've once seen a student waste months of his life studying a book he thought was relevant, only to discover that book wasn't building towards the sort of knowledge he needed in that subject. The book was about the correct subject, but was focused on somewhat different aspects than the ones he was interested in. There was no way for him to know this in advance without guidance.
So we don't know how to organize existing books. Also, even the books that exist are usually pretty bad at conveying knowledge. Or perhaps humans are just pretty bad at learning things from books. Either way, no one knows how to write textbooks and courses that are much better than what we have today. I really don't know of a better way to preserve knowledge than the current one. Perhaps technology can improve the situation by making access to knowledge more interactive. But I suspect this would require a real breakthrough.
> We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work.
Why not?