Superspecialization and Knowledge Mosaicism in the Brain
Comedian Will Rogers said that “Everyone is Ignorant, just in different subjects.” This was true back then but is more and more true in a world overloaded with information.
But I only started to think about the concept of knowledge mosaics after reading the work of Leopoldo de Meis. In his book ‘Science and Education – the human technological conflict’ he talks about the different ‘culture ages’ that we have. His book is in Portuguese only, but his ideas are so important to understand the Narrative wars that we are going through that I decided to translate and share with you here.
Overspecialization
The first schools that we know of were founded by Plato in 387 BC. and by Aristotle in 335 BC, both in Athens. Plato’s school was called the Academy because it was located on the property of a legendary Greek named Academus, and Aristotle’s Lyceum because the building it occupied was dedicated to Apollo Lyceus, god of shepherds. Aristotle imparted knowledge to his disciples in lectures similar to the lessons of modern times. It is believed that his presentations were copied into 150 volumes. Most of this work has been lost, but fifty volumes have been found in 80 BC. in a pit in Asia Minor by Roman soldiers of General Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The volumes were taken to Rome and copied. The work was a kind of encyclopedia that comprised all the knowledge available at the time, including Aristotle’s own original thoughts and observations. The amount of information contained in each volume is much less than that of a small modern textbook – in fact, the volumes resemble the notebooks of our students today. Aristotle’s course lasted a few years, perhaps two to four, and during this period the students learned everything that was known until then.
At the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, encyclopedic knowledge was much greater than that available in ancient Greece, but the volume of technical-scientific information recorded was small. Most knowledge could be assimilated by a single person without major difficulties. In the 18th century the Oxford University library was considered one of the most complete in the western world. Among the many books available, there was a small collection of approximately two hundred volumes dedicated to experimental philosophy, the generic name given to the various areas of the new ‘science’ that emerged after the description of the ‘method’. The page number of each of these volumes was also much smaller than modern treatises on science. If an Oxford professor had wished at that time to update his scientific knowledge and devoted himself to reading for eight hours a day, resting on Saturdays and Sundays, in a year he would have read the entire section on experimental philosophy. He could have all the scientific knowledge of the library at his disposal without worrying about new publications, since the pace of knowledge production was very slow and it would take several years for there to be a significant increase in the number of volumes.
Professors of the 18th and 19th centuries were, therefore, able to teach chemistry, biology, mathematics, physics and several other subjects safely, and in relation to their time they were educated men, with a multidisciplinary view of knowledge. Count de Buffon, who in the 18th century described vitiligo, was not only a doctor but also a biologist and mathematician. René Descartes not only described the scientific method, laying the foundations of modern philosophy, but was also known for his contributions to mathematics and anatomy. In mathematics he combined algebra and geometry, establishing the concept of Cartesian coordinates, and laid the foundations of analytic geometry. In his anatomy works, he identified the pituitary gland and obtained the first evidence that its functioning was somehow linked to the brain. At the time, the study time required to train a professional, between school and university, was somewhere between 6 and 10 years. Currently, between school, university and graduate studies, it takes between 22 and 26 years of study to train a qualified professional for the job market.
Unlike in the past, modern professional are far from being generalists. They are, as a rule, a specialist trained in a specific aspect of a given area of knowledge. The number of scientists and university professors working today is thousands of times greater than those available some two hundred years ago. Despite this large increase, scientists who are distinguished by their contributions to various areas of knowledge, such as social sciences and exact sciences as in the case of Descartes, are extremely rare.
It is impossible to master more than one area of knowledge and keep up to date in each of them in modern times. The massive amount of new knowledge generated each year forces academic superspecialization. The number of scientific papers published by technical journals cataloged by the ISI grows year by year (Figure 6.1) and between 1968 and 1999 [more than] tripled [and could reach] to more than 20 million. […] If a university professor of biochemistry wants to update his knowledge and is able to read an article an hour for 12 hours a day, every day of the year, including Saturdays and Sundays, by the end of the year he will have read less than 5% of what has been published in the various biochemistry journals in the period. During that year, the professor did not have time to teach classes, work on his research, live with his family or perform any other activity besides reading.
And the most seriously, if you wish to continue in your academic effort, to update yourself in biochemistry, you must read 95% of the articles from the previous year that he failed to read, plus an equal volume corresponding to new articles published in the second year of reading. He will never be able to update himself, and long before he will lose his sanity, as it is not possible to maintain such a rhythm of reading for a long time.
The growing mismatch between the ability to absorb information and the growth of knowledge.
Until the 18th century it was possible to assimilate what was known in the various areas of science, but today it has become humanly impossible to assimilate everything that is known. In order to maintain a productive professional activity, the modern university professor will only be able to keep up to date on a very particular topic of his/her specialty. It is possible to dedicate an hour or two of your workday to reading and limit yourself to a very small fraction of what is published, so that you have time for other academic tasks.
The super-specialty [of a biochemistry professor] will allow you to know the concepts published in the last two or three years; about general biochemistry, you will be able to have notions of what has happened in the last two decades; your physics will be limited to the concepts proposed by Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century; what will you know about math will go back to the beginning of the millennium; and your children at home are likely to claim that your knowledge of social science dates back to the stone age. Therefore, the excess of information produced annually means that each individual has, for each aspect of knowledge, different cultural ages.
What I prefer to call the ‘Knowledge mosaic’ is defined by many factors: where you were born and live, the language(s) that you speak, your teachers, friends, family, your economical status, the things that you’ve chosen to learn and study before. And it is like a fingerprint: no one else in the universe will have the same mosaic that you have.
Most recently, that got me thinking, that this may be the main reason behind polarization.
Until today, asymmetry of information was a bit obvious: educated vs. non-educated. If we had similar educational and socio economical background, we could assume little or no asymmetry of information in a given topic. Today, even if you want to discuss soccer match over beers at the bar with your peers, asymmetry of information is to be expected, because the mosaic has grown diverse.
But as information accumulation grows, exponentially, so does the diversity of mosaic! And now, it is not your cultural, education, geographical or socio-economical status that defines your mosaic, but your different biases, being availability bias (the information sources that you consume), closely followed by confirmation bias, probably the two most importante ones.
This may have huge impact on innovation. Domenico de Masi says that the age of individual creativity is over and all creations nowadays are collective. While people fell more secure around people with similar mosaics and biases, to build new, creative and resilient products, we need to access more knowledge than one person can offer. We need to hang out and work together with people with different ‘knowledge mosaics’.
People are looking for diversity in nationality, race and sexual orientation, but the real diversity is in your knowledge mosaic.
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