Opinion – Rodrigo Zeidan: All the knowledge in the world

Keep an open mind. Mix skepticism with wonder. Absorb as much as possible on all subjects.

Living in 2022 is difficult in many ways, especially with a denialist government in power, but nothing will change the fact that learning has never been easier. As long as one is intellectually curious, life will always be worthwhile.

Science fiction books lied to us. We don’t have cars that fly and we can’t go to Mars for a weekend. But we have something much better: we have all the knowledge in the world in the palm of our hands, to use as we please. We live in the age of information abundance.

Historical studies on Greek classics? It’s on the internet. African poetry of the 50s? Also. Videos with reviews of every great comic book artist of the last hundred years? Series about Japanese babies who go shopping alone? There is an explosion of information that should make us ecstatic to learn about anything we want, in the level of detail we want. And it gets better. We can consume content written, narrated, dramatized and even created automatically by artificial intelligences.

Today, the speed of knowledge diffusion is impressive. For example, if I want to answer a question about econometric methods, I just ask a question to one of the researchers on the subject on Twitter and almost immediately I have the right references to study the topics I need. Before, mastering a subject, even without a researcher’s depth, required a monstrous effort in time and money. Today, for any level of depth you want, there are infinite options. Paradoxically, the problem is to filter the excess of information, since there is no shortage of websites and videos with clumsy productions.

Cumulonimbus calvus, capillatus and incus. I will never forget being eight years old and picking up volumes of the Encyclopedia Mirador Internacional to read the entries in sequence. With the naivety of children, I thought it would be possible to memorize all the knowledge summarized in the thousands of pages of those volumes.

To live in the past was to live in darkness. The intellectual experiences of even the most brilliant writers and researchers were shaped by the few available volumes to which they had access. When Isaac Newton died, he had a gigantic library for the time, of about 1,700 volumes. But most of his science had to be done almost from scratch, as he didn’t have access to almost any frontier knowledge, due to the delay in the diffusion of knowledge in the 17th century.

Few see a Sunday afternoon as a pleasant chance to enter a whirlwind of information on a specific subject. Spend hours learning about medieval armor? Chinese art from the Song dynasty? Corporate finance classes or classic Detroit Pistons games from the 80s? No, a lot of people prefer to go on the internet to engage in pointless bullshit or consuming information full of confirmation bias.

My goal with this article is not to create guilt. Nor anxiety. Nor is it giving moral lessons. It’s just an invitation. We have, just a few clicks away, practically all the explicit knowledge generated by humanity. I’ll stop here as it’s time to hear about Vijayanagara, the last emperors of South India. We will?