Mere aggregation

There's a funny change I've noticed with social gatherings, especially of a nerdier bent. It used to be that knowing things was a valuable contribution to a conversation. Let's say someone mentions colourblindness. "Well", you would say, "did you know that the Japanese didn't have a word for green until after the American occupation?". Everyone would say "wow, that's amazing", and then someone else would reply "and did you know that there is a tribe in the Amazon with no words for colour at all!". And so on and so on.

I used to enjoy those types of conversations, until at some point, seemingly overnight, they became incredibly boring. Other people I've talked to have made similar observations, even though none of us have gotten sick of learning new things. I was thinking about why that is, and to me the obvious culprit is the internet. Obviously, the internet has always been a fairly effective mechanism for dispensing facts, but these days between Wikipedia, TED, infographics, feel-smart-about-stuff-every-day blogs and the non-stop bombardment of social media factbites, it's safe to say being able to acquire facts is no longer a going concern.

The impact of this is twofold: firstly, it reduces the value of knowledge as a signal of intelligence. People were once described as well-read, having a breadth of knowledge about interesting topics. But these days anyone can have a breadth of knowledge, you just regurgitate whatever you saw on /r/TodayILearned today. Of course, when everyone else also has access to the same feeds of trivia, and they know how easy it is, it stops seeming impressive.

And the second part is that in point of pure utility, someone telling you a fact is just inefficient now. I could learn ten facts, probably more interesting ones too, in the time it takes someone to struggle through one explanation – and from the comfort of my own home! If my goal is to know things, I'm better off going straight to the source than getting someone else to read the internet to me slowly and with more mistakes.

So, is there even any point in sharing information anymore? Sure, but the value isn't in transmitting the information, it's in choosing what information to transmit and in what context. The flipside of having this endless repository of facts is that it's actually quite hard to tell what you do need to know from what you don't. A computer science course teaches you something that the Wikipedia category can't, which is how to arrange that information relative to all the other information. And a person can select information tailored to your needs, and guide you through the connections between information you have and information you might want.

Someday, perhaps, even that will be done better by computers, and at last there will be no point in sharing anything we've learned. However, even then I think there will be a point to conversation, not about the facts or the knowledge we've acquired, but their consequences. Knowing things allows us to make better decisions and generate new knowledge from what we have already. That's not going to stop being useful even when knowledge is easy and commoditised.

So maybe facts are dead, but I say good riddance. Long after they pass, understanding will live on.