Lately I've been wanting to learn new things — or rather, do new things — and this frustration keeps coming up.
I get the logic that know-how makes money, so you can't just give it away for free.
But when I want to do something, I can't find the general yet concrete knowledge I need.
More precisely: search doesn't surface it easily. Or it isn't on the internet.
※ Of course bad search technique is a possible line — but that's out of scope this time.
Writing this, I can almost hear "Kid, if you're relying on internet info you're already done" — but with technology this advanced, isn't it weird that general, concrete know-how still isn't findable right away?
Just a hypothetical: say you want to open a sushi restaurant in New York — who to ask, how much to spend, for the most concrete and highest-expected-value path — you probably can't figure that out immediately.
Again, I haven't actually searched this, so "whether it's really unknowable is itself unknown" — but you'd get rough info, not enough to picture the path to making it real.
The spark: I briefly touched artist Takashi Murakami in a recent post, so I read his book "Geijutsu Kigyo-ron" (The Art Entrepreneurship Theory).
The title is a bit cringe, but it's fascinating for how much Murakami himself struggled as a counter to Japan's sense of art.
There's a scene like this:
Murakami wants to make a life-size figure
→ consults Toshio Okada
→ gets introduced to a company
→ the managing director mocks what he's trying to do but tells him to come in
→ he goes and gets paired with the company's ace sculptor
→ talking gets him nowhere; he's told they don't even want to do it
→ then he's passed around among sculptors and finally gets it made
That kind of story.
Couldn't he have just searched the net from the start and hired that sculptor?
Or further: if he'd understood sculpting know-how, could Murakami probably have reproduced it himself?
It felt like being dissed and jerked around cost him a lot of mental and time waste.
(※ I cut a lot of middle for brevity — Murakami doesn't write it as that unpleasant. If anything, that connection also brought plenty of positives.)
This feels like something more technology could enable.
It feels like such a waste.
Assume world happiness totals rise when individual happiness is filled.
Then if each person's route to their goal were known fully step by step, couldn't everyone just follow it?
But the concrete method often isn't knowable right away.
So with rough info you guess "this route seems right," join an organization where you can pack in that experience, grind, and learn the craft. School is that too.
Looking back later, some of that craft abstracts to "essentially it was this," and some of it you can draw as a concrete roadmap.
If all of that were language-ized as far as possible, you could have cut a lot of time — and further, if you'd sublimated it before choosing that path, you might have picked a better one, cutting time and money cost.
Of course I get that you learn because you go through practice — but isn't the time and money sunk into a given path often too large as cost?
Further: the uncontrollable factors piled on you beyond knowledge acquisition feel too big.
Say you decide the optimal path to becoming a pro wind-instrument musician is a music university that produces many pros.
You make regular top-level in the orchestra by ability — but there's a nasty person, and you get bullied enough to hurt performance.
Sure, you can ignore them or blow up back — but it's still a risk attached to acquiring knowledge.
If you knew in advance what stages count as track record for a pro musician, what skill set you need for those stages, who must recognize and recommend you, how to self-produce and promote... with those concrete methods, you might not need music university at all.
Smart people gather info before entering a path and make the right moves; some build careers strategically.
But that's also probabilistic — one variable going wrong can still derail things.
Looking at success stories across genres, access to that information often comes from someone nearby who happened to know, or a chance encounter.
Murakami's example too: without Okada at the start, it doesn't happen.
In the end, somehow meeting someone who knows and asking is best.
I wrote that on the blog before. (2020_1107 The most efficient way to gather information)
(※ Lately I also contacted someone in a field thinking "this person is interesting — how do they do this?" — but taking their time feels apologetic.
They'd probably think "why do I have to teach you? Ask someone else." ※ And how to find that someone else is unclear too.)
So I also think it should be easier to get. (Of course free isn't always possible.)
You pay cost thinking it's treasured secret know-how (not buying an info product — more like career-level cost), get inside, and realize "oh, that's all it was — I didn't need to be here" — that cost.
Feels like such a waste, and not healthy.
Implementing this would be hard, but it feels like we could do better.
Especially in education, the impact should be huge.
ChatGPT has pushed us closer to this world — but if we could get down to more concrete levels, fewer people in the world would end up unhappy.
That said, how well it fits any individual, and literacy to vet information, still matter — but you still need it to judge expected value, and keeping that cost as low as possible seems better for society.
Tweet© 2024 ZUUHE