I've been fascinated by—or haunted by—this and related questions for a long time.
What constitutes a sufficient foundational body of knowledge of the world?
Knowledge has a boundary. Ideally, that boundary grows steadily throughout life. It starts very small, and purely implicit. As we observe and interact with our surroundings, the boundary expands.
At the same time, we are learning to communicate with other people, and they are imparting their explicit knowledge to us.
Could you chart the growth of the knowledge boundary? It is like a bubble, growing along multiple dimensions. But it doesn’t grow smoothly. Is it even one bubble? It is all connected, of course, through us—our sensations—and our language, made of words and phrases and ideas, which reference those sensations.
I believe that knowledge is first and foremost a question of application. Even then, there are many ways to apply it. The simplest is just to repeat words we have learned, in the right order, with the right intonation, at the correct time and place, to satisfy social expectations. But this is trivial knowledge. Useful knowledge helps us make choices in how to behave, to get what we need from our environment, both social and material.
(Aside: this is why large language models only have the most superficial kind of knowledge—that of repeating words that fulfill expectations. They have no understanding of themselves. They have no needs of any kind. They simply have impulses, programmed into them, to read symbols, process them, and generate more symbols in response. The processing is expensive—it uses a lot of equipment and energy—but the basic behaviour is simple, and not at all “intelligent”.)
Learning to live means learning to interact in a complex environment. We all learn what we believe are the necessary methods and rules of interacting with the critical systems around us, including people, machines, and things in nature—animals, plants, ecosystems, geology. Many people do a poor job at this. The evidence is that their lives are full of pain and suffering, much of which could be avoided, if only they better understand their environment.
Unfortunately, people have limited means, and limited opportunties. While the environment is vast and complicated, and learning how to interact with it takes time, effort, and energy. Moreover, those with resources are jealous of their privilege, and don’t want competition. In fact, they want the opposite: they want support and obedience. They want the majority to serve their (the minority’s) interests, even when it (mostly) goes against their own.
Granted, it is difficult to evaluate what is in a person’s interest, even if that person is onesself. We make predictions of the future, but we can never know it. Butter understanding leads to better predictions, but chaotically or non-linearly, not simply, consistently, or reliably. On the other hand, it is sometimes easier to know when something is against one’s (or another’s) interest. It is always debatable, but some situations are zero-sum. In some situations, if the outcome benefits one person, it harms others.
Most resources are either finite, or produced and distributed at a finite rate. And they are conserved–they cannot exist in two places at once, or be used by two people, agents, or systems, at the same time. The idea of conservation of matter and energy is fundamental to a factual understanding of the universe. But many people have an incomplete understanding of the implications, and how to apply it to predictions of outcomes of situations.
In constrast to material resources, some resources are not in fact resources at all, but simply fictions. Fictions are not conserved. But we often treat them as though they are, because it is a social convention to do so.
The biggest fiction like this is money. But there are others. Like knowledge itself. Knowledge can be shared without it running out.
Money and knowledge are information. Information is not conserved, although the systems which store and transmit information do use energy, which itself is conserved. (I am not an expert in information theory. There may be other ways in which conservation laws restrict the free flow of knowledge.)
Ownership is somewhere in between material and information. The things we own are, generally, material in nature, and restricted by conservation law. But most things are not in perpetual use, and could be shared much more than they are. It is only culture and convention, and various fears and psychological biases, which cause us to excessively enforce exclusive access of material wealth as private property. Much material wealth is pathologically restricted to very limited use, for reasons that have little to do with the laws of physics, and everything to do with the laws of human relationships, trust, and power.
Perhaps the greatest hole in the curriculum of life is the proper understanding of social power. And how it differs (or not) from physical power. There are many kinds of power, but in general there are just two categories—or realms—of power: one over material things; and the other over human thought and behaviour.
Beyond the simple ignorance of the difference is the ignorance of the varieties and means of exerting and benefiting from power, in both realms. Not to mention the opposite issue of being the target of power, in either realm. Mostly we get by on intuition. But those who master the art of power usually transcend intuition into study and conscious execution of it. (Some never proceed past intution, but having started with the unfair advantage of inherited power, they never have to, and yet face few risks of losing their power, as it is defended on their behalf by ranks of servants and support personnel.)
If you cannot exert power over your environment, there is no doubt that your environment can exert power over you. This truth we do not teach this to the majority of people, but only the privileged who are selected to inherit power, usually by birth, or more rarely, but innate talent, ability, or other qualities (like beauty or charisma).
Instead of teaching everyone how power works, we instead mislead them, or outright lie to them. We promise them, falsely, that they can attain power in ways that, instead, reduce their power, and transfer it to others. This is the essence of “the market”, now—at least in non-essential goods and services. But also in essentials: the market is full of harmful substitutes to proper food, shelter, medicine, and especially knowledge itself.
Our social environment is full of false signals. And most of us get confused, distracted, and misled by those signals. But the negative consequences are unfairly and extremely distributed. The vast majority live in a haze of false or questionable information, incorrect or obsolete knowledge, and an overwhelming vulnerability to harmful people and other risks. Only a tiny minority have access to the truth. Even though the truth is not a secret, to attain it is difficult, especially in light of the countless obstacles society puts in our paths.
A better world ultimately depends on remedying this situation. But first, we have to collectively recognize that this is the situation we are in, and the problems that it causes. We have to free ourselves from the distractions and falsehoods and confusion, even as all that harmful noise looks and feels like real and useful knowlege, with real and meaningful benefits. Because that is how it is packaged and sold by those with real power.