Review
17
Review
Panology
19Mitchell_Porter
10JenniferRM
10Gunnar_Zarncke
2JenniferRM
6Mo Putera
3Hubert Korzeniak
3Karl Krueger
2JenniferRM
1Karl Krueger
3JenniferRM
New Comment
I can take classes in various kinds of dancing. Is dancing science? I can take classes welding. Is welding science? A panologist would eventually get around to studying "all of it".
If someone says "trust me, I'm a scientist" they deserved to be laughed at, right in the face. Geologists don't necessarily know diddly about RNA. And if category theorists know about real estate law then its probably an accident. There are degrees and licenses for microbiology, real estate, petroleum engineering, and mathematics... there is no degree for "all of it".
If panology were a real thing (which of course it is not, and in fact it might never be) then "trust me, I'm a panologist" would not deserve to be laughed at. They really would be "on a trajectory whose logical end point is omniscience".
The value of the concept is in seeing the delta between the normal run of merely real institutions and the half-assed efforts up to this point in history vs what is might be hypothetically possible for a human to do.
Since humans learn very slowly, and elitism has a bad name (and so on), there seems to me to have been no serious need for conceptualization of what it would look like to "not half-ass one's intellectual existence".
I'm pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.
And with our AGI benchmarks we are struggling to learn how to measure such entities as have never existed before. Scientists have existed. High level panologists... probably simply don't exist.
If you stop and think about it, PROBABLY no one knows what science doesn't know. Right? Except... is that actually true? How do we know? Has anyone ever made a list of everyone who exists, and then actually looked to check and make sure that literally everyone on the full list does in fact have the same basic and nearly fully general ignorance about "the totality of knowledge" that me and you and all the people we've ever met have?
Like it could be that Renaissance Technologies had a couple guys who competed internally to be "everything knowers" and that might have been part of the firm's alpha? Or not. I don't know. I haven't checked. I don't even know how I would check IRL.
But again: I'm pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.
1I think many would argue that (natural) philosophy is that super science, but while it might have been true at some point, I think it is relatively far from it today.
Eric Drexler wrote two essays that seem related, which I really loved.
The first is How to Understand Everything (and why). It's short enough to be quoted essentially whole, so if you don't mind I'll do so:
In science and technology, there is a broad and integrative kind of knowledge that can be learned, but isn’t taught. It’s important, though, because it makes creative work more productive and makes costly blunders less likely.
Formal education in science and engineering centers on teaching facts and problem-solving skills in a series of narrow topics. It is true that a few topics, although narrow in content, have such broad application that they are themselves integrative: These include (at a bare minimum) substantial chunks of mathematics and the basics of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, with the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics close behind.
Most subjects in science and engineering, however, are narrower than these, and advanced education means deeper and narrower education. What this kind of education omits is knowledge of extent and structure of human knowledge on a trans-disciplinary scale. This means understanding — in a particular, limited sense — everything.
To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest. By knowing the outlines of a field, I mean knowing the answers, to some reasonable approximation, to questions like these:
What are the physical phenomena?
What causes them?
What are their magnitudes?
When might they be important?
How well are they understood?
How well can they be modeled?
What do they make possible?
What do they forbid?And even more fundamental than these are questions of knowledge about knowledge:
What is known today?
What are the gaps in what I know?
When would I need to know more to solve a problem?
How could I find what I need?It takes far less knowledge to recognize a problem than to solve it, yet in key respects, that bit of knowledge is more important: With recognition, a problem may be avoided, or solved, or an idea abandoned. Without recognition, a hidden problem may invalidate the labor of an hour, or a lifetime. Lack of a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Looking back over the last few decades, I can see that I’ve invested considerably more than 10,000 hours in learning about the structures, relationships, contents, controversies, open problems, limitations, capabilities, developing an understanding of how the fields covered in the major journals fit together to constitute the current state of science and technology. In some areas, of course, I’ve dug deeper into the contents and tools of a field, driven by the needs of problem solving; in others, I know only the shape of the box and where it sits.
This sort of knowledge is a kind of specialty, really — a limited slice of learning, but oriented crosswise. Because of this orientation, though, it provides leverage in integrating knowledge from diverse sources. I am surprised by the range of fields in which I can converse with scientists and engineers at about the level of a colleague in an adjacent field. I often know what to ask about their research, and sometimes make suggestions that light their eyes.
The follow-up essay is How to Learn About Everything. It's again short enough to quote wholesale:
Note that the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.
This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it. The cross-disciplinary reach of nanotechnology almost demands this as a condition of competence.
Studying to learn about everything
To intellectually ambitious students I recommend investing a lot of time in a mode of study that may feel wrong. An implicit lesson of classroom education is that successful study leads to good test scores, but this pattern of study is radically different. It cultivates understanding of a kind that won’t help pass tests — the classroom kind, that is.
- Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
- Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
- Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
- Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
- Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
- Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
Why is this effective?
You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary. With comprehension of words and the unstructured curriculum of life came what we call “common sense”.
The aim of what I’ve described is to learn an expanded language and to develop what amounts to common sense, but about an uncommonly broad slice of the world. Immersion and gradual comprehension work, and I don’t know of any other way.
This process led me to explore the potential of molecular nanotechnology as a basis for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing. If broad-spectrum common sense were more widespread among scientists, there would be no air of controversy around the subject, milestones like the U.S. National Academies report on molecular manufacturing would have been reached a decade earlier, and today’s research agenda and perception of global problems would be very different.
I think I prefer either of Drexler's approach, Sarah Constantin's / Scott's fact-posting, and Holden Karnofsky's learning by writing, all of which can start with endless breadth but also require (quoting Drexler) deep structure and practical applications as focusing mechanisms, to the sort of learning that I think might be incentivised by budding panologists having to maximise their minimum score across some standardised battery of tests. I also liked Sarah's suggestion at the end:
Ideally, a group of people writing fact posts on related topics, could learn from each other, and share how they think. I have the strong intuition that this is valuable. It's a bit more active than a "journal club", and quite a bit more casual than "research". It's just the activity of learning and showing one's work in public.
I think that in the literal sense "panology" could also contain terms like "ideology", "mythology" etc. Logos in this sense means also "thought" or "reason".
The systematic or formalized thought on anything is "-logy". Better term for "study of everything" could be for instance "pantomathy" because it automatically suggests focus on research and learning.
Moreover when we consider e.g. the word "ontology" we can also see that it is not always about studying - we often have fixed ontological views without any research. Idealism or materialism are not always effects of our research.
In the context of words like "polymathy" or "cosmology" it is definitely wrong - they focus on some or multiple areas of study, but not study of everything.
I have read very little EO Wilson, but I've been informed at several cocktail parties that I probably am, or would be, a fan of his stuff. This is probably true <3
I do think myrmecology is awesome, and my understanding is that EO Wilson got pretty into that :-)
Consilience as described there seems like "a reasoning tactic that any bright person with common sense probably derived for themselves when they were eleven or so"?
However, also... when I read about the unity of science I find myself puzzled by the way people seem to be dancing around in weird ways. Like Wikipedia currently says:
Jean Piaget suggested, in his 1918 book Recherche[12] and later books, that the unity of science can be considered in terms of a circle of the sciences, where logic is the foundation for mathematics, which is the foundation for mechanics and physics, and physics is the foundation for chemistry, which is the foundation for biology, which is the foundation for sociology, the moral sciences, psychology, and the theory of knowledge, and the theory of knowledge forms a basis for logic, completing the circle,[13] without implying that any science could be reduced to any other.[14]
It seems weird. There is ONE THING, which is "all of it".
That thing is a certain way and that thing is internally consistent and able to be understood. Right? It is out there. It is "the territory". It is what it is.
This is one of those things that "goes without saying" most of the time, except instead of being about how "the social world can be non-fake" (as in Sarah's essay there) I'm talking about how "the world itself can be non-fake as well!"
Any ways of measuring or thinking about what exists that are right will gain consistency with each other by virtue of being "about that one thing that is a certain way".
Any true and real contradiction between any two fields of study making claims about reality means (1) at least one of them is wrong or else (2) humans have finally discovered a glitch in the matrix, such that the seemingly academic question has just teleported us from two adjacent laboratories having a collegial debate about the halflife of protons (or whatever)... all the way to chapel perilous (in the Wilsonian sense).
However, from the ways that EO Wilson comes up, and that summary of Piaget, I don't get the sense that they are taking "reality being real" for granted? Or maybe they aren't talking to an audience that takes "reality being real" for granted?
I instead somehow get a sense that they are trying to manage status hierarchies between squabbling academic departments (or something)?
One problem I've seen around consilience is that some people say "well, clearly you don't think that there is one thing" when what they actually have evidence for is "you don't agree with my analogies across distant fields". So "believing in the unity of science" can get conflated with "agreeing with a particular set of analogies."
Andy: "Evolutionary biology proves that capitalism is the correct economic system, because competition produces fitness among firms as it does among organisms."
Betty: "I'm not sure you can directly draw inferences from biology to economics like that, without dealing with a whole bunch of disanalogies between the objects of those fields."
Andy: "What, do you deny that biology and economics are both studying the same world?"
I think Andy is just probably being stupid in your example dialogue.
That dialogue's Andy is (probably) abusing the idea of consilience, or the unity of knowledge, or "the first panological assumption" or whatever you want to call it.
The abuse takes the form of trying to invoke that assumption... and no others... in an "argument by assuming the other person can steelman a decent argument from just hearing your posterior".
FIRST: If panology existed as a sociologically real field of study, with psychometrically valid assessments of people, then Betty could hypothetically not grossly insult Andy by calling him stupid and leaving, but could instead say "Oh... huh... Maybe you're a more competent panologist than me, and you might be charitably assuming that all the disanologies I can think of, perhaps at the level of High School evolutionary biology and High School economics, are all resolved somehow by reasoning that is clear to someone with a PhD in evolutionary biology and a PhD in economics. Panologically speaking, what is your current weakest field and its level?"
This would be an extremely humble and refined way for Betty to call Andy a idiot engaged in bad faith reasoning, if they are actually both very smart and learned, but also it might truly help angry babies (ie genius 15 year old boys?) and potentially be heard by them as humble kindness, and potentially lead to good teaching and learning outcomes <3
SECOND: Sadly, Andy might be applying the rhetorical strategy of thinking very deeply and then simply repeating his current true posterior over and over over to Betty, interspersed with calls for her to think harder... and this is technically valid based on Aumann! If his posterior never moves, and she is good enough at Aumancy to detect that he's honest and that his posteriors would move if she said anything surprising, then she might say new things in each ply of the conversation, until eventually she talks herself into having imagined what he has seen, believing he saw it, and updating to share his posteriors.
THIRD: This is part of why high quality psychometrics to assess panological capacities might actually be very efficient to create! If would give all of the "foolish Andies" (who are wrong and need to learn more) help in assessing their real level and finding good tutors to efficiently repair their largest learning gaps, and would also give the "half wise Andies" (who are technically right) something wildly more useful to say, in order to give stronger and more helpful hints during an Aumantic conversation with a random "Betty" who would, with infinite time, eventually converge... but in actual linear time is more pragmatically likely to find Andy's shitty tutoring very unhelpful and simply "agree to disagree".
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