Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

Statistically, the opposite is happening: human knowledge is becoming deeper. The arc of human knowledge throughout history bends towards specialization: never before in human history have so many people been educated in so many different subdomains, each different in methodology, discipline, and scope. This is evinced by rising numbers of postgraduate degrees, increasing diversity in academic specialization, etc.

This poses its own problems:

* Academically: extreme specialization increases academic friction, as closely related but distinct subdomains struggle to consume each others' results

* Culturally: we're slowly losing a very important kind of shallow knowledge: the ability to repair small things, to converse intelligently about things outside one's area of expertise, to understand more generally that we can't derive every fact about every field from a small set of first principles.

So overall, I don't think so. I think we (including the youths) have more and deeper knowledge than ever before, at the cost of important, shallow, general knowledge.

People don't want to do their jobs, but that doesn't mean they're completely unmotivated. Many people with jobs they're indifferent to, also have hobbies they pursue relentlessly.

If you want people to take a deeper interest in their jobs, give them more money. Way more money. Way, way more money. If you want people to pursue deeper understanding of their interests, give them more free time.

To the extent that "shallow knowledge" is a problem, I think it's likely because most people spend a lot of their time doing boring work for not-enough money.

I'm a little confused by this statement. Of course people want to obtain value very quickly; we live in a society where people are explicitly told their economic success and therefore basic survival is a zero-sum game in competition with other human beings (we are not told this is untrue unless we explicitly go out and discover this), where the opportunity to do basic things like be housed and have a family is dependent on economic achievement in a rapidly more unequal society.

Of course people are trying to obtain value as swiftly as possible. Every moment they aren't doing so means they are now trying to gain value in a situation where there is less value possible to gain. Additionally, our society glorifies "hustle culture" and "gig economy", so yeah, if we raise our children like this they will follow the values we teach them.

> I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly.

I feel like ... that's how humans are in general? Our brains are wired to seek easy paths, which is how habits are formed.

> The existence of a big number of people who can do complicated jobs is crucial for the modern world, and I think this whole thing will fall down if it continued with the current mode.

I think we may have different definitions of "complicated jobs" here, but I believe the number of people who are getting higher education (masters+) have been increasing.

Yes I do believe that people's attention span (mine included) are getting shorter and shorter. I've found myself watching more "summary videos" that are shallow instead of sitting down and deeply engaging with the topic. But I don't think it's to a point where the whole thing will fall down.

I do believe that we are criminally underpaying some crucial professions that require deeper understanding though: I can't believe I get paid more than electrical /mechanical engineers.

I would argue that people who go deep are invisible for most of their early career to the general public, and only become famous (if ever) once they use this knowledge years later, at which point someone might ask about their past and they could explain how many thousands of hours they spent holed up learning.

Even within your extended local social graph this is likely to be the case, imagine if your e.g. neighbor's teen spends years learning about any topic, if you ask your neighbor then they're not likely to tell you (might not even know!) about this, instead would tell you the typical "oh you know he's a teenager and hangs out with his friends and is all day playing videogames" or might tell you on the surface "he's interested in science". You might only get a more accurate picture within a close social graph, but then it's statistically very unlikely that any of those are one of those dig-deep geniuses.

I've seen at least 3 examples in the Open Source/DIY communities of news about some popular-ish people who shocked everyone when they revealed their age and were teenagers. Some times they hid it intentionally to avoid being judged against, some times they just never mentioned.

BTW, the more generic "young people are lazy/don't want to put effort" is a meme that has been said for literally centuries by the respective older generations:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/407/503/119...

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/05/me-me-me-generation-...

Just standard "what is wrong the kids!" fare but HN-flavored.

There are plenty of shallow thinkers of all ages.

Not sure i agree... I've been watching my kids find a subject on youtube and delve deeeep into it. My boy (14) has spend the last 2 years solid teaching himself to program almost exclusively through youtube videos to a point where he is way ahead of his schools ability to keep up with him.

He's not going to coder dojo and finding that he's so far ahead of those kids that the leaders are asking him to train some of the other kids.

My daughter is more art focused and spends hours watching art tutorials.

The kids are specializing in my corner of the world. Not sure what you're seeing.

OP, you will likely be interested in this talk by Bert Hubert:

How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents: On how companies lose deep knowledge and stop innovating

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

As a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw

My day to day assumption is for nearly anything I want to do, someone else in the relevant domain has already done the deep dive and it's a variety of premature optimization for me to over invest.

If it's important, or my domain, or something interesting, sure, I'll dig in deeper. However, we live at a time where vast expertise is a few clicks away, so I find it's usually more valuable to know how to find and analyze someone else's solution than to create my own.

I don't think most people want to pull their hair out for anything, period.

Yet, young people will pursue what fascinates them very deeply when given the chance.

A huge problem is that we don't teach things in such a way that it's interesting, at all, to the majority of people.

Another problem is, of course, the focus on the next quarter's profit.

But, overall, I agree, it's a problem. Just not one I'd pin on the kids.

"I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly."

It might be that we have to obtain value quickly.

I'd love to dive deep into my systems and tech. My company doesn't want that. They want someone who can just knock out half-decent code as dastardly as possible. There's no thought to actually allowing or helping employees become experts. They don't want experts because they can't afford them, so they create an environment where everyone is mediocre.

Is the world suffering? Maybe. You'll get a variety of responses and incorrections.

If so, why is the world suffering? You'll get a much wider variety of responses. I doubt many of them will be general shallow thinking, though there will surely be fingers pointed at some people for that crime.

What is shallow knowledge? Who's to determine the correct depth? I hope it doesn't work like Mississippi river boats because Mark Twain is already dead.

Is asking a web forum for an answer to something as important as the world's suffering itself an example of shallow knowledge? Or an attempt to elicit it?

Just my own speculation, but yes. The lack of deep focus is endemic in the culture. There is too much cheap distraction. I’ve gone through my phase of thinking it will collapse. I think that’s possible, but a more realistic base case is a consolidation of key technologies and methods that can get the job done, although standard of living may reduce drastically.

I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly.

so how big of a sample size you're talking about. A lot of young people are producing cutting edge research in math, physics, computer science, coding etc.

I think the problem is that the payoff for engaging deeply into a topic often isn’t better than the payoff for engaging in shallow learning of a wide variety of different topics.

For example, why would I want to spend time learning deeply how to write my own compiler, vs just spending that time to do tutorials for a couple different new frameworks?

I think the obvious answer is "no the world isn't"

Do you have any evidence that young people are significantly different than people of the past that is not ancedotal?

I would suggest you probably just have nostalgia for an imaginary past which never existed. You remember the impressive people of your youth and forget all the mediocre ones.

The tech industry has "eaten its young."

By this, I mean that it has systematically destroyed the source of people who grow up with the passion to learn tech at the deep levels that make for the people the tech industry likes to hire for the core, foundational stuff that makes things run.

About a decade ago, I understand Google's SRE hiring pipeline was struggling, because Google had singlehandedly destroyed their best source for hiring - university student sysadmins. Google Apps for Education was great, and allowed shutting down a ton of annoyingly expensive server rooms at universities - but it also meant that those universities no longer had nearly the number of various student sysadmins who were entirely unfazed by "The mainframe is serial linked to the G3 Mac for ethernet access, with software written by someone long since graduated, and..." sort of systems. It was a wonderful filter for people with a diverse set of experience across a range of "You did what to the what now? In assembly?" sort of systems, and they could usually translate that experience to the sort of "haven't seen this before..." stuff that Google ran at the time.

The same seems to be true in the really foundational parts of computing. I know very, very few people under the age of about 40 in the firmware/osdev/hypervisor/etc spaces, and that age has more or less been tracking along with me. It's not a base age for people getting into the space, it's the age of the youngest of the last generation to know how to do that stuff.

There are exceptions, but they're few, far between, and seem to not go into those spaces terribly often either.

The modern tech industry is just focused on distracting people as much as possible, as long as possible, to look at as many ads as possible, and that's entirely at odds with the requirements to get good at the deep weeds, which is long, sustained focus, in challenging and arcane spaces.

But it's worse, because the complexity of modern tech is increasing at such a rapid rate that you have to run to stand still. All the microarchitectural vulnerabilities and such have been "patched" with... complexity. When they stem from complexity. And the whole stack at this point can be summed up as "Complexity created to hide the problems caused by the previous round of complexity." It's nasty, all the way down, and then you discover that the people who are designing the foundations have no idea what they're doing either! Intel clearly doesn't understand their chips, given how many times the stated guarantees of SGX (that malicious ring 0 code can neither observe nor modify the state of production SGX enclave computation) have been violated by a range of mechanisms. L1TF/Foreshadow cracked production enclaves wide open with demonstrations of how to single step them and pull full state from every step, and Plundervolt involved undervolting the chip to the edge of faulting (so multiply and AES operations would fault but simpler stuff would retire fine), and then launching an SGX enclave that ran faulting operations. Whoops.

I don't know how much longer this sort of thing can continue, because the last wave of people who do understand the deep weeds that make it work are starting to retire, with nobody to replace them. And they just want to go do "something that has nothing to do with computers" anymore.

A recent comic on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/vnmmuo/whe...) demonstrates just how strong this sentiment has become in recent years. The hypervisor hackers and firmware devs are going to retire and rapidly forget everything they've known, and have a grand old time doing "anything else." I know an awful lot of these people, myself included.

It's going to be a very real problem in the decades to come.

I think it's been like this for thousands of years. The forefront of human knowledge has not been advanced by everybody all doing their bit. It was by a vanishingly tiny number of super-intellects, plus a much bigger (but still small) group of experts and deep thinkers who help carry and refine and expand those ideas.

I would say most people don't have the capability to usefully contribute to the complicated problems of today. The good thing is that those who do are inclined to share it with the rest of us because they can't do that in isolation either, and are dependent on the blood and sweat of others too.

I think the number of people that are deep down into some specific knowledge is always fairly low. Our world currently works in a way that big majority can benefit from the work of a few. There are only a few thousand people in the world who design and create new medication, nuclear plants,or some high end microprocessors.

There are a few industries that are examples of some deep expertise. Airlines maintenance is by no means shallow, not in well ran airlines. All airspace industries I believe need deep expertise of what they are doing.

there are more industries like that, but yes, the average young person is not interested in gaining deep knowledge, they want value quick, at some point shallow knowledge will have less value and we as a collective will have to dig deeper... i hope

Young people may not want to work hard (when was that ever not the case), but they also respond to incentives. When they understand that higly specialized jobs are the surest path to their desired standard of living and consumption, many of them get cracking.

Teenager here. Not every adult knows anything deep about any topic. only 1% of adults can talk in detail about atleast one topic. It's the same in the next generation too. Not all kids want to learn, but some do. It's just about our outlook towards it

There is no stopping of "current" mode. Yet. When presenting my PD work for the young guns, I UX them to unconsciousness:)

Scratching the surface of a given topic and focusing on comfortable for them communication is the key. I always let the door be open for the deeper questions without selling my "extra" knowledge or experience. They have to be the stars in the room, knowledgeable professionals have a critical way of thinking which is "annoying" and "unproductive".

Be soft, forgiving, friendly, and willing to learn the "new trends" without asking questions. Just tell you deeper knowledge to take back seat.

My only hope is in the recession. Maybe if we are lucky things will reach a critical point and all the "unicorn magic", "empty words", "big ideas" will meet reality. And we know that reality has no sense of humor or "culture fit". :)

Why would I want a deeper understanding of what I do (assuming you mean what I do in exchange for money)? I want to know as little as possible to get by.

If there is such a need, people will create incentive so somebody will digging into this knowledge. This is easy actually, the incentive could be money, honor etc.

> many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do

Every generation says this about the next generation, and yet here we are with scientists in their 30s making huge advancements in things like mRNA vaccines.

If you think that laziness (what you're implying this is) will be the end of the world, there are many things that are far more urgent. No high-tech industry is collapsing because they can't find enough STEM graduates.

You may just not see those people, but they are there

> Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

No. We are far better off now.

But yes, we are stuck.

It's like "HN now is worse than the old days" meme. It's not worse but it hasn't matured along with the exponential growth of the internet.

We are stuck at Wikipedia. TikTok is probably the "best" successor to Wikipedia. Teaching people how to use a saw over Wikipedia telling people saws exist. We can do better.

I learn everything I need from Ted talks.