On forseeking and the totality of knowledge
Towards failure
(This piece is written as an introduction into the ideas within and to serve as a starting point for this newsletter. It thereby, lays out the purpose of this - to argue on the interdisciplinary (and beyond) nature of a lot of knowledge, and the need to continuously try and fail in exploring this.
I’ve separated this newsletter out from my economics content, primarily to facilitate any who would rather read that alone and not this side of my thoughts. While I will keep these separate for now, I very much see a lot of overlap at some point in the future, and I do expect to crosspollinate heavily as well.
UPDATE: For ease of organization, I’m moving this newsletter to its own domain)
TLDR - The nature of the real world feels highly multifaceted and complex. Yet specialization has been a cornerstone of how the modern world progressed. These provide two contrasting ways to engage with knowledge. While things could be moving towards interlinkages and generalization again, taking both approaches could allow to avoid the pitfalls of both, at least until better “techniques” are developed could be one way to engage with knowledg. But taking both approaches probably means failing in one approach while succeeding in the other. Being okay to fail, being okay to try and apply both the specific and the general, is what I’m terming “forseeking” and is the basis of splitting this newsletter out.
There’s this quote of John Maynard Keynes (being an economist, it is hard to escape the man) that talks about how being a good economist requires one to be well-rounded. This isn’t a rare idea by any means. Most people would have heard someone somewhere talk about the benefits of being such a “jack of all trades”. If you’re from a part of the world that has a cricket culture, the term “all-rounder” might even have entered your vocabulary.
Yet this is not always the most common framing. The very frame of a “jack of all trades” involves being a “master of none”. Instead, increasing specialization, both in the economic framing but also in the scientific framing, has been more or less the way that the world has worked for at least a few hundred years. Whereas earlier (centuries earlier in some parts of the world, decades earlier in others), a general Bachelor of Arts would make you among the most educated thinkers of your generation. Now, even a PhD (ironically, a title suggesting generalization) might need post-doctoral studies to “establish your niche”.
But this is not a simple one-way development. Keynes himself spoke of this well before the current hyperspecialization of the world was underway. We’ve had similar arguments on the benefits of generalization over specialization made recently as well - David Epstein’s “Range” is probably the most popularly accessible version of this argument. Between the two, there was also a famous (infamous?) quote by the sci-fi author Robert Heinlein that took a bit of an exaggerated framing on the issue as well.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert Heinlein in Time Enough for Love
Across the years, this tension between generalist and specialist approaches has continued in its varied forms. Regardless of how important this tension itself was in the past, it existed then, and it exists now. How do we engage with this situation? How do we engage with the world itself? How do we understand reality around us and crucially, how do we take steps to move forward with it?
Reality as multi-influenced, complex, and interconnected
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that society is increasingly aware and increasingly accepting of the pretty intuitive and obvious fact that the world around us is quite complex. I don’t mean this in the technical meaning of the word used in “complexity theory” (which ironically, uses a precise definition alone on the concept) but rather in the general meaning of the word. A simple “proof” of this is to look at the trends between the frequency of the words “complex" and "simple" in Google's database of books.
I would argue that outside of general “complexity” in the way that the world works, there’s also an almost inherent multi-influenced mechanism at play as well. Again, for most, this would probably be obvious enough. Obviously, things are affected by more than one thing at the same time, or at least by more than one type of thing. If we take a simple situation like an economy’s growth trajectory, of course it’s affected by many things! Politics matters. Economic decisions matter. Investment matters. Social trends matter. All of these and more will obviously affect the way the economy works.
Where it might be less appreciated, but still at least on some level, obvious, is where this also applies to things that feel “bounded”. Lets take the individual human for example. They’re an individual of course. We talk of them as such, we give them a name, we talk to them individually. Yet for no person do they exist without the biological genetic makeup they get from their parents. Noone exists outside of the social context of their upbringing. Your cultural background IS a part of you, regardless of whether you agree with the culture or not. It becomes hard to consider people as pure and isolated individuals. They’re connected, they are understood different by different people, and they exist differently from one moment to the next. In similar ways, most things we consider “isolated” can in many ways be considered pretty complex, interconnected, and multifaceted. I doubt many will disagree with the fact that there is at least influence on this level.
Knowledge as deep, specialized, and siloed
Despite all of this increasingly “obvious” points, the other side has also been visibly true as well. Even for us as individuals, we prefer to think of things as “discrete” and “bounded” categories. We list things out, we put them in buckets, and slap labels on each bucket as well. Despite people being very much an interconnected creature, we still consider them individuals in the end. In practice, dealing with a nicely packaged idea that’s neatly defined is much easier than dealing with a purely nebulous idea. Even this very piece of writing is split into sections, sections in paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, sentences into words, words into letters. I could just get rid of every bit of separation there and take everything together, but that would just be a massive darkened block, not particularly interesting.
This has not just been on an individual basis, but the very foundation upon which the modern science-based world is built. Looking at the history of how different “fields” or “disciplines” came to be shows this quite well. Most knowledge fell under just a few headings in the past - of knowledge itself, and at most split between worldly and spiritual matters. Over time, as each aspect developed itself further, this has nested itself into greater and greater specialization. There are many different ways we can map this, but just one is reproduced below - of Immanuel Wallerstein’s view of how different “world systems” came to be (a bigger story for another time). From a religion driven, to a split into secular philosophy, then into sciences, then into further division until a point we end up having hyper specific specializations (which then have even more specific areas that individual practitioners go in greater depth into).
While I may sound a little irreverent of this development into specialization, it is undoubtedly the engine that drove everything the modern world is about. There is no question whatsoever that it has driven massive change, massive growth, and massive explosion of deep knowledge. Yet interestingly enough, this very specialization has now started to increasingly become cross-fertilized. Whereas one might specialize in a hyperspecific area alone, it has become SO hyperspecialized that it’s infact much easier to specialize by combining two (or more) previously different fields. To use my own economic thought as an example, one might be one economist among million. But if one is an economist specializing in quantum application? Rare indeed. While most of these interdisciplinary contexts have been less dramatic than that example, they’re increasingly becoming more and more of what new knowledge is made by and made in.
Forseeking as an interdisciplinary approach to engage with knowledge
Across this entire story, what we’re seeing in my view, is two broad methods that have both been quite useful across human history (or at least, the relatively short period I spoke of here). How do we deal with both of these approaches? One feels more relevant to what the world is “really like” but the other has brought a lot of progress in a more practical sense. Then again, both worlds seem to be colliding as well right now. How do we engage with this situation?
My answer is to engage in both. By taking the multifaceted and interconnected side of things, we are able to recognize and engage with a lot of the “actual” aspects of reality that we might otherwise miss out on. By taking the specific and precise side of things, we are able to develop ideas and bring forth actual results in a much more practical sense. Both have their pitfalls of course, but both also have their great successes.
But a big part of this “combined” method likely involves failing in one way or the other. By taking one approach, you are almost by definition failing on the other approach. The opposite is true as well. Thereby, any form of engaging with the two approaches probably require that sort of “openness to fail”. There may even be new “techniques” and “methods” that allow this sort of dual approach to work, but until such gets developed, this “continous failing” feels likely to be at least one way that one can engage with it. That can look like directly trying to apply different disciplines but also different techniques and different approaches altogether.
A tangent - that’s the main reason behind me splitting this blog into two newsletters as well. The interdisciplinary nature of things I want to explore will probably be substantially “wrong”, especially as measured from the perspective of the economics content I have a bit more of a “specialist” expertise in (though ironically, that expertise comes from a sort of interdisciplinary background in the first place). This newsletter, Forseeking, is meant to be a place to explore these “wrong” ideas. The word itself is one I’ve coined, a protologism for now, that relates to this overall idea of exploring wrong ideas with a view to understand more things later. The other newsletter continues for now, but as I write on both sides, I do expect them to be pretty significantly interlinked in the future.
Regardless of that personal diatribe, I do see an increasing likelihood that knowledge will become more and more interdisciplinary in the future. Whether this actually reverts to the totality of the past, or whether it reverts back to specialization, or even if it oscillates between the two extremes is one I don’t have a great answer to - though my bias is that we will end up in some totality of knowledge before oscillating back. But in the meantime, it’s a moment where I DO see at least some level of change in the way we engage with knowledge in the world. How do we engage with it? I feel we need to keep trying and keep failing, but the paradox is - if I am right, then I am wrong as well. That paradox is a question for another time.
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