97. Knowledge Poor Information Rich

On May 25, 2022, Darian Woods asked Tyler Cowen in an interview,

“How successful do you want to be, or how ambitious are you?”

It is a question from Tyler’s book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.

Tyler answered,

“I want to be what I call an information trillionaire. I've just spent most of my life studying things, reading, traveling the world. I've been to over 100 countries, tried to learn as much social science as I can. So maybe right now I'm some version of an information billionaire, but I want to do better than that and be, you know, the information trillionaire. I don't think I'll get there. Like, billion to trillion is a long leap, but that's how ambitious I am.”

Compare Tyler’s statement to the following excerpt by David Deutsch from The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications.

"I remember being told, when I was a small child, that in ancient times it was still possible for a very learned person to know everything that was known. I was also told that nowadays so much is known that no one could conceivably learn more than a tiny fraction of it, even in a long lifetime. The latter proposition surprised and disappointed me. In fact, I refused to believe it.

It was not that I wanted to memorize all the facts that were listed in the world’s encyclopaedias: on the contrary, I hated memorizing facts.

By ‘known’, I meant understood. The idea that one person might understand everything that is understood may still seem fantastic, but it is distinctly less fantastic than the idea that one person could memorize every known fact. For example, no one could possibly memorize all known observational data on even so narrow a subject as the motions of the planets, but many astronomers understand those motions to the full extent that they are understood. This is possible because understanding does not depend on knowing a lot of facts as such, but on having the right concepts, explanations and theories. One comparatively simple and comprehensible theory can cover an infinity of indigestible facts. "

The fundamental difference is not a matter of ambition or ability. It is epistemology: what knowledge is and its origin. I don't know Tyler's epistemology, but it seems like Empiricism or something related whereas David's is an evolutionary epistemology similar to Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism.

It is interesting to see that having better ideas about the world affects the height of one's ambitions. In an information-rich world, knowledge is what we truly need. Knowledge changes things. Knowledge is power.