Knowledge, a thing to be attained 

Education is a kinetic form of learning, whereas awareness is a receptive form of it. It requires a focused acquisition of information through sustained habits and practices, whereas you can become aware of something simply by being in the right place at the right time. And most importantly, education allows for the application of learned information, which is the ultimate way to transform it into knowledge.

Education Vs Awareness

I’ve realized that there is something super important that is missing from how we define knowledge, and it is the quality of attention that is paid for the pursuit of information. This points to the process used to measure the depth and quality of how we arrive at a piece of information.

Quality Of Learning Is Dependent On Attention

To put it simply, knowledge is a verb. It is not what we know. It is what we do to improve the quality of what we know.

Knowledge

What is knowledge? In the age of misinformation, exploring this question is more important than ever.

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We’re going to kick things off here with a nice mental exercise.

Say hello to our two friends, who will be the test subjects for our thought experiment:

While this neighborhood is a cool place to hang out, it’s not the best place for us to get down with science.  So let’s transport these guys over to our research lab, where we have built two rooms that await their entry.

One will be assigned to Room A for the duration of this experiment, while the other will be assigned to Room B.

Shortly, the doors in front of them will open, and our friends will spend the next day in their respective rooms (don’t worry, there are bathrooms and lots of delicious food from Whole Foods in there too — we’re going to take good care of them).

As they wait to enter, they notice that there are signs posted on each of the respective doors as well.

On the door to Room A, there is a sign that lists eight topics of interest that will be addressed in this experiment:

On the door to Room B, there is just one topic of interest that is listed, but it is the topic that its inhabitant happens to be the most interested in of them all:

And at that moment, the doors swing open, and the rooms reveal themselves to our subjects.

In the center of the room is a nice, cozy chair that acts as a nice holster for one’s ass.

The rest of the room, however, looks like something from a sci-fi film.

The four walls surrounding the chair are large screens that respond to voice commands, and on these screens, a slew of information is already presented on them.

The information is organized like a news feed, with all the latest developments in each of the listed topics prominently displayed on the walls. There are informative videos on the various subjects listed, headlines of the latest news stories, and relevant think pieces by experts on each area.

However, there is no real categorical organization to them, so a story about AlphaGo Zero’s dominance in the Go world would be right next to news about bitcoin breaking some sort of price barrier, which would be adjacent to a piece about identity politics, which would be next to a short video about LeBron’s hairline, and so on.

Our friend has the ability to sort through the information as needed through simple voice commands, and can view related detail into any topic when necessary. He can switch topics at any time as well, but the information will continue to organize itself into that of a news feed. Room A’s inhabitant is excited to delve into this, as all the topics presented are of keen interest to him.

The walls here are simply walls with a few whiteboards, so nothing inherently remarkable about them here. At the center of the room though, there is a nice chair, a desk, a computer, a notepad, and a small stack of books waiting for our subject.

He walks over to the desk to leaf through the books, and upon seeing the covers of them, his excitement bubbles at the brim of his brain.

These books happen to be the exact three books he wanted to read about bitcoin, its history, and how the technology works. He’s been meaning to get a hold of these books over the past few days, but now they are right in front of them for him to explore.

He then looks over at the computer, and there is a note tacked onto the monitor. It states that he can use the information from the books to learn how to set up a bitcoin wallet, learn what exactly is going on when he initiates a transfer, and understand how the underlying technology works. He could even try experimenting with some basic mining software on the computer as well.

Needless to say, he’s excited too.

All right. Now we’re going to give each of our friends the next 24 hours to be in their respective rooms. For purposes of this thought experiment, you can assume that they have the same level of information processing, same depth of attention span, and also have similar oscillations of focus and fatigue.

As our two subjects work through the night, our team of super researchers here at More To That Labs need to come up with a system to measure the results of the experiment.

After hours of careful thought, deliberation, and highly mathematical modeling, we have come up with a hyper-sophisticated graph that will measure everything with intense statistical accuracy:

Eh… good enough for a blog post.

Let’s assume that prior to this experiment, both our subjects were 1’s across the board for all eight topics, meaning that while those topics sounded interesting to them, they knew little to nothing about them:

All right. We’re ready to measure.

A whole day has passed — the sun has set, the sun has risen, and is now ready to set again.

It’s time to check up on our friends.

We first speak with our subject from Room A.

He’s scoured through the enormous feed of information about his eight topics of interest, and is now fairly informed about all the latest happenings in each of the eight fields. He can tell you all the latest political developments, what music production software just came out, the latest news regarding CRISPR’s success in treating diabetes in mice, and so forth.

If you were to have a conversation with him about any of the exhibited topics, he can speak to what is currently happening in those areas, but will have difficulty drilling down into the why . A good way to look at it is that he can have a nice 15-minute conversation about any of the topics, but will fail to uphold a thorough, well-articulated, two-hour long conversation about any one of them.

Here’s how his level of understanding of the various topics maps onto our graph:

On average, he is anywhere from a low 2 to a low 3 in each of the topics (during the course of his research, some topics held his interest longer than others, hence the slight variations).

He has read through most of the provided literature on bitcoin so he now has a solid foundation of all the history surrounding the cryptocurrency’s existence. He can explain why a decentralized payment structure is so important given recent banking downfalls, why encryption is so essential when it comes to money, why earlier “digital currencies” such as DigiCash failed, why miners are necessary to validate transactions on the all-important blockchain, and a bunch of other bitcoin-y things. He even had the opportunity to try mining for bitcoin himself (although he failed to get any) and also had the experience of sending and receiving the currency through his wallet as well.

He can now hold a legitimate two hour conversation about bitcoin as a technology, and can even provide his own detailed and well-constructed opinions of its future as well.

Here is what his graph looks like:

He is anywhere from a low 5 to a high 6 on the topic of bitcoin now, and that bar will only get higher as he spends more and more time studying it.

Room A provided its subject with the ability to cover a wide breadth of topics, but only achieve a shallow understanding of each of them. Room B, on the other hand, provided its subject with access to only one topic, but achieve a deep understanding of that one specific area.

We thank our lovely friends for their time, hook them up with lots of goodies and Amazon gift cards, and wish them well.

Now, back at More To That Labs, we take off our lab coats, gather our data, and collectively take a deep breath. All of this research and time was spent in pursuit of one single question.

Viewing the results of Rooms A and B, we ask ourselves:

Which of the two is more knowledgeable as a result of this experiment?

Before we go down this path, I will admit that on its surface, this can seem like one of those annoying questions in which the only answer to it is, “Depends on what you mean by (fill in the blank) .” Some close cousins to this question are “Who is more talented?”, “Who is more beautiful?”, “Who is more rational?”, or any other question in which the prescribed adjective can mean a bunch of different things.

So we can’t go into the details yet until we first define what knowledge is.

The dictionary is a good starting point here, and since my father once disappointingly gave me a thick red Oxford dictionary as a Christmas present while other kids happily received toys, let’s use Oxford’s version to pay homage to that memory:

(1) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation

(2) facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

At first glance, the two definitions above sound pretty similar… until you realize that the whole experiment in the post so far is pretty much a straight delineation between the two.

The key difference between the two definitions of knowledge is that one focuses on (A) the general awareness of information , while the other emphasizes (B) the focused acquisition of information .

Room A was designed to match the first definition of knowledge. It’s a room in which an endless feed of happenings are displayed to you, making you generally aware of these facts’ existence. A flurry of information is presented all at once, and it is up to you to react and ultimately decide which tidbits are to be rewarded with your attention. There is a wide breadth of knowledge distributed in this room, but you will tend to gravitate to whatever information is packaged nicely to your tastes.

This room, of course, is analogous to the way in which many of us are currently introduced to new information. We visit platforms that herald themselves as distributors of knowledge (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, news aggregators, etc.), and we have immediate access to almost everything we would like to know about any particular topic. The range of facts and information that can potentially be made aware to us is breathtaking. However, it is this very immensity that leads us to displace focus, as we tend to enter these platforms without a specific goal in mind. All we know is that we’ll become aware of something that will pique our interest, and that becomes the starting point.

It’s like entering a grocery store without knowing what you specifically want — all you know is that you want to walk out of there with some type of food. So naturally, the people handing out delicious samples will grab your attention and the food with the best packaging will end up in your cart.

Room A is designed to provide you with information, then have the information itself raise your curiosity towards it. Curiosity no longer becomes the starting point to your journey. Instead, it is relegated to a reaction you have when you are presented with well-packaged information.

Room B, on the other hand, was designed to match the second definition of knowledge. It’s a room that was built around the highest point of curiosity for its inhabitant, which in this case happened to be the topic of bitcoin. Not only were there books for the subject to dig through, there was also the opportunity for him to apply that information as well.

The starting point of this journey did not arise from the availability of information itself, but rather from a focused, curious state of mind.

Room B acted as the store of resources he needed for curiosity to get to work. And when you combine curiosity with a sense of diligence, that’s when we get a really awesome process called education:

Education is a kinetic form of learning, whereas awareness is a receptive form of it. It requires a focused acquisition of information through sustained habits and practices, whereas you can become aware of something simply by being in the right place at the right time. And most importantly, education allows for the application of learned information, which is the ultimate way to transform it into knowledge.

So now that we have parsed through the two rooms, let’s revisit the question again:

Although there is a clear delineation between the ways in which our friends acquired knowledge, here’s the thing. The standard definition of knowledge puts what we know on a singular spectrum, with a zero-level of understanding on one end and expertise/mastery on the other (with education driving movement on the spectrum from left to right):

The problem with this line is that it doesn’t factor in the processes we use to obtain our information. Information obtained through shallow awareness or deep learning are both considered pieces of knowledge on this extremely wide spectrum. Simply being aware of the existence of something already puts you in the game.

I’ve realized that there is something super important that is missing from how we define knowledge, and it is the quality of attention that is paid for the pursuit of information. This points to the process used to measure the depth and quality of how we arrive at a piece of information .

For purposes of this post, let’s use the term attentional capital (“AC”) to loosely quantify this concept. Here’s the official definition based on the super-made-up More To That dictionary of terms:

Here are some examples of situations with high and low attentional capital:

High AC: I obtained this information through proactive diligence and focused research.

Low AC: I obtained this information by reactively coming across it on my social media feed.

High AC: I have tested my thoughts and findings through conversations with other individuals.

Low AC: I have formulated my conclusions on my own accord and have kept them to myself.

High AC: I have structured my ideas using objective and highly testable sources, and they are falsifiable if presented with sufficient counter-evidence.

Knowledge Is Not a Thing - More To That

Knowledge, a thing to be attained

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Quality Of Learning Is Dependent On Attention

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