Some knowledge is clearly more useful than other knowledge. The cure for cancer would be extremely valuable to learn, while the number of grains of sand that exist on Atlantic Beach would probably be much less so. But all knowledge, even the less valuable knowledge, has some value.
This is because all knowledge is interconnected, even if the connections are not obvious. As is argued in the Conjecture Institute Handbook, a book from a new institute built on the ideas of Karl Popper and David Deutsch, “Because of the unity of nature, knowledge in any field is never entirely disconnected from any other.” Therefore, seemingly useless and irrelevant knowledge may be the key to building tomorrow’s great invention, solving yet-unsolved scientific mysteries, or discovering counterintuitive moral truths.
As University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch explains in a conversation with Steven Pinker, “One can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge will be needed to solve a particular problem. So, if you had asked somebody in 1900 what kind of knowledge will be required to produce as much electricity as we want in the year 2000, the answer would never have been that the answer is found in the properties of the uranium atom.”
This realization comes largely out of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, an era of unprecedented appreciation for the general positive value of the growth of knowledge.
One Enlightenment thinker who pioneered this way of thinking was Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. A French philosopher and economist who served as administrator under Louis XV and comptroller general of finance under Louis XVI, he was for a time considered France’s foremost thinker on progress.
Turgot argued that, even before the fruits of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment were manifest, “Amid all the ignorance, progress is imperceptibly taking place and preparing for the brilliant achievements of later centuries; beneath this soil the feeble roots of a far-off harvest are already developing.”
As Turgot writes, “Chances lead to a host of discoveries, and chances multiply with time. A child’s play can reveal the telescope, improve optics, and extend the boundaries of the universe in great and little ways.”
Commenting on this passage, Cato Institute Intellectual History Editor Paul Meany points out that “This might seem like fanciful thinking, but when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, it was due to a simple mistake that yielded a crucial element of modern medicine, while Edison had to experiment over 1000 times before creating an effective light bulb which thereafter illuminated the entire world. There is no set path for progress to take.”
So, if you discover, document, or communicate a piece of knowledge, however seemingly small or irrelevant, all else being equal, you have done some good. You have filled in another portion of the ever-incomplete picture we have of the world. That portion is a resource for humanity’s continued pursuit of truth. And we cannot know in advance where the next great achievement will come from.