nadriel: (Default)
nadriel ([personal profile] nadriel) wrote2010-11-15 01:59 pm

Ponder for the day

Is there any truly useless knowledge?
flemco: (Default)

[personal profile] flemco 2010-11-15 02:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Tons of it. The axiom "there is no knowledge that is not power" may be technically true - but in many instances, it grants us useless power. Knowing that Nathan Fillion's favorite ice cream is Pecan Praline, for instance, is not power that you will ever use. Hence, useless.
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)

[personal profile] matgb 2010-11-15 04:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Unless you happen to be entertaining Fillion, in which case being able to buy some in in advance might be useful.

But as the odds of that are low, it's effectively useless knowledge.
83_tauri: Alien beasties, falling toward a gas giant's moon (Default)

[personal profile] 83_tauri 2010-11-16 12:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Depends, I suppose, on whether or not the memory capacity of the human brain is effectively finite. If it is, then you can argue that some less directly-relevant things could be 'useless' by taking up space that more-directly useful things could use.

That said, AFAIK, no-one in psychology's ever suggested that anyone they've studied has actually run out of memory space. So whatever the capacity of the human brain actually is, it's sufficiently enormous not to be a practical problem.