Thoughts on knowledge acquisition
Several years ago I read a discussion on whether pirate music is an economic deficit or benefit for the music business as a whole. The argument were that the small, “indie” and non-label artist (and their music) got a significant increase in the market as well as the more commercial big labels artists didn’t decrease that much. So combined, they argued that the sum of the “tail” of the popularity graph, relative to the genre/labels/artists, was larger than the sum of the commercial labels, or the most popular music.
This fascinates me alot, and more recently I witnessed another exploitation of this “sum of tail” phenomenon on a FAST presentation during ITovation conference (video stream of fast presentation). FAST recognize that the sum of the “smaller” enterprises that needs enterprise search is larger than a single focused search strategy (public web search, i.e. Google, Yahoo etc).
Inspired by this combined with an interest of knowledge management, creation and acquisition, I thought of the way we acquire knowledge over a period of time. A study is a nice, illustrating, example for this. Over a defined period of time, say 5 years, we are in a process of acquiring a certain set of knowledge, for instance learning certain math skills, software development skills and similar. The set of intentional knowledge is pretty well defined, and we can assume that we learn most of it. However, in the same period of time we acquire other knowledge, often the result of a certain interest or more accidental. Knowledge motivated by special interest can be assumed to be a bit smaller in degree of specialization. Accidental knowledge may be a viril discussion, random web page, TV show and similar. Together this can be a graph similar to the one mentioned earlier.
Knowledge Acquisition over a period of time
So, the essential question. Is the sum of the “tail” of knowledge greater than the “body”? Seperation of tail and body is reasonable to put somewhere in the intersection of interest and accidental. I hypothesize that the tail is larger.
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Interesting thoughts. As I understand this, I find it worth commenting that interest is more or less a prerequisite for intentional knowledge (and accidental knowledge a prerequisit for interest?). This makes it somewhat wrong to make this clear separation between the body and the tail?
And touching specialization vs generalization.. This reminds me a discussion of research after reading the front-page article in http://www.tu.no/a/00027/Teknisk_Ukeblad_0206_27673a.pdf
Does a university benefit from selveral “moderate” researchers than from fewer “super” researchers?
I agree the separation between the body and the tail is fuzzy, and not strict, however it probably could be defined some “cut-off-point”.
The discussion on a lot of “moderate” researchers vs. few “super” researcher is quite interesting, and certainly in the same direction as the knowledge-hypothesis. It depends on what scale is used and what the intention or goal of having researchers is. Say scale is number of published papers – then probably a “herde” of researchers is beneficial vs. few (sum of tail > sum of body). However, I think that metric is too narrow in defining quality of researchers. But there will always be the two problems; what is the goal and what is the metric used. If the two do not cohere, then the idea won’t work:)
Very interesting questions indeed. I must say I agree with Magnus that “interest is more or less a prerequisite for intentional knowledge”, at least this is how I feel when it comes to studying; The more interested I am, the more I feel like I actually learn about the subject.