Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpmoral | Hacker News Reader

Browsing Wikipedia last night I learned that the Brontë siblings created a fictitious world called Glass Town with its own history, geography, politics, and interconnected plots and characters. I don't think this will ever be "useful" to me.

On the other hand, I've always had trouble understanding Kubernetes. I know the general concepts and I can get by reasonably well but there are parts that just don't click. This is knowledge that would help my career and financial well-being in clear ways.

If I were offered a pill that would permanently remove any knowledge of Glass Town and any ability to find out about it again in exchange for perfect understanding of Kubernetes I wouldn't take it.

View on HN

And yet, because you read about Glass Town the other night, now I and others know about Glass Town. Looking into it further, I also now know about "Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës," written by Isabel Greenberg. Knowledge of these works is definitely useful to me.

As for Kubernetes, I already know that stuff.

Yeah, there are things that I wish would "click" for me, too.

I have come to believe that recreational play can be a process of reinforcing the ability to acquire new skills. Or play, like dreaming, can be an unconscious way of sorting out new experiences against the frameworks you already possess.

As I wrote this, I was struck by the literal sense of the Engligh word: "re-creation".

My best work as a programmer has always come to me as I am walking, or in the shower as I wake up. My worst work has always been sleep-deprived nonsense.

While the Brontë sisters' imaginary world may have no intrinsic value, it may well be that the experience of creating such a thing led them to success in other ways.

I would prefer useful knowledge over fantasy knowledge almost every time.

But I would like to understand why you value that trivial knowledge even after admitting it will not affect your life in a measurable way.

>I would prefer useful knowledge over fantasy knowledge almost every time.

I think the better contrast would be useful knowledge and having fun with fantasy knowledge.

Usefulness and affecting my life are not the same thing. What you find to be a piece of trivia I find something beautiful that enriches my life.

But doesn't that in and of itself therefore make it useful? In fact its useful in enabling discussion on HN right now.

The paper was about ideas and exploration about crossing from not-useful to useful and the requirements for that to happen to accumulate a lot of not-useful's for the future to draw on.

This also reminds me of Taleb referencing Umberto Eco's book collection for his anti-scholar/anti-library concept where the 'value' of the library was in the unread books rather than the read ones.

The posts I was replying to talked about 'keeping in the brain-attic tools which may help do work' and 'real, tangible, applicable skills'. That's a different definition than what you're proposing.

Different people will have different definitions of useful. And different people will weigh usefulness differently in determining value.

My point is that I don't need to find some arbitrary definition of 'useful' to cover something in order to find it valuable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com