Is there some research corroborating this quote? I have a lot of useless knowledge but it doesn’t seem to stop me from accumulating useful knowledge. It does make sense to avoid spending time and energy on acquiring useless knowledge, though.
If this is a question about causality, I would assume not. Sherlock Holmes was eccentric to the point of insanity and made up all sorts of funny wrong things.
It’s less about making things up and more about then-current ideas that are now outdated.
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.
There are more of them in Holmes stories, like like the idea that you can tell a man’s intelligence from his skull shape/size (phrenology).
I have a lot of useless knowledge but that doesn’t seem to stop me from accumulating useful knowledge.
As I understand it (not that I can quote any research), knowledge helps gain more knowledge due to how memory works; it’s easier to remember something if you have previous ideas to which to “link” or associate the new ones (and those links don’t have to be within the same domain of knowledge). Also, wouldn’t it be true that the more things you understand, the more likely you are to have a shorter inferential distance to whatever new ideas you come across?
I had a different interpretation. To me, this sounded more like a warning against bad personal epistemic hygiene and about the tradeoff between epistemic and instrumental rationality, not what happens when you reach the upper bound of your memory capacity. Now that I think about it, your interpretation is probably closer to what Doyle had in mind (what with his 19th century pop-psychology and all).
However, he does demonstrate this knowledge later in the series and in fact turns out the be a well of useless facts later on though I don’t have the source for the inconsistency handy at the moment.
Is there some research corroborating this quote? I have a lot of useless knowledge but it doesn’t seem to stop me from accumulating useful knowledge. It does make sense to avoid spending time and energy on acquiring useless knowledge, though.
If this is a question about causality, I would assume not. Sherlock Holmes was eccentric to the point of insanity and made up all sorts of funny wrong things.
In reality, it seems like in general exercising the brain improves its function on several dimensions. Also, relevant silly article about brain memory capacity
It’s less about making things up and more about then-current ideas that are now outdated.
There are more of them in Holmes stories, like like the idea that you can tell a man’s intelligence from his skull shape/size (phrenology).
As I understand it (not that I can quote any research), knowledge helps gain more knowledge due to how memory works; it’s easier to remember something if you have previous ideas to which to “link” or associate the new ones (and those links don’t have to be within the same domain of knowledge). Also, wouldn’t it be true that the more things you understand, the more likely you are to have a shorter inferential distance to whatever new ideas you come across?
I had a different interpretation. To me, this sounded more like a warning against bad personal epistemic hygiene and about the tradeoff between epistemic and instrumental rationality, not what happens when you reach the upper bound of your memory capacity. Now that I think about it, your interpretation is probably closer to what Doyle had in mind (what with his 19th century pop-psychology and all).
In the book this quote is in, Holmes uses it to justify refusing to remember that the Earth goes around the Sun.
However, he does demonstrate this knowledge later in the series and in fact turns out the be a well of useless facts later on though I don’t have the source for the inconsistency handy at the moment.
I read this as concerning organization instead of capacity.
relevant: Your inner Google