I can take classes in various kinds of dancing. Is dancing science? I can take classes welding. Is welding science? A panologist would eventually get around to studying “all of it”.
If someone says “trust me, I’m a scientist” they deserved to be laughed at, right in the face. Geologists don’t necessarily know diddly about RNA. And if category theorists know about real estate law then its probably an accident. There are degrees and licenses for microbiology, real estate, petroleum engineering, and mathematics… there is no degree for “all of it”.
If panology were a real thing (which of course it is not, and in fact it might never be) then “trust me, I’m a panologist” would not deserve to be laughed at. They really would be “on a trajectory whose logical end point is omniscience”.
The value of the concept is in seeing the delta between the normal run of merely real institutions and the half-assed efforts up to this point in history vs what is might be hypothetically possible for a human to do.
Since humans learn very slowly, and elitism has a bad name (and so on), there seems to me to have been no serious need for conceptualization of what it would look like to “not half-ass one’s intellectual existence”.
I’m pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.
And with our AGI benchmarks we are struggling to learn how to measure such entities as have never existed before. Scientists have existed. High level panologists… probably simply don’t exist.
If you stop and think about it, PROBABLY no one knows what science doesn’t know. Right? Except… is that actually true? How do we know? Has anyone ever made a list of everyone who exists, and then actually looked to check and make sure that literally everyone on the full list does in fact have the came basic and nearly fully general ignorance about “the totality of knowledge” that me and you and all the people we’ve ever met have?
Like it could be that Renaissance Technologies had a couple guys who competed internally to be “everything knowers” and that might have been part of the firm’s alpha? Or not. I don’t know. I haven’t checked. I don’t even know how I would check IRL.
But again: I’m pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.
What’s the difference between “panology” and “science”?
I can take classes in various kinds of dancing. Is dancing science? I can take classes welding. Is welding science? A panologist would eventually get around to studying “all of it”.
If someone says “trust me, I’m a scientist” they deserved to be laughed at, right in the face. Geologists don’t necessarily know diddly about RNA. And if category theorists know about real estate law then its probably an accident. There are degrees and licenses for microbiology, real estate, petroleum engineering, and mathematics… there is no degree for “all of it”.
If panology were a real thing (which of course it is not, and in fact it might never be) then “trust me, I’m a panologist” would not deserve to be laughed at. They really would be “on a trajectory whose logical end point is omniscience”.
The value of the concept is in seeing the delta between the normal run of merely real institutions and the half-assed efforts up to this point in history vs what is might be hypothetically possible for a human to do.
Since humans learn very slowly, and elitism has a bad name (and so on), there seems to me to have been no serious need for conceptualization of what it would look like to “not half-ass one’s intellectual existence”.
I’m pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.
And with our AGI benchmarks we are struggling to learn how to measure such entities as have never existed before. Scientists have existed. High level panologists… probably simply don’t exist.
If you stop and think about it, PROBABLY no one knows what science doesn’t know. Right? Except… is that actually true? How do we know? Has anyone ever made a list of everyone who exists, and then actually looked to check and make sure that literally everyone on the full list does in fact have the came basic and nearly fully general ignorance about “the totality of knowledge” that me and you and all the people we’ve ever met have?
Like it could be that Renaissance Technologies had a couple guys who competed internally to be “everything knowers” and that might have been part of the firm’s alpha? Or not. I don’t know. I haven’t checked. I don’t even know how I would check IRL.
But again: I’m pretty sure that AGI will be (or recurse into being) a non-human panologist, not a mere scientist.