Pat Carroll

Tag: knowledge

  • Reflecting on What I Read in 2025; Specialisation vs. Generalisation in Learning

    Reading List

    I read and learnt about some pretty cool things this year. Here’s the list!

    Non-Fiction

    • The Molecule of More — Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman
    • Chip War — Chris Miller
    • Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari
    • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr
    • QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults — Van Badham
    • Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference — Rutger Bregman
    • The Soul: A History of the Human Mind — Paul Ham
    • War — Bob Woodward
    • Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir – Israel, Palestine and Beyond — John Lyons

    Fiction (this was my year of science fiction!)

    • Raft — Stephen Baxter
    • Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) — Jeff Vandermeer
    • House of Suns — Alastair Reynolds
    • Pandora’s Star (Commonwealth Saga #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Exodus (Archimedes Engine #1) — Peter F. Hamilton
    • Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) — Richard Swan
    • Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1) — Christopher Ruocchio
    • Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2) — Steven Erikson

    My favourite non-fiction was The Soul — Paul Ham, and my favourite fiction was Exodus — Peter F. Hamilton.

    I don’t usually like to think about my least favourite, but this year, it definitely goes to Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman.

    Specialisation and Generalisation in Learning

    As the year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my approach to reading and learning. In particular, I keep returning to the idea of the “right way” to learn: specialisation versus generalisation.

    Specialisation is often presented as the superior path — and in many cases it is, but only for particular ends. If the goal is to become an expert in a narrowly defined field, or to qualify for a specific role, then deep specialisation makes sense. But I often wonder whether that comes at the cost of something else: the joy of following curiosity wherever it leads.

    I find myself drawn to a wide range of topic areas that, on the surface, can seem entirely unrelated. This year I’ve enjoyed exploring the topics of power and technology, history, the Chinese revolution, dopamine, AI, and more. Each of these threads brought its own excitement and reward. I know plenty of people are perfectly content to stay within a single domain, but my mind doesn’t seem to work that way. It jumps around — and often, I let it!

    Is this a “bad” way of reading and learning? I don’t think so. It’s certainly not the most efficient route to becoming an expert in any one of these areas, but that isn’t really the aim here. Learning, for me, isn’t an all-or-nothing process.

    There are areas where my knowledge runs deeper — areas of music, through my PhD, and areas of cultural studies that I’ve taught over the past few years. Alongside these sit other domains about which I’ve read and thought a great deal, but I’d never claim expertise. Taken together, this forms something like a T-shaped knowledge profile: depth in one area, with breadth across many others.

    What I actively try to do, though, is build connections between these different domains. This, to me is the overarching project of learning: the interesting mixing and connecting of domains. History, for example, offers countless cases that can be drawn upon to illuminate contemporary ideas. Films play out philosophical questions that appear in histories, but also literature and music; abstract theories unfold out in stories, technologies, and social systems, all explored through various media and domains. When viewed this way, seemingly separate fields begin to cohere around shared themes.

    For me, many of these interests ultimately converge on questions about the nature of knowledge and ideas, and how they shape the world. Reading Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus played a significant role in forming this theme, helping me see how domains of history, technology, culture, economics, and art are deeply so interrelated.

    In that sense, what looks like generalism from the outside can begin to resemble a kind of hyper-specialisation: an ongoing inquiry into a very broad theme, approached from as many angles as possible.

    It brings to mind a quote I heard from Robert Sapolsky:

    “…when you think in categories, you overestimate how different [two facts] are when there happens to be a boundary in between them. And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries, you don’t see big pictures.”

    I wish everyone a wonderful holiday period, and best wishes for the new year.

  • Linking Knowledge and Technology

    Technology is the product of knowledge.

    The root of the word and concept of technology is the ancient Greek téchnē, which refers to art, craft, or skill. For Plato, téchnē meant something more than a mere knack or habit. It involved a deep understanding of a domain, and the ability to carry out a rational method for some creative purpose. This ‘rational method’ requires the craftsperson to know why what they do works the way it does; why that way is the best way to do something. In modern times, our concept of this is ‘technique’.

    Our concept of technology builds upon this: it is the knowledge and artefacts that allow for techniques to be carried out through mechanisation and automation, and allows these processes to be scaled. A piece of technology is the product of the process of applying deep knowledge and rational methods to produce something that fulfils some purpose.

    Consider the process of developing new technologies, whether they’re machines, devices or algorithms. It begins by gathering a pool of knowledge in usually several domains of knowledge. This involves understanding the principles of a field, as well as key problems or questions related to it. Skilled people are hired by a technology manufacturer, and/or they spend a large amount of time in the research phase, building the body of knowledge further. At a certain point, the focus is very much set on problems, and specifically on figuring out the best way of solving them. This may be a particular movement of an object, or a way of processing information. For example, product developers may come to the best methods for moving dirty clothes through water to clean them. This stage is aimed at building the essential techniques that can be used to solve the problems. This stage is an interesting one, because many of these techniques can be carried out by humans: they may be physical, physiological, or mental techniques. However, when building new technologies, once the techniques are decided upon, they are then mechanised, automated, and scaled. Those best techniques­—the ‘rational method’—for moving dirty clothes through water to clean them are programmed into a device that, when a button is pressed, goes through these motions. A customer of a new washing machine—and any technology for that matter—is buying an object that is capable of specific techniques: The techniques are the things that give the object value.

    Technology, knowledge and language are also linked in how they are all generative things, meaning that they evolve by combining simple building blocks of themselves into more complex structures, which are then further built upon. Words are built through combinations of other words, new technologies are built by combining existing technologies in new ways, and ideas are built by combining existing ideas. Our ideas in Western civilisation are based on a lineage of ideas tracing back to the ancient Greeks and beyond, into deeper history. In the same ways, our modern technologies are able to be traced back through a lineage.

    Knowledge and technology are thus absolutely intertwined and inseparable. Theory provides the basis for action, and technology materialises theory into artefacts. These artefacts are not only commodities but also products of a creative process. The creative process is the medium which the craftsperson moves through to turn their knowledge, understandings and rationality, into physical forms of technology.