"Just one more thing ... (That I do not know)"

"Do you ever have a day where everything is unfamiliar, and you feel that you know absolutely nothing?"

The collective knowledge of human is expanding at an extraordinary pace. In the book Critical Path, published in 1982, R. Buckminster Fuller introduced the idea of "Knowledge Doubling Curve" which describe the rate of expansion of human knowledge. By the end of World War II, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. By 2004, the rate was approximately 18 months. And with the advent of the fabled "Internet of Things", the rate is projected to be 12 hours [article]. Just like a snowball, when it starts rolling, it will keep rolling and keep growing. This vast expansion places a huge strain on knowledge workers around the world. 

A knowledge worker is anyone "who works for a living at the tasks of developing or using knowledge" [article]. They can be engineers, scientists, educators, researchers, coders, etc. So, as computer scientists, or postgraduate students, we are knowledge workers. And we are not immune from the "knowledge snowball". In fact, I believe that we will be the first to experience this pressure. 

To function as a computer scientist, we rely on a wide range of knowledge. We need to be familiar with many mathematical tools on the deepest level to build new methods and conduct our experiments. As "computer" scientists, we are also expect to be fluent with a wide range of software development tools and techniques, which are vast and ever changing. Finally, as scientists, we also need to know standard scientific methods, which might, or might not be taught explicitly. In short, there are many things that we must know to survive.

And here is the ugly part. No matter how much we learn, there is no catching up with this rolling knowledge snowball. Everyday, there will be new research articles, new results and old challenging knowledge (that we "conveniently" skipped in the past) reappearing. Sooner or later, we will reach a point where we feel that we know absolutely nothing and everything is strange and new.

What should we do?

For me, not knowing the question is worst scenario in which one can be. So the first task should be sitting down with a pencil and answer the question "what exactly don't we know?". Be specific. For example, instead of writing "I don't remember statistics techniques", replacing it with something like "What are the most common statistical tests?". This task might take several hours. It might take several days, but I believe that it is a task that we can never properly conclude. 

Anyway, in the end, we have a long list of things that we should know, but we don't know. That's half of the battle already. Half. Now what? 

I usually attend workshops of Dr. Hugh Kearns, who specializes in productivity issues of researchers. In the end of every workshop, he always gives us a quiz as follow: "what is the next small thing that you will do immediately after this workshop?". That's exactly what we should do. Just pick ONE tiny thing from the list, everyday, and solve it. The selection should be according to some priority, but the key point is picking something. The clearer the task, the higher chance that we will actually complete it.

My hypothesis is that we can keep learning just "One Thing a Day", when months and years went by, we will actually know something. Just like the snowball, the more we know, the faster we grow. That's the reason of this blog: to let me share my "One Thing a Day" journey and pieces of knowledge that I actually gather. Let's see how far we can roll.

That's enough for my part. Now, what will YOU do today? What is the next thing that you will learn?

Cheers,

Nguyen