Human knowledge, its organization, pruning and focusing by scientific method

[ionelv]

It dawned on me that human knowledge is highly disorganized, poorly categorized, redundant, often wrong or corrupted, unfocused, and often suboptimal. Most attempts to provide some structure are themselves suffering from similar flaws. It would be very useful if we applied the scientific method to most of it more liberally. Under epistemology, some attempts were made but the field itself is replicating haphazardly. Same goes for ontologic attempts at mapping knowledge.

Some ideas on focusing human knowledge:
1. Provide clear labels and categories for sections of knowledge (e.g. science, pseudoscience, non-science, truthiness, BS).
2. Develop presentation layer that transcends any one language and its limitations (e.g. any book(s) in English or any other language is but a shard of knowledge, whereas a verifiable and flexible schemata that links books, articles, monographs, theses, experiments, theories, etc beyond any one language might be a better presentation layer). Improve book form beyond TOC, index, preface, notes (e.g. include commentary, critique with each book or at least make it more easily accessible).
3. New and old ideas and theories should be tested and verified. If they fail either, they should be at a minimum labeled as such and binned accordingly. Parts maybe cleaved and recategorized as needed. A few good places to start are: politics and laws.
4. Some areas of knowledge are largely non-verifiable and non-testable and that is fine: e.g. art and religion.
5. Free up access to knowledge, organize it and make it easily accessible (e.g. arxiv.org and its clones, archive.org, Project Gutenberg, wikipedia).
6. Free up access to education, organize it and make it easily accessibly (e.g. free courseware from Ivies in US).
7. Start easily accessible online project to advance all the above by using platform similar to wikipedia and stackexchange, but better structured, presented, organized and queryable for our purposes. Ability to zoom in/out with ease by novices and experts alike, find links between knowledge areas, better summarize, present assumptions, weak spots, unknowns, critiques would be major pluses.

Comments

[jsburbidge]

The scientific method is based on replicable and verifiable empirical experiment. It isn't just things like art and religion which don't mesh well with it. Disciplines like history deal with unrepeatable events, and attempts to create semiscientific disciplines in the humanities (cultural anthropology, sociology) have not universally been considered successes.

The sort of systematic presentation of knowledge as a subdivision of fields you suggest is more mediaeval than modern: Isidore of Seville or Alanus de Insulis.

It also requires a single coherent authority, a sort of Acadamie Française for the sciences, to do any of it, and it would still be like herding cats.

[ionelv]

You are quite correct in pointing issues with history and the humanities as well. Thanks for pointing out previous medieval attempts. It is quite interesting to read about Isidore's attempt to write an universal encyclopedia in the 6th century (Etymologiae).

Of course, a single coherent authority would be ideal, but I would be happy even with a few semi-coherent authorities (that do not contradict each other much) or even a quasi-ideal wikipedia-like decentralized attempt (at least on issues that do not require highly specialized knowledge; thinking of snopes or other fact checkers).

I do realize that my musings and suggestions are quite quixotic, and ironically even duplicative, but as a long-term objective, I think there is some value if humanity made a more concerted effort at consolidating and pruning knowledge. I realize that wikipedia and various encyclopedias are the closest to what I am looking for, yet I find them somewhat lacking in either focus, quality, organization and/or access.

What probably irks me a great deal is the knowledge overlap, gaps, varying sensibilities, biases, cultural foci and especially conflicts/disagreements amongst all language-centric and often cultural-centric sources (e.g. West v East, anglosphere v francosphere, capitalism v communism, science v religion, perpetual growth at all costs v environment preservation, etc). These are probably the hardest to reconcile, yet I have a feeling that attempting to at least acknowledge (and maybe even resolve some of) our differences, is a worthy endeavor.