The Art and Necessity of Half-Knowing
Things They Forgot To Tell Me In Business School​

Of the many factors contributing to our domination of planet earth, humankind’s insatiable appetite and capacity for knowledge ranks right up near the top. Below, perhaps, the opposable thumb but above any mechanical invention. And since no modern business article is complete without a martial reference, I direct you to what renowned ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had to say on the subject in his vastly misappropriated work The Art of War:
 
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Knowledge, literally the stuff of life.

While that was fine and good for Mr. Sun and possibly my ancestors, none of them had to deal with the Information Age. The Art of War fits in the palm of your hand, is thirteen short chapters in length, and can be breezed through in a couple of hours and then thought about for the rest of your life - which, per the above formula, may or may not be a long time. Whereas my «smartphone», at approximately the same size, is a window on the internet, an entirely different proposition. With its 5.4 billion indexed pages and counting [worldwidewebsize.com], the internet is a long read, leaving very little time for thinking.

And Thinking - analyzing, focusing, reflecting, pondering, cogitating, using the old cabbage, call it what you wish - is very important; it is what transforms passive information and random data points about the things we read/ view/ hear/ taste/ smell into knowledge and actionable intelligence. Thinking is a fast disappearing luxury.

There is just no time for thinking anymore. Like swimming across an endless ocean, if I stop to think not only might I break the Snapchat streak I started in 2015, but I might entirely disappear into a bottomless sinkhole of information, disinformation, facts, alternative facts, opinions, and all range of anesthetizing noise, images, and irrelevance around me.

And more immediately germane, I may not make it through the 900 page, three-volume, report I absolutely have to review by Thursday. Why so long on a report which contains maybe, at best, 150 pages of useful content? Because data bloat is everywhere. Partly no two people will agree on exactly which 150 pages matters, and largely because, despite all of the changes in technology and all of the productivity apps we install, life still follows Mark Twain’s famous aphorism «I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead». This single insignificant example demonstrates how one group’s lack of time leads to another’s waste of time, continuing ad infinitum until we both find ourselves here with me wasting your time.

«I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead» Mark Twain

Information technology has exploded our recording of data over the past 50 years, analytics has exploded the conversion of this data into information, and the internet has exploded access to this information over the past 25 years, but absolutely nothing has exploded the capacity of our human brains to absorb, digest and assimilate this information. Humans are as smart/ dumb as ever we were before the information age.

Don’t Hitchhike on the Information Super Highway
The very first step to avoid sinking hopelessly into an amorphous sinkhole of information is to build your own life raft and become an expert, in a professional sense, in at least one area. Maintaining an expertise not only allows you to be discerning about your content in this area at least, but it also takes a ton/tonne of time and lots of thinking, thus restricting opportunities for pointless distraction. We may be forced to change life rafts once or more over the course of a career, but one never wants to be caught without one.

After dealing with the matter of expertise, managing the rest of life on the information superhighway becomes a matter of philosophy. [Remember that one, the information superhighway? Still love it.] As with many things, there is a spectrum of approaches to managing information overload:

· Going with the Flow: At one end of the spectrum lies the path of least resistance, going with the flow. Simply sink/ float/ surf indiscriminately over the never-ending deluge of content as it comes. Scrolling along, not a care in the world.

· Dropping Out: At the other end of the spectrum lies the lonely road of abstention, dropping out. At the extreme, this leads to eschewing the comforts of modern life and living off-grid without the internet in a small shack in a dark forest on a lonely mountain slope - or its approximate equivalent.

Going with the flow has the advantage that it keeps you current and doesn’t require a lot of thought. Just open the social media app of choice and start scrolling and swiping. And keep scrolling and swiping until your phone battery dies, like the couch potato equivalent of slot machine zombies at the casino. The disadvantages to going with the flow are that it reduces your intellect over time to a collection of half-remembered memes and pale reflections of other people’s opinions, like a coffee cup continuously draining and refilling but never being washed. [Queue Joe Jackson song, Sunday Papers]

«Going with the flow reduces your intellect to a collection of half-remembered memes and pale reflections of other people’s opinions, like a coffee cup continuously draining and refilling but never being washed.»

Dropping out has the great advantage of providing focus and clarity to the rest of your life, in rejection of all information technology that is new and intrusive. It frees up a lot of time for deep thinking, growing a garden, and possibly raising goats. The disadvantage of dropping out is that it removes you entirely from relevancy to the world except for the role of prophet, which is a shallow market. Unless you have a monomaniacal commitment and very special skills as a prophet, you are destined to end up just another crank living in a shack down by the river. [Queue rewatch of Uni-bomber Movie]

«Unless you have a monomaniacal commitment and very special skills as a prophet, you are destined to end up just another crank living in a shack down by the river.»

The Art and Necessity of Half-Knowing
I find these choices and their close cousins unpalatable and impractical thus have found salvation in a third position, bravely making a stand for The Art and Necessity of Half-Knowing.

Do not scoff now, nor be fooled that half-knowing is easy or some kind of cop-out. Half-knowing is a sophisticated mix of art and science: it is much more than simple subject recognition, which is what you get scrolling on your phone; and much less than expertise, which is what you get by locking yourself in a room for 10,000 hours.

​The magic of half-knowing is twofold: one fold is a proficiency in taking a mass of information and quickly distilling it down to basic elements and key points - separating the wheat from the chaff as it were; the other fold is an innate sense for what scraps of insider knowledge are best added on the top - the sprinkles that make it special. Both of these require thinking. Once mastered, it allows one to demonstrate sufficient command of the fundamentals so as not to embarrass oneself, and sufficient additional information to imply deeper insights, all without actually claiming so. Subtle knowledge acquisition, smooth communication, and a refined sense of when to play smart and when to act dumb are the tools of the trade.

«Simple context, properly supported, is a persuasive medium allowing people to reach their own conclusions»

Take the classic «cocktail conversation» example. Adepts at the art of half-knowing are able to ask simple leading questions of acknowledged subject matter experts that are then taken up and continued long past their tentative beginnings but in a manner that reflects positively both on the actual expert and the original questioner. This provides the opportunity to smile benevolently with an insiders’ eye as if every edifying and clarifying follow-on was being delivered for the benefit of the others in the conversation and not the questioner. [Note: It is not all taking and no giving, as a subject matter expert in something, one’s turn inevitably comes to provide cover for a half-knower.]

The art of half-knowing comes with risks, as there is nothing worse than being exposed as a fraud. This is why it is critically important never to overtly claim knowledge in excess of that which you possess - that would be a lie, that would be wrong, and that would get you burned. Simple context, properly supported, is a persuasive medium allowing people to reach their own conclusions that one knows more than they know. The other important health warning is that this is an instance where two halves do not make a whole. While half-knowing can be mildly impressive standing alone, and complimentary to true expertise when used adroitly, two people half-knowing something does not equal one expert - too much overlap and too many gaps.
 
«In the past, people knew many fewer things but knew them far better.»

While it was important to half-know things in ages past, the nature of knowledge and learning was different and people knew many fewer things but knew them far better. There were reasons for this: broad-based education was limited to a small portion of the idle wealthy who had the time; excess knowledge in the hands of the masses was known to be dangerously destabilizing and thus controlled; religious guidance was deep but focused on compliance not questioning; apprentice learning was widespread but narrowly restrictive to the particular trade, and learning materials of all forms were rare and expensive.

But not today. Today, knowledge is on the move: universal education is widely recognized as a human right; knowledge in the hands of the masses remains dangerous to the status quo but is much more difficult to control; exclusively religious education has been effectively muted in most parts of the world; the prevalence of formal apprentice learning has likewise significantly diminished; while, with thanks to the internet and modern information technology, we are simply awash in information and cheep gadgets to find it.

A greater variety of information passes the eyeballs of an average teenager in a day looking at their «phone» than a religious scholar in ages past would have seen in his/her entire life, which could well have been spent laboriously copying out letter by letter, time after time, the same 1,400 page religious text.

So, once you have established a professional expertise consider joining the ranks of the half-knowing to soak up the rest of your time and help you stay focused and thinking. It is a simple formula for navigating life that will help us all self-actualize into the new action hero of the information age, the «jack of all trades, master of one».

​;)