Strange Knowledgeability - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions

SubscribeSign in

Strange Knowledgeability<br>Human knowing in perspectival encyclopedicity<br>Venkatesh Rao<br>Jun 26, 2026

11

Share

The book club pick for June was a bit of a wildcard. Robert Darnton’s The Business of the Enlightenment, about the first modern encyclopedia, Diderot’s 18th century Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. I’ve just finished, and it’s left me with a lot of weird, perhaps ill-posed questions, and strange new beliefs about knowledgeability and a funhouse-mirrors new angle on AI.

Encyclopedia, made on Titles with my Bucket Art model<br>I’ve always found the notion that you don’t need to know as much stuff when you can just google everything to be silly. I’ve found the opposite to be true. The more there is to know, the more you need to know. The marginal value of knowing stuff does hit diminishing returns, but the point is much further out than most people realize, and it moves out further with time, as the knowledge environment evolves, not closer. The zero-sum idea that the more Google knows, the less you need to know, is wildly wrong. And it goes beyond the Google-fu (or now prompt-fu) of knowing what specific query to use to probe the knowledge environment. What you know shapes what you can see.<br>LLMs have pushed this co-evolution between internal and external whats and ways of knowing to a point of crisis, which is what I want to talk about. But first, encyclopedias.<br>The Darnton book has given me one weird new belief in particular: I now think that the Enlightenment wasn’t so much about a few specific big ideas that challenged medieval orthodoxy, but about an encyclopedic way of knowing about reality. For the first time, it became possible to know so much, you could entirely contain and exhaust normal human levels of uninspired curiosity. You could at least roughly cover your experience of reality with a map of reality. And you didn’t need to be a discoverer of knowledge to do so. Merely an accessor.<br>You could become post-curious and most people in fact did just that.<br>It didn’t start with Google. Already in the 18th century, people were forced to ask the same questions we do today. How knowledgeable should you be in an encyclopedic environment? Should you aim to know as much as possible, or as little as possible? Are there things you should try to not know, like Sherlock Holmes with his studiously cultivated lack of astronomical knowledge and all other subjects unrelated to detecting?<br>Why bother knowing anything when it’s in your personal budget quarto edition of the encyclopédie, which you bought for just a few hundred livres; only a few months of your middle-class income? This quarto edition is what the Darnton book is about. You’d think the publishing history of a particular cheap bestseller edition of an archaic encyclopedia would be a dull subject, but it’s fascinating.<br>Holmes’ knowledge, as described by Watson, is ironically a rather good example of what I think of whenever I hear the adjective encyclopedic applied to a human’s knowledge:<br>Dr. Watson’s summary list of Sherlock Holmes’s strengths and weaknesses:<br>Knowledge of Literature: Nil.

Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.

Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.

Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.

Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.

Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.

Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.

Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

Plays the violin well.

Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Sherlock Holmes’ knowledgeability was exceptional, but relied on an environment that offered a more banal encyclopedic way of knowing as a foundation. The genius of Holmes could not easily have been expressed in a pre-encyclopedic culture. He had a cache optimized for fast inference in the detection game.<br>The conflict between Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, I suspect, had more to do with the quantity and comprehensiveness of available knowledge than with specific bits of knowledge. The subversion lay in the encyclopedic way of knowing available to all, rather than in specific shocking doctrines held by a few.<br>Religions don’t have answers to most questions a normal human might think to innocently and lazily ask, so they tend to view unbounded curiosity as a threat and act to curtail, dismiss, or trivialize it. What kind of bug is that? a child might ask. Another of God’s creatures, now get back to your Bible! is no answer at all.<br>This works pretty...