Essential Useless Knowledge

TL;DR

The concept of useless knowledge doesn’t really exist. All “useless” knowledge has the potential to be essential and important. Plus, deciding that something is useless or not is time-relative and often retrospective. So, what you can only do is to give it your best and make most of it.


Articles like this are bound to happen, articles that are inspired from my college classes. However, for it to happen this early is unanticipated. What’s more is the irony from the class that this topic is from.

In Columbia’s Core Curriculum, there are many requirements over many fields. Some might say that it is overkill and that time might be better spent focusing on one field. For me, growing up with the Thai curriculum where you go in-depth in too many fields, I was used to it in some ways. (Also, it helped me convinced my mom to let me come to Columbia so yea 😏).

One of those requirements is called “Frontiers of Science” where we learn about various parts of science that is interesting. For me, there were neurology, relativity physics, (micro)biology, and climate. More relevant to the story, though, is not the lecture but the “spotlights” which is basically getting-to-know-a-Columbia-professor.

One particular spotlight stood out to me: the spotlight with Prof. Martin Chalfie—a Chemistry Nobel Laureate in 2008. Particularly, his presentation about how we need research in basic/fundamental sciences rather than the bleeding edge advancements.

A clear example that he brought up is the choice between funding in diabetes or bacteria, which the public promotes diabetes but it turned out that research in bacteria laid the fundamental for finding a more efficient treatment for diabetes.

The point of all this is that the notion of useless knowledge is, in many ways, retrospective.

You cannot know whether you are studying in something that will be useless or not, which means that you have to give it your best at all times.

This has always been my ideology (credits go to my mom). Just do you best because you are doing it and nothing that you do is ever going to go to waste.

Coming back to the Core Curriculum, it is a system that I support, at least the idea of it. However, I cannot disagree that it may be difficult to make most of something that you might deem “useless”.

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