Panology

post by JenniferRM · 2024-12-23T21:40:14.540Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

  Panology Does Not (Currently) Exist
  Why Does Panology Not Exist?
  Where Does Panology Fit In Education?
  How Would Panological Competence Be Measured (If Academia Was Competent)?
  What About Tribalism And Tools?
  Famous Early (Amateur?) Panologists
None
6 comments

The study of literally everything would, logically, be called panology.

Panology Does Not (Currently) Exist

Every field in science would be a subfield of panology, if panology existed, which, as of 2024, it does not.

Since there is no "Field Of Study" officially called panology in existing academic science, there are pretty strong arguments that academic science does not study "everything", and so, slightly less strong (but still pretty compelling) arguments could be made that academia is Doing It Wrong in important ways.

You can't have a Field Of Study until it is simply and clearly true that a real group of people are doing knowledge work, as a team of teams, that collectively self describes with the name of "the field of study they are part of"... and no such group of scientists, artisans, mad scientists, researchers, engineers, scholars, adventurers, or librarians exists for "panology".

Panology could be made to exist, but this would require social, political, and institutional alchemy rather than simple or straightforward epistemic elbow grease to simply "study everything" and thereby generate the relevant knowledge for the relevant field.

Apologies are possibly owed here to Simon (1974), Martinez (2013), Nurhayati (2020), and surely some others that I haven't had time to look up. However, if one simply looks at academia, the various independent attempts to initiate a field that uses this word all clearly failed to induce the existence of a group of people using the term, in the proposed way, as part of their collective self-description. No one is making progress under this banner, and then having conferences, and writing to each other about their successes, and so on.

I put $1 in my envelope labeled "Grok's Money" (he only asked for $0.50 but I did a gift economy thing and overpaid) and he suggested: Philosophy, Polymathy, Generalism, Interdisciplinarity, Universal Studies, Encyclopedism, Holism, Cosmology, Sapience, Omniology, Systems Theory, Humanities. None of these are very good.

He did not independently notice or credit Roswell Park's 1843 book "Pantology, or a Systematic Survey of Human Knowledge" but when asked about Pantology vs Panology he re-generated awareness of that book and author on his own, but also suggested that Pantology would confuse a lot of people who might think it was the study of "pants", which accords with my own initial naive impression.

Why Does Panology Not Exist?

My current working hypothesis for the reason that panology does not materially exist is that there is a theology-shaped-hole in academia.

((To rigorously speak about this, I'd probably want to talk about Shapley Values over Reasons For This Outcome, and then I'd assign Bayesian Credence Levels to every possible shapley score for the specific causal mechanism "there is a theology-shaped-hole in academia because of politics n'stuff", and then other people could also assign credences here, and then the conversation might not founder? Hopefully? Sadly, the field of counter-factual history is yet another field that basically just doesn't exist, and so I kinda have to make up the techniques I would imagine that field would eventually develop. It is almost certainly much much much more complex than "there is a theology-shaped-hole in academia where panology could hypothetically be and that's why there's a hole there rather than a field of study" but... shrug. I'm trying to keep the essay short.))

I didn't invent this hypothesis. I got this hypothesis from Robert Maynard Hutchins, by way of story-telling about Hutchins in the essays of Martin Gardner.

If the field of panology ever actually exists, perhaps in 2025 or 2026, I would like some credit for helping it form itself into something coherent, but I will insist that there have been numerous lone (feral?) panologists many times in history, who made various splashes, and that Gardner and Hutchins both deserve mention, even if they never used the word "panology" in their writings.

It would be lovely to hear other hypotheses for the reason panology did not exist prior to 2024 in the comments.

Where Does Panology Fit In Education?

In the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) there is a 6-digit code within the managed ontology (or taxonomy (depending on how you taxonomize formal coding systems)) that is: 24.0102 "General Studies". This is how the bean counters count the human beans in school who aren't learning to ignore most things, and focus on a part of everything. The illustrative examples for the kinds of text strings that get this classification are: [Undeclared Major] [Undecided].

The first broad breakdown in the CIP, for "at least some specialization but still very very general" appears to follow CP Snow, and gives us 40.0101 Physical Sciences vs 24.0101 Liberal Arts and Sciences.

You might be strongly tempted to place panology (if panology existed) within 13.0101 Education, General but if you look at the details of that codepoint in the CIP, you'll find that it is a catchall for "learning to teach (especially learning to teach kids)".

How Would Panological Competence Be Measured (If Academia Was Competent)?

Since panology doesn't exist, there are no tests for it, however, psychometrics is a field, and so it is a field that every panologist would eventually get around to knowing something about.

Part of what you'd need "to properly measure in a way that can validate itself and get better" would be a vision of what the construct is, and why the construct is valid, and so on.

My first draft here would simply be that a panologist should be able to sorta just "take all the tests", and they should either pass or max all of the "easy ones" and their reportable level would be the first test they fail or get a low score on.

For example, someone graduating with a bachelor's degree should pass the bachelor's general competency battery as part of graduating (and if this doesn't exist then it is probably an indictment of the panological adequacy of the school they went to), but then if they take every single GRE, then the field and score of their lowest GRE would be a very solid proxy measurement for some hypothetical platonic idea of "panological competence".

Once you have the vision for a long dragged out and expensive way to test the construct, a decent psychometrician should be able to optimizing the test, to thin-slice "the current students in the current meta" to find proxies for this proxy.

The GREs already exist inside an institution that already has a robust adaptive/automated testing framework, and that institution could probably just "mush literally all of the tests together" with a few weeks or months of work, most likely, unless the institution has a core that rotted out a long time ago (as is sadly the case with many institutions these days).

What About Tribalism And Tools?

In medieval China, according to modern common sense and lore, you weren't decently educated until you could cite chapter of verse of Confucius. In other places it might be the old or new testament, or the hadiths, or whatever... but also like... these were not open book tests and they'd go very different if they were open book tests.

Also, maybe every human is just a simple baby, with a score of basically zero, because almost every human would fail the test if they got a test for 8-year-old elementary knowledge in "every language for which a test like that exists" and the lowest score is their final score?

I guess it is possible that some human on Earth is omniliterate, but I don't think that it is likely. If people are allowed to take all the tests using language translation software that is really good, then it probably changes the scores... a lot?

These are the kinds of edge cases that could or should lead to debates about "machine translation" vs "assistive technology".

Also "calculators in math class!?!"  ...but on the other hand, escape rooms might be "IRL panological tests with high construct validity" and being good at mental math might help with some of them.

In this essay, on these issues: I want to punt! <3

Famous Early (Amateur?) Panologists

There is a claim by Andrew Robinson (1957-TBD) that Thomas Young (1773 - 1829) was the last "man who knew everything" and if you look at What Links To Polymath On Wikipedia there are currently less than 500 links but I bet that the real list is actually much larger. There isn't even (yet) a Category in Wikipedia for biographies about people who potentially qualify.

A huge part of the real formation of actual fields is that they are prestige parties that induce prestige-seekers to playfully compete with each other for feathers in their caps based on puzzle solving and paper publishing and so on.

Another kind of comment to this essay that would be lovely would be suggestions of people who fell in or near the semantic rubric of "panologists" even if they were just called a "genius with wide-ranging interests" or "a polymath" or a "jack of all trades" or a "renaissance man" or whatever.

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