Somebody Has Already Figured It Out for You

Let’s say you want to cross a river.

There’s no bridge, because it’s 3000 BC and you are a nomadic goat herder. You’ve never seen a bridge that wasn’t just a log over a creek. Crossing a big river is something you haven’t figured out. Maybe nobody has.

You could maybe make a raft, but it’s hard to find suitable wood for that, and you don’t know if it would be safe. Are there man-eating water-lizards lurking out there? Will the current dash you on some rocks before you get across?

You never cross the river.  

Say you want to learn accounting. You’d love to be able to track every penny that comes in and out of your life in a great big ledger. It would satisfy your desire for order and efficiency, and probably save you a lot of money. You could even provide accounting services for businesses in your village.

The problem is it’s 1590, and you are an illiterate tavern owner. There’s maybe one guy in a nearby town who might know about accounting, and the town is eight miles away and you don’t have a horse. Also, that guy is a monk and he has no reason to devote any time to teaching you accounting.

Basically it’s off the table. Maybe in the next life.  

Say you want to record your own music. It’s 1960, so you know it’s a thing that can be done.

You have some vinyl records and look at them. How do they encode music into those tiny grooves? You know they “cut” records using special machines of some kind, and your record player can read them and play the music. You know there are microphones and cords and tape-recorder things involved.

This is not enough information. You have no clue where to begin. Clearly somebody out there knows though. There are people who understand this esoteric art, and they are human too.

You go to the library, and the librarian does find you a book on recording music! You learn some terms, and write down some of the necessary equipment. You begin to diagram the process, but there’s so much you don’t get. This book was written for someone who already knows something about the process, and you don’t have anyone who can answer your questions. You don’t learn anywhere near enough to make a record.

You daydream about getting a bus to Nashville, befriending some musicians, and finally gaining access to this world of people who know how to record music. But you have a job and other obligations, so it is not at all practical to do that. You live and die without ever learning how to record music.

Until not long ago, humans ran into knowledge barriers all the time. It was hard to figure out how to do a thing you’ve never done before. You generally had to find someone who knew how to do the thing, and convince them to teach you. You probably had to travel to where they were, and live there for a while yourself.

Today, whatever it is you want to do, you can find out pretty quickly how people do that thing.

If you want to cook a turkey, build a shed, or become a lawyer, you can acquire a list of the basic steps, from someone who probably knows what they’re talking about, in about ten or fifteen minutes.

You can easily get follow-up questions answered. You can Google your question or ask an AI. You can go on Reddit and post your question to an entire group of economists, carpenters, musicians, accountants, or pastry chefs.

You can do all this while you sit in a bathroom stall on your break at work.

You don’t even have to look through any musty textbooks. People are constantly publishing content that spells out exactly how to do a thing, in the most user-friendly way possible. In fifteen minutes, you can find the exact steps to changing your car’s engine air filter (any model), getting certain weeds out of your garden, beating the original Donkey Kong, getting into the crime-scene-cleanup business, inventing your own language, or planning a renaissance-themed wedding.

Whatever it is you want to do, somebody has already figured it out for you.

This is an incredible state of affairs, and it’s so new I think we don’t quite appreciate it. Anyone with an internet connection has essentially limitless access to good quality how-to knowledge. We’ve had this technology for less than a generation.

Can you imagine what anybody from even the recent past would give up for this amenity alone? If you were an American who wanted to learn to meditate in 1947, you’d have to get on a boat to India, and roam the streets of Bombay trying to get someone to refer you to a trustworthy guru. You might die trying to find out.

It’s getting easier all the time, too. You can use an AI like Claude or ChatGPT to break down any task at all into any number of steps, and ask as many follow-up questions as you need. It will only get easier and easier and easier to learn to do whatever it is you want to do.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do the steps, but the know-how is available — if something’s stopping you, it isn’t cluelessness. In an afternoon, you can generate a real plan to do basically anything you would find worth doing, and get yourself in touch with people who have already done it. This is true even if the thing you want to do is extremely weird or specialized, like making a cake that looks exactly like a hamburger, or forging a bronze battleaxe with your family crest on it.

There are still many factors that can impede your endeavors — physical ability, opportunity cost, impatience, etc. — but not knowing how is unlikely to be one of them.

The how question has always been the first and one of the sturdiest barriers to human endeavor, and with few exceptions it’s basically gone.

How on earth do people braid their hair like that? How do people become highly-paid software developers? How do you safely rehabilitate a knee injury? How do you get grease stains out of cotton? How do you play Für Elise on piano? How do you type an umlaut? How do they make such amazing banana bread? How does a person avoid getting ripped off at a mechanic’s shop? What do you do when you encounter a bear? How do they make such amazing bread?

Imagine somebody had figured all of that out for you. They have!

***