Accessible knowledge is power. Learn how to measure it.
The phrase "scientia potentia est" is a popular Latin aphorism meaning "knowledge is power", commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon.
However, I contend that this phrase only applies when that knowledge is accessible. Google proved the power of accessibility by building an easy-to-use search engine that indexed the most expansive source of knowledge in the world - the internet. The search engine was a revolutionary step forward in a long chain of knowledge access that probably began with oral tradition (which is essentially just using multiple brains to achieve n-copy redundancy). Oral tradition was limiting because you had to have a person who knew the tradition physically present in order to access the data. This becomes a problem when they are away milking the cows or away away (i.e. death).
Next, we got all the innovations of writing and bookmaking (alphabet, ink, scrolls, printing) to disseminate more copies of the knowledge. However, when it came time to access that knowledge, you still had to dig through the chapters of the book (or at minimum the index of the book) in order to reference the required info.
Point being, we can see the difference in time to access (TTA) for these different mediums. Importantly, the search engine did not solve this problem completely. Being able to search the entire internet at your fingertips and being able to find a particular needle in a big haystack instantaneously are two different things. We’ve all been through the frustration ofwanting to find a link/meme/video/song/tweet and not being able to cast the right incantation of search terms to find it. Especially for prior knowledge that is accessed frequently, the ability to “summon” it quickly can be a boon or bane for productivity.
The best way to do this is to build your own personal knowledge center or digital garden to greatly shrink the search space. Having a curated set of important findings, knowledge, or reference data at hand will make you seem like you have a super power.
The concept of digital gardens is also similar to Zettelkastens, personal wikis, and knowledge graphs.
In the rest of this article, I won’t be covering how to specifically build your own knowledge center. The setup of which can vary significantly based on your own needs and preferences. I will, however, explain how to measure accessibility using TTA and an alternate measurement - actions to access (ATA).
TTA is pretty straightforward. It’s just the time elapsed from when you begin your search to when you find the knowledge you need. We can split this into user time and service time. User time is the time you spend inputing text/voice and service time is the time required for the host to generate and return your response. For something like ChatGPT, the service time can be O(10s of seconds).
Importantly, Miller in his 1968 paper Response time in man-computer conversational transactions described three different orders of magnitude of computer responsiveness: