The Importance of Knowledge

After many days of planning and procrastination, me and my roommate finally resolved to hit the gym regularly this year. With each other to keep us company, and a state-of-the-art activities center to boot, we started to take time out every evening or so to devote to ourselves and our fitness. After one such session, we returned home with a sense of satisfaction at having worked on our bodies, when my roommate picked up a packet of chips and started eating out of it with abandon.

Scandalized at this blatant squandering of all the calories we had just so painstakingly offloaded, I yelled at my roommate to hold off until at least half an hour had passed; believing, as according to popular belief, that it would cause discomfort to eat so soon after intense physical activity. As it turned out, I was wrong in saying this, because a few seconds later, he was yelling right back at me, because he had Googled up evidence to the contrary: it is, in fact, necessary to replenish the glycogen and moisture lost by the body in exercise.

Of course, my roommate, in his proving of the point, overlooked the fact mentioned on another of Google's search results: that it is important to get in the right kind of nutrients (in particular, carbohydrates) from food consumed after exercising. By eating chips, he had also consumed a significant amount of fat, which served to reduce the amount he had labored to shed. He had gone by the opinion of an ordinary member of the Internet population, as opposed to a specialist on the subject, simply because that was what he 'found' first. He had demonstrated a classic example of incomplete knowledge being as harmful as no knowledge at all.

Don't get me wrong here, While I'm not discounting the power of community and the importance of getting an opinion from someone who has had practical experience related to a topic of discussion, the extent to which these opinions are correct may be debatable. Particularly in the matter of a topic as important as our health and fitness, I would go by a doctor's blog or article, rather than a post somebody left on a forum or opinions website. On the whole, however, it is very important to get a thorough grounding on the topic in question before speaking about it as passionately as my roommate did.

This brought me to thinking about a much larger point: what is the plight of those people who do not have an opportunity to access the knowledge that my roommate was able to reach in the click of a button? There is a large section of the world population that will probably never even have access to a computer, let alone one that will allow them to connect to the Internet and obtain information so easily. And all the while, we use this immense power at our disposal casually, almost disdainfully. Putting this infinitely valuable resource to good use is something we all need to do.

Take the example of the Indian organization Mahiti, run by Vijay Rasquinha and a group of his colleagues. One of the private limited's many projects is the provision and maintenance of an IT training infrastructure for rural areas, based on the concept of paying it forward. Essentially, the organization sets up several systems in these areas to train children and young adults on the skills required to become competent and productive in the world of IT. Once they have trained a core set of people, the company hands over the infrastructure to the area's residents, allowing them to teach the rest of their community. They make themselves available for any support that the users of the infrastructure might need. This is one of several companies that is committed to realizing the limitless potential of spreading knowledge, and thus creating power.

The best way to exercise the power and privilege granted to us by the easy availability of knowledge, is by expressing our selves as clearly and loudly as we can, in order for the uninitiated to learn from our experience of it. We need to share our knowledge and use it to empower. We must thirst for knowledge, and spread it. But we must also remember that incomplete knowledge is more dangerous than none at all, and must take care to completely inform ourselves before paying it forward. Only then will the 'complete' power of the community be realized.