The Problem of Dormant Knowledge A lot of human knowledge goes unseen or underutilized. Over 3 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually across more than 30,000 journals, a figure that has been doubling roughly every nine years since World War II. The biomedical field alone sees over a million papers pour into PubMed each year, growing at 8-9% annually. No one can keep up. Not even specialists in narrow subfields. And what happens to all this knowledge? A significant fraction simply sits there. Citation studies vary in their estimates (the often-quoted “90% of papers are never cited” appears to be overstated), but the reality is still stark: approximately 27% of natural science papers, 32% of social science papers, and over 80% of humanities papers go uncited within five years of publication. Being uncited is not the same as being unread, and being unread is not the same as being useless. But the broader pattern holds: vast quantities of recorded insight effectively do not exist for most of the people who might benefit from them. ...

I’m considering starting a Master’s program in 2026. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might lose in the process. Graduate school will teach me things. It will deepen my expertise, give me credentials, connect me with people working on problems I care about. But it will also subject me to pressures. Pressures to specialize. Pressures to protect my reputation. Pressures to stop asking the kind of dumb, speculative questions that I currently ask freely. ...