The weight of all the writing in the world
In science, something is a “gap” if no one has written about it before. How can I read everything to know what is a gap? I spent a year on some research that turned out to have already been done 15 years prior. But if I hadn’t tried for that year I wouldn’t even have known what keywords to search for.
Nietzsche writes that one way to misuse history is to burden oneself with so much of it that it stifles all decision and action. I think he is talking about how one cannot live in response to too much. Pick your issues, stick to them, don’t try to solve it all.
This is an issue of carefulness. To care is to pay attention, to ascribe importance, to be serious. If we care about too much, we are too careful. We are not taking a risk.
Montaigne invented the act of writing essays by being overwhelmed by the over production of books and being sceptical that understanding came from studying them. He needed a medium that enabled him to think independently, to be less careful, to venture, to take a risk.
Risk is essential to understanding. A real gap is not where nothing has been written, but where no one has truly understood. There are many fields with so much writing, all of which is waiting to be ignored.
The rise of LLM tools is liberating. On the one hand, we can give up the cognitive burden of searching for relevant documents, and on the other hand we can give up the expectation that being so scholarly is valuable work for a human to do.
Human writing should be risky. When a human writes something they stake their image, their relationships and their society - not to lose it all, but to move it in a certain direction.
Writing a PhD thesis is a risk. It is tempting to be careful and respond to everything and make incremental progress. If I do that too much, I risk not thinking enough.