ChatGPT and the power of knowledge drilling

In the past, gaining a deeper understanding into a subject requires broad based education to understand the entire field before being able have a good enough grasp of the topic to answer a specific question in mind.

However, now, with the power of ChatGPT, such broad based education is no longer needed. Instead, we can do something I call “Knowledge Drilling”. Rather than having to study the entire field, we simply drill straight into the key idea we are curious about and find our answers. This allows for much faster routes to finding answers, and also enable more polymathic questions to be answered because a person can now answer a question in a field that they have never formally studied before.

With ChatGPT, we can directly ask a question were are interested about. From the answer, there maybe many field-specific jargon and terminologies that we are not familiar with. And here we have the benefit to continuously asking ChatGPT what it means. This is a Lean Startup approach to learning, only learning what is required for the task at hand, not point learning a bundle of other knowledge that will not be used in the future. By asking ChatGPT to explain any dependencies to the concept we want to uncover, we can simply quickly expand our web of knowledge centred around the question we are curious about. In other words, we learn just enough contextual information in the field to understand the answer to the question we have.

In my personal experience, going through the process of Knowledge Drilling often allows me to reach the frontiers of science within an hour, where ChatGPT will admit that the answer to the question I have is still an area of active research, and it is able to make further postulations on what hypothesis there could be. Reaching the frontiers of science in the topic that I am completely unfamilar with is unheard of. Typically, people need a Bachelors or a Masters to start doing research at the frontiers of science, but with ChatGPT, this is no longer required.