Deutsch essentially thinks that humans are what I think he called at one point "universal knowledge generators". I confess that I don't fully understand his argument for this claim. It seemed to be something like the idea that we can in principle run a universal Turing machine. He does apparently discuss this idea more in his book The Beginning of Infinity, but I haven't read it yet.
I haven't read it yet.
What would you think of a loose convention to not say one hasn't learned about a specific thing yet?
Saying that I haven't read something yet makes me more likely to think others think I am more likely to read it than if I hadn't said "yet". But that prematurely gives me some of the prestige that makes me want to read it in the first place, making it less likely I will.
This thread is for discussing anything that doesn't seem to deserve its own post.
If the resulting discussion becomes impractical to continue here, it means the topic is a promising candidate for its own thread.