a mini-post
First a caveat - I have almost no background in the social sciences.
This week a few people have written about information overload. It’s certainly been with us since the beginning of the 16th century in the Western world and one can make arguments that extend further back. The rate of new knowledge, as opposed to raw information, has increased in many fields, doubling or more every decade and causing many fields to fission into new subfields. It’s a major cause of the imposter syndrome I feel when I’m trying to hack through a paper in low temperature physics for example … sixty years ago there wasn’t a problem thinking about both.
We deal with the information increase by specializing and creating what are often rich traditions. I’ve been able to carry on rich conversations with people where I have no Mandarin and the other person had almost no English by jotting abstractions and drawings of our shared tradition on a blackboard (slate blackboards are another tradition in my field) .
But these traditions blind us to the greater knowledge around us. .. It reminds me of the early experiment where you train a dog to respond to a bell. When you measure the brainwave of the dog you get a clear signal when the bell is rung. Now put a piece of juicy meat before the dog and ring the bell. The bell signal is nowhere to be found - it’s been overridden by the sight and/or the smell of the meat.
It’s funny - we don’t make progress without tradition, but it can also blind us to the greater world.. My belief is it’s important to communicate across the boundaries of the many traditions. I think this is an area where the arts are very powerful. We’re resorting to mechanisms we don’t have a real grasp on.. machine learning comes to mind.. to deal with some of this. There are many views on the subject, but I’m guessing it isn’t as useful as many suggest.
Finally there's an issue in traditions where knowledge doesn’t increase rapidly. How to be kind, how to be a good person, love, peace. Areas where people a long time ago had figured things out within the context of their tradition and arguably we haven’t made progress..
anyway .. just random thoughts on a rainy Spring evening. There are so many issues here that are interesting to think about.
Enjoy the Spring and listen to some music and enjoy some art. And some of you are creatives so create rather than sit back!
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A note on ignorance .. that's a complex subject in it's own right, but the title seems to fit.
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