Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”*…
Long-time readers of (R)D will know of your correspondent’s affection for– and commitment to– archives and archiving: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, or here. As the new administration is sytematically scrubbing government websites of public data and threatening the National Archive, it’s a painfully-timely concern.
Digital pioneer Mark Pesce weighs in with a reminder that our archiving efforts should be broad– and that we shouldn’t neglect the personal…
When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life’s work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I’ve been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years’ worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I’d always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he’d also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I’d known Tony for two decades, but he’d never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It’s an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we’re no longer around to spruik them?
The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony’s other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won’t disappear completely.
Half an hour after I’d learned of Tony’s passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we’d call the “New Age” movement. Although the society’s star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
As Errol Morris has said, “People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.” The best defense is wide distribution (per the full Aaron Swartz quote, below).
Where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? “Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise,” from @mpesce.arvr.social.ap.brid.gy in @theregister.com.
See also: “Century-Scale Storage” from Maxwell Neely-Cohen and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School
Oh, and now is a good time to visit– and support– the Internet Archive.
* “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” — Aaron Swartz
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As we prioritize protection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1497 that Dominican friar and populist agitator Girolamo Savonarola, having convinced the citizenry of Florence to expel the Medici and recruited the city-state’s youth in a puritanical campaign, presided over “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the public burning of art works, books, cosmetics, and other items deemed to be vessels of personal aggrandizement. Many art historians, relying on Vasari‘s account, believe that Botticelli, a partisan of Savonarola, consigned several of his paintings to the flames (and then “fell into very great distress”). Others are not so certain. In any case, it seems sure that the fire consumed works by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other painters, along with books by Boccaccio, manuscripts of secular songs, a number of statues, and other antiquities.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”*…
The end of the year approaches, and thoughts turn to retrospectives. In what has become a (Roughly) Daily tradition, today’s edition features a year-end recap from the estimable Tom Whitwell, who shares a full deck of fascinating things he learned in 2024. For example…
6. The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]
7. Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]
22. In 2022, 55% of Macy’s income came from credit cards rather than retail sales. That’s fairly normal for US department stores. [Pan Kwan Yuk]
29. You can buy 200 real human molars for $900. [B for Bones, via Lauren]
32. In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5. [Our World in Data, via Boyan Slat]
42. n the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Spider-Man: Homecoming), up almost 300% since the 1990s. [Daniel Parris]
46. Between the 1920s and 1950s, millions of ‘enemies of the people’ — often educated elites — were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union. Today, the areas around those camps are more prosperous and productive than similar areas. [Toews & Vézina]
Many more fascinating factoids at: “52 things I learned in 2024,” from @TomWhitwell.
Previous lists: 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023… and sprinkled throughout the December postings in (R)D over the years.
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As we forage, we might recall that on this date in 1968 Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was in the middle of its seven-week occupancy of the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.
A year earlier, Gladys Knight and the Pips had had a hit with the tune (#1 on the R&B chart; #2 on the Hot 100). Gaye’s version overtook its predecessor and became the biggest hit single on the Motown family of labels up to that point. The Gaye recording has since become an acclaimed soul classic. In 1998 the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “historical, artistic and significant” value.
“I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”*…
The estimable Nicholas Carr observes that “you don’t make friends by telling people they’re not as smart as they think they are. And you definitely don’t make friends by telling all of humanity that it’s not as smart as it thinks it is. That’s why the philosophical school of Mysterianism has never caught on with the public.” As an amateur Mysterian himself, he reprises a 2017 essay to spread the good word…
By leaps, steps, and stumbles, science progresses. Its seemingly inexorable advance promotes a sense that everything can be known and will be known. Through observation and experiment, and lots of hard thinking, we will come to explain even the murkiest and most complicated of nature’s secrets: consciousness, dark matter, time, the origin and fate of the universe.
But what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as Mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many prominent thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the linguist Noam Chomsky to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The Mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that many of the mysteries of the cosmos will forever lie beyond our comprehension.
Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The Mysterians suggest that the human mind is incapable of understanding itself, that we will never know how consciousness works. But if Mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”
The simplest and best argument for Mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the physiology of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has put it, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.
Mysterianism, it’s important to emphasize, is not inconsistent with materialism [with theism or idealism]. The Mysterians don’t suggest that what’s unknowable has to be spiritual or otherwise otherworldly. They posit that matter itself has complexities that lie beyond our ken. Like every other animal on earth, we humans are just not smart enough to understand all of nature’s laws and workings.
What’s truly disconcerting about Mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns. “As to myself,” remarked Isaac Newton in his old age, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” It may be that we are all like that child on the strand, playing with the odd pebble or shell — and fated to remain so.
Mysterianism teaches us humility. Through science, we have come to understand much about nature, but much more may remain outside the scope of our perception and comprehension. If the Mysterians are right, science’s ultimate achievement may be to reveal to us its own limits…
On unknowable unknowns: Question Marks of the Mysterians, from @roughtype in his terrific newsletter, New Cartographies.
Pair with Flatland (here and here) and Godel’s second incompleteness theorem.
* Socrates (per Plato in Apology 22d)
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As we wonder, we might recall that it was on this date (tough different sources offer different November dates) in 1966 that 96 Tears, the debut studio album by the American garage rock band ? and the Mysterians was released. The title single, which had been released some months earlier was at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100; the album joined the single on the charts for fifteen weeks; the follow-up single “I Need Somebody” charted for ten weeks.
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge”*…
Learning from the past: as John Thornhill explains in his consideration of Jason Roberts‘ Every Living Thing, the rivalry between Buffon and Linnaeus has lessons about disrupters and exploitation…
The aristocratic French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon chose a good year to die: 1788. Reflecting his status as a star of the Enlightenment and author of 35 popular volumes on natural history, Buffon’s funeral carriage drawn by 14 horses was watched by an estimated 20,000 mourners as it processed through Paris. A grateful Louis XVI had earlier erected a statue of a heroic Buffon in the Jardin du Roi, over which the naturalist had masterfully presided. “All nature bows to his genius,” the inscription read.
The next year the French Revolution erupted. As a symbol of the ancien regime, Buffon was denounced as an enemy of progress, his estates in Burgundy seized, and his son, known as the Buffonet, guillotined. In further insult to his memory, zealous revolutionaries marched through the king’s gardens (nowadays known as the Jardin des Plantes) with a bust of Buffon’s great rival, Carl Linnaeus. They hailed the Swedish scientific revolutionary as a true man of the people.
The intense intellectual rivalry between Buffon and Linnaeus, which still resonates today, is fascinatingly told by the author Jason Roberts in his book Every Living Thing, my holiday reading while staying near Buffon’s birthplace in Burgundy. Natural history, like all history, might be written by the victors, as Roberts argues. And for a long time, Linnaeus’s highly influential, but flawed, views held sway. But the book makes a sympathetic case for the further rehabilitation of the much-maligned Buffon.
The two men were, as Roberts writes, exact contemporaries and polar opposites. While Linnaeus obsessed about classifying all biological species into neat categories with fixed attributes and Latin names (Homo sapiens, for example), Buffon emphasised the vast diversity and constantly changing nature of every living thing.
In Roberts’s telling, Linnaeus emerges as a brilliant but ruthless dogmatist, who ignored inconvenient facts that did not fit his theories and gave birth to racial pseudoscience. But it was Buffon’s painstaking investigations and acceptance of complexity that helped inspire the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, who later acknowledged that the Frenchman’s ideas were “laughably like mine”.
In two aspects, at least, this 18th-century scientific clash rhymes with our times. The first is to show how intellectual knowledge can often be a source of financial gain. The discovery of crops and commodities in other parts of the world and the development of new methods of cultivation had a huge impact on the economy in that era. “All that is useful to man originates from these natural objects,” Linnaeus wrote. “In one word, it is the foundation of every industry.”
Great wealth was generated from trade in sugar, potatoes, coffee, tea and cochineal while Linnaeus himself explored ways of cultivating pineapples, strawberries and freshwater pearls.
“In many ways, the discipline of natural history in the 18th century was roughly analogous to technology today: a means of disrupting old markets, creating new ones, and generating fortunes in the process,” Roberts writes. As a former software engineer at Apple and a West Coast resident, Roberts knows the tech industry.
Then as now, the addition of fresh inputs into the economy — whether natural commodities back then or digital data today — can lead to astonishing progress, benefiting millions. But it can also lead to exploitation. As Roberts tells me in a telephone interview, it was the scaling up of the sugar industry in the West Indies that led to the slave trade. “Sometimes we think we are inventing the future when we are retrofitting the past,” he says.
The second resonance with today is the danger of believing we know more than we do. Roberts compares Buffon’s state of “curious unknowing” to the concept of “negative capability” described by the English poet John Keats. In a letter written in 1817, Keats argued that we should resist the temptation to explain away things we do not properly understand and accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Armed today with instant access to information and smart machines, the temptation is to ascribe a rational order to everything, as Linnaeus did. But scientific progress depends on a humble acceptance of relative ignorance and a relentless study of the fabric of reality. The spooky nature of quantum mechanics would have blown Linnaeus’s mind. If Buffon still teaches us anything, it is to study the peculiarity of things as they are, not as we might wish them to be…
“What an epic 18th-century scientific row teaches us today,” @johnthornhillft on @itsJason in @FT (gift link)
Pair with “Frameworks” from Céline Henne (@celinehenne) “Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation.”
* Daniel J. Boorstin
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As we embrace the exceptions, we might send carefully-coded birthday greetings to John McCarthy; he was born on this date in 1927. An eminent computer and cognitive scientist– he was awarded both the Turning Prize and the National Medal of Science– McCarthy coined the phrase “artificial Intelligence” to describe the field of which he was a founder.
It was McCarthy’s 1979 article, “Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines” (in which he wrote, “Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance”) that provoked John Searle‘s 1980 disagreement in the form of his famous Chinese Room Argument… provoking a broad debate that continues to this day.
“I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”*…
As Joshua Rothman reminds us, we have a lot to learn from studying our ignorance…
… The truth, of course, is that we’re ignorant about the future. Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? What will skyscrapers, or smartphones, or schools look like in thirty years? We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions. But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize,” the philosopher Daniel DeNicola writes, in his book “Understanding Ignorance.” The more you know, the more precisely you can say what you don’t.
DeNicola’s book is an entry in a subfield of philosophy called “agnotology”—the study of ignorance. As philosophical subfields go, agnotology sounds abstract and even a little contradictory: what could it even mean to study what’s unknown? And yet, because ignorance is actually an everyday condition from which we all suffer, the study of it is quite down to earth. Have you ever been in a bookstore, leafed through a weighty tome, and then returned it to the shelf? You are practicing “rational ignorance,” DeNicola writes, by making “the more-or-less conscious decision that something is not worth knowing—at least for me, at least not now.” (In an information-rich society, he notes, knowing when to maintain this kind of ignorance is actually an important skill.) Have you ever tuned out a gossipy friend because you don’t want to know who said what about whom? Deciding that you’d rather be above the fray is “strategic ignorance”; you embrace it because it will make life better, deploying it when you decide not to read the reviews before seeing a movie, or conduct a hiring process in which the names of the candidates are obscured. There’s a big difference between strategic ignorance and what DeNicola calls “involuntary” ignorance: “In the iconic image, Justice is blindfolded, not blind,” he writes.
My wife’s parents have a box of letters that were sent between her grandfather and her grandmother while he was serving in the Navy during the Second World War. The box is in the basement; no one has read the letters, and no one plans to. This reflects a valid concern for privacy, but it also involves what DeNicola calls “willful ignorance”—the persistent, long-term maintenance of a gap in one’s knowledge that could easily be filled in. Willful ignorance isn’t necessarily bad; it might be wise to avoid learning the disturbing details of a half-forgotten traumatic event, for instance, lest they keep the trauma fresh. But we should be wary of willful ignorance, DeNicola argues, because it often flows from fear. “Consider a mother who is so upset about her son’s military service that she refuses to discuss it while he remains on active duty,” DeNicola writes. Or a voter who refuses to read about a favored candidate’s ongoing scandal. “The benefits of willful ignorance tend to be overestimated by those who exhibit it”; knowledge can be a path to overcoming fear.
DeNicola argues that, even when we don’t choose ignorance, there are ways in which we must “dwell in ignorance,” no matter what we do. We’re ignorant of most of what happened in the past because, despite our efforts at historical reconstruction, “worlds disappear” in the flow of time. We’re ignorant about the future not just because we don’t know what will happen but because we lack the ideas needed to comprehend future knowledge: “Galileo could not have known that solar flares produce bursts of radiation,” for example, because the very idea of radiation depends on a “framework of theoretical concepts” that wasn’t developed until hundreds of years after he lived. It turns out that there’s a special word, “ignoration,” which describes the condition of people who “do not even know that they do not know.” In a broad, almost existential sense, we all live in ignoration all the time. Recognizing this makes knowing what you don’t know feel like a step forward—even an opportunity to be seized…
… In a recent book called “Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity,” a German philosopher named Markus Gabriel argues that our personhood is partly based on ignorance—that “to be someone, to be a subject, is to be wrong about something.” It’s intuitive to hold the opposite view—to say that we are the sum of what we know. But Gabriel points out that, even when you know something to be true, you probably also know that there are aspects of it about which you’re probably wrong. I encountered this phenomenon recently when my son asked me to explain the meaning of “E=mc2”—but, also, when I tried to tell him about how I’d met his mom. “We were riding up in an elevator, and we started talking, and then she got off,” I said. “And then, later, when I was riding down, she got back on.”
This story is true, but also wreathed in inevitable uncertainties. What exactly did we say to one another? What were we wearing, or thinking, or feeling, before and after? There are limits to recollection, and to noticing in the moment; life is short, and you can’t know it all, not even about yourself. But you can know, at least to some extent, what you chose not to know and what you wished you’d found out. You can understand what you looked away from, and toward…
“What Don’t We Know?” from @joshuarothman in @NewYorker.
* Socrates, from Plato, Apology 22d
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As we noodle on nescience, we might send bodacious birthday greetings to that most fabulous of flappers, Betty Boop; she made her first appearance on this date in 1930. The creation of animator Max Fleischer, she debuted in “Dizzy Dishes” (in which, still unevolved as a character, she is drawn as an anthropomorphic female dog).
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