The Usenet Motto.

"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." -- Caron de Beaumarchais.

You probably know about Car Talk, the public radio talk show about cars and car repair. The hosts, Click and Clack (a/k/a Tom and Ray Magliozzi) once had a spirited conversation about whether two people who don't know anything about a subject know more or less the one person who doesn't know anything about that subject.

The answer, of course, is that two people know less. Two people arguing about something that neither knows anything about are capable of building an entire towering construct of ignorance and supposition, each particle of non- or mis-information building on the one previous.

[Over the Edge]

This quote has been making the rounds recently, generally in a critical way. On the other hand, I've been thinking about learning this week and I'm not inclined to be so critical.

If you turn the phrase around, don't you get something along the lines of "in order to understand things, you have to argue about them?" Certainly in learning settings it's nice if someone knows something to get the ball rolling, but it isn't necessary. I'd argue (naturally) that the scientific method is essentially a set of rules for how to argue about things you don't understand in order to understand them better.

I don't think it's the lack of understanding that's the issue here. Rather, it's the intent of the argument. If you enter the argument with the eye toward developing deeper understanding and the willingness to abandon your initial hypotheses, then you're learning and you're doing science. If you enter with the intent to bring others around to your position willy-nilly, then you're doing debate or politics instead.

The forms look remarkably similar, yet the stance toward learning and understanding is diametrically opposed.

2:31:43 PM •  • comment  

Phil Wolff left me a comment noting the following:

"How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a million or even a billion people?" Adrian Scott's contribution to the Edge World Question Center for 2002.

Darned good question.

I subscribe to more than 400 RSS news sources and weblogs now. That is an eight hour day just to keep up. Prioritization, filtering, trusted recommendation, summarization, threading, clustering and related techniques are becoming mandatory to manage the flow in a reasonable time.

Adrian's answer includes the idea of a personal Customer Relationship Management system. Maybe Radio will become part of this? I'd like to see Ryze, my Palm Desktop, and Outlook better integrated with Radio."

I don't have anything to add to this except to say 1) 400 news sources beats my measly 136 (does size matter when it comes to number of feeds subscribed to?), and 2) ditto to everything else. And add extra dittos in bold and italics for the Palm and Outlook wishes, too.

I know Adam Curry does weird and wonderful things with his calendar, but it's a bit over my head to say exactly what those things are. I wonder if they could be part of the equation, too (as might vCalendar). Naturally, I can't find the link to his description of it at the moment, but I know part of it includes making each day's events an RSS file.

[The Shifted Librarian]

A good example of how to think about the ways that technology might be used as an all in dealing with an information/knowledge intensive world. It's also a good example of the need for individual knowledge workers to adopt a design stance toward their own work practices.

2:20:53 PM •  • comment