[HN Gopher] We are drowning in information while starving for wi...
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We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 284 points
Date : 2022-12-21 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (realizeengineering.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (realizeengineering.blog)
| brightball wrote:
| Information: Here are some facts
|
| Wisdom: What facts are missing and why do these facts matter?
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Drowning in information... Starving for wisdom...
|
| No matter what we come up with, we still have to seek wisdom from
| the wise. The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise.
|
| This gives me hope for humanity, and makes me love God more.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise.
|
| Remember when everyone was all about "the wisdom of crowds,"
| when talking about social media? Yeah, that isn't something
| anyone says or thinks about now. How quickly did that meme die?
| And if AI is built from that data, by definition, it cannot be
| wise.
|
| As Solomon realized, wisdom is a very powerful virtue.
| dimal wrote:
| I've been thinking of creating a startup founded with the mission
| to organize the world's information and make it universally
| accessible and useful. Since there isn't any other company doing
| this, I think it could really take off.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| ... How would you monetize it?
|
| Wikipedia is the closest thing to what you describe, and they
| have to petition for donations yearly.
| SPBS wrote:
| Google search results vs reddit threads
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| - Reddit threads get pulled in search results.
|
| - Reddit (and HN) are bad for "wisdom" because they are
| deliberately violating netiquette : once in a while, starting a
| new thread is wrong, and necroposting is right, and reddit
| prevents this by locking the thread.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Knowledge is memorizing information
|
| Smart is being able to absorb and process things quickly
|
| Wisdom is knowing and picking the right course of action
|
| Understanding is knowing why, and what you're trading with this
| choice
| jmartrican wrote:
| After playing with chatGPT, I'm thinking one solution would be to
| have chatGPT be trained on all these scientific papers, and then
| we can just ask it any questions we may have. Obviously, any
| answers would be thoroughly vetted, but it may be able to
| drastically reduce the time from paper to wisdom.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Facebook tried this: https://galactica.org/
|
| Apparently they took it offline after seeing that it generates
| fake information:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adyw9/facebook-pulls-its-ne...
| jmartrican wrote:
| Very interesting. Did they use GPT-3?
| mjreacher wrote:
| This issue has been talked about quite a bit over the past few
| years and to me it comes down fundamentally to incentives
| academics have to keep churning papers because that's what they
| get measured on. Of course the good thing about that is that you
| can change the incentives, just as how science funding changed
| significantly post WW2, but I'm afraid just like in many
| problematic areas of society nowadays there is a large group of
| people who benefit from this situation and are hence hostile to
| any sort of change. As such if change does come I think it will
| have to be top down rather than bottom up.
|
| For an interesting perspective the physicist Murray Gell-Mann
| spoke on similar issues in a 1997 interview:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Intelligence is what you know, and wisdom is knowing how to use
| what you know.
|
| It's intelligent to know how to start a fire and wisdom to know
| where NOT to start one.
|
| We've got enough intelligence and enough wisdom. What we also
| have is collective, weaponized purposeful ignorance. People who
| know better but believe that by banding together with other
| people, they can force society to abandon both their intelligence
| and their wisdom.
| eruci wrote:
| Wiser words have rarely been spoken.
| kraig911 wrote:
| Google any recipe you want to cook to experience this phenomenon.
| brink wrote:
| Thinking of wisdom like food is a good analogy. But there are no
| "hunger pangs" when we starve for wisdom and no direct dopamine
| release when we consume wisdom (without training). The reward of
| wisdom is a better and happier life, and may take weeks / months
| to reveal its benefits unlike the immediate pleasure of eating.
| So few people care about it because it takes vision and patience,
| and does not reveal itself immediately.
|
| More or less, people generally don't seek wisdom because they
| have poor vision for the future.
| fleddr wrote:
| The frustrating part is that excellent content, the type that is
| relevant, well researched, well written, that stands head and
| shoulders above anything else is out there. More than ever
| before.
|
| I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in
| multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a
| wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in,
| read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is
| so damn good.
|
| But I have to actively store them to notes or bookmarks, because
| you'll never find a single one in Google.
|
| Google has become completely broken for me. In general it returns
| low quality verbose content, which seems a variation of keyword
| spamming from 20 years ago. Gonna be great when those crappy
| pages can be generated with AI.
|
| Google promotes stale content that is outdated or simply
| incorrect over anything else. And not only that, this effect
| strengthens over time.
|
| Google increasingly dismisses your input. You type a few words
| and it simply drops a few.
|
| Google has no understanding of meaning. You'll type "red flower
| thailand" and it'll just include flowers from any other random
| country, including those not even red.
|
| Google indexes everything and still can't figure out an original
| source. It'll show you spammy Pinterest garbage over the actual
| high quality source.
|
| So here we are. We do have a treasure chest of wisdom. But wisdom
| doesn't click ads so fuck us I guess. And if this isn't
| depressing enough, Google will continue to get away with it.
| Google only has to work for the masses posing normie surface
| level questions. It does that. It works.
| WhiteBlueSkies wrote:
| Which newsletter are you subscribed to?
| lumenwrites wrote:
| > I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in
| multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's
| a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As
| in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because
| it is so damn good.
|
| Can you recommend your favorite ones?
|
| I'm particularly interested in startups/tech/programming/AI
| topics, but if you know some great examples from other fields,
| please share them as well!
| bluetwo wrote:
| Pages filled with crappy generated AI are what I get every time
| I have searched for anything recently.
|
| Which leads people to post what would be their google search to
| Reddit, after finding any group related to the topic.
|
| Which is leading to Reddit forums being filled with the same
| beginner questions over and over and over and over...
|
| ... from people who don't even bother to join the group.
| wnolens wrote:
| I don't know this article grasps what wisdom is, except for being
| able to shallowly write out a definition.
|
| There's tons of wisdom out there, but the more widely applicable
| it is (across different people/experiences), the more abstract or
| general it must to be and is thus not directly applicable.
|
| Specific wisdom (like for a highly constrained problem) is
| awesome, but you and your life are quite unique so this is very
| hard to find or probably doesn't exist. (Should I move away from
| home for a job? Well.. that depends on a thousand factors AND
| your unique self)
|
| Trying to optimize for wisdom is a little like optimizing for
| meaning, I think. Adopting it from others can be counter
| productive.
| amelius wrote:
| If only we could apply collaborative filtering to webpages.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This article is totally ignoring the existence of academic
| "handbooks", which is where the wisdom lies.
|
| The whole idea is that individual papers are _supposed_ to be
| exploratory, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
| They 're _supposed_ to be a deluge of information.
|
| But then every decade or so a team of academics take it upon
| themselves to serve as editors to a handbook, which attempts to
| survey the field in terms of history, where the most value has
| been found so far (and what hasn't panned out), and current
| promising directions. Usually something like 20-50 chapters, each
| contributed by a different author.
|
| If you want to get into the wisdom of a field, the first thing
| you do is pull out the most recent 800-page handbook, read the
| first few chapters, and then drill down in your area of interest
| on the remaining part.
|
| To say there "are no prizes for wisdom" is absurd, when being
| selected to publish in a handbook (or being an editor) is
| prestigious, a mark that you've very much "made it" in the field.
|
| And of course there are plenty of other things that serve similar
| roles, such as literature review papers or similar. (In
| philosophy you can write a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
| article, for instance.)
|
| If you aren't finding wisdom anywhere, it means you're simply not
| looking right.
|
| (And this isn't even to mention the fact that at some point
| somebody will popularize major progress in a field in a general-
| audience book, e.g. when Daniel Goleman wrote the book "Emotional
| Intelligence" or Stephen Hawking wrote "A Brief History of
| Time".)
| earthicus wrote:
| I agree with you that academic summary works are probably the
| best way for a non-researcher to learn what exists, what's
| known (and what isn't). Since i've never seen them discussed or
| referenced on this website, let me also point out the existence
| of academic encyclopedias, such as the Springer encyclopedia of
| algoriths[1] (each entry is essentially a slightly more
| pedagogical review article about a subfield or important
| problem in CS, along with loads of references to the literature
| for digging deeper), and the delightful encyclopedia of
| distances [2](800 pages long!). A couple others i've seen that
| may be of interest to this audience are the encyclopedia of
| systems and control[3], and the encyclopedia of unconventional
| computing[4]
|
| Unfortunately some of these are absurdly expensive, so if you
| don't want to go the piracy route the cheapest way to access
| them is to get a membership to your local public university's
| library system, which in the US typically costs like $100 a
| year or something.
|
| [1]
| https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-2...
|
| [2] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-52844-0
|
| [3]
| https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-44...
|
| [4]
| https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4939-6...
| grahar64 wrote:
| If I am doing academic study the fastest way to find good
| information is to find couple recent studies and cross match
| their references for common citations.
|
| This often ends up in summary papers, foundational papers and
| papers with well founded experiments. The fact as a society we
| pay for millions of researchers to do (mostly) research is a
| resource many people ignore.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| You can pull this trick with academic books, too. If you find
| such a work in some niche subfield you know little about, but
| aren't sure that book's a good place to start, odds are good
| the author will name-drop most of the really important books
| & authors in the introduction. If you do this with two or
| three and cross-reference, any mentioned in more than one is
| probably something you ought to look at.
| yamrzou wrote:
| Maybe the article is highlighting the fact that scientific
| papers are more accessible to the general public than
| handbooks: You can easily find academic papers on Arxiv or
| Google Scholar, newspapers cite them, etc. While handbooks
| don't get much publicity.
| kashyapc wrote:
| An example[1] of these academic 800+ pager "handbooks" from
| Neuroscience:
|
| _" Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind"_ by
| Gazzaniga et al.
|
| I don't own a physical copy of it yet (only digital), but I do
| have a copy of an equally outstanding book[2] called _"
| Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain"_ by Bear et al. An excellent
| thing about this book is that each chapter has a small section
| called "Path to Discovery" where leading researchers on a given
| topic (including Nobel winners such as Eric Kandel) briefly
| share their story of _how_ they arrived at their discoveries.
| Another excellent aspect of this book is its rich set of visual
| illustrations of complex topics. It makes learning a joy. I
| find their high price justified.
|
| [1] https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393603170
|
| [2]
| https://www.jblearning.com/catalog/productdetails/9781284211...
| aiwv wrote:
| Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in
| spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how
| they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds
| like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current
| state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing
| the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select
| their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a
| handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to
| send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively
| expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more
| radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might
| be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm
| likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I
| bring in.
| Tainnor wrote:
| If there are different schools within a field, every one of
| them might have a handbook (so you might have a handbook on
| linguistic typology, and on the other hand a handbook on
| generative grammar - although often the topics are even more
| narrow), so they still are useful to get a survey of the land
| even when there are different schools of thought. I also do
| not at all share your sense that all science is crazy
| antagonistic and political in the sense that "institutions
| discourage radical ideas" - maybe that's true of some fields,
| but definitely not all of them (for example, the idea makes
| no sense at all for mathematics). Even when different
| opinions and schools of thought exist that doesn't
| necessarily mean that there's nothing that people can agree
| on.
|
| But more concretely, you can just look up the authors that
| contributed to the handbook and if you do indeed have a
| degree in the field, you'll probably recognise them and their
| affiliations and will be able to know (or at least look up)
| what tradition they belong to and what this implies for the
| handbook.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Is that advanced degree an academic oriented one or industry
| oriented?
|
| People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a
| lot. But industry oriented degrees tend to stick with
| textbooks. (By the way, yes, textbooks are the other kind
| where you can find wisdom. Normally in an easier to get, more
| condensed form, but of an older kind.)
|
| About who selects the books, well, who tells you if a book is
| any good? Some have very radical untested ideas, others stick
| to older but proven ones. You decide what book to get.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a
| lot.
|
| Are you from the EU? Becuase having been in US STEM
| graduate programs in 2 different fields I have never come
| across such a handbook or know anyone who has. It's
| certainly not common in the US.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, how do you reliably trust anything?
|
| I've never seen a handbook that led anyone "wildly astray".
| They're put out by major academic publishers (Oxford,
| Routledge, etc.) who hire (publishing) editors qualified to
| select qualified (academic) editors to select qualified
| chapter contributors. It's not like they're randos self-
| publishing or something.
|
| The entire point is to be a fairly neutral, comprehensive
| state of whatever field or subfield the handbook covers. And
| they generally do a pretty good job. A place like Oxford is
| never going to publish a handbook that's trying to push some
| ideological agenda and ignoring half the field.
|
| But if you don't trust the senior editors at major academic
| presses, then I don't know what to tell you.
|
| And since you've never heard of handbooks, see my peer
| comment with links so you can see they exist. :)
| NhanH wrote:
| Could you please give some examples of handbooks in some
| fields? I have read survey papers but this is the first time
| I've heard about the handbook concept
| crazygringo wrote:
| Routledge and Oxford are major publishers. Browse to your
| heart's content:
|
| https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/home
|
| https://academic.oup.com/pages/oxford-handbooks
|
| One I've read cover-to-cover, for example, is the OUP
| Handbook of Political Science:
|
| https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/35474
| civopsec wrote:
| The problem with this is that it's hard to blog about it without
| making yourself a hypocrite.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| A key part of a scientific-research education is learning how to
| filter the vast pool of literature and recover interesting and
| meaningful books, reviews and primary publications. It's not that
| trivial and is definitely a learned skill.
|
| Take the author's example, 'entropy'. Well, a one-word search is
| of course going to generate a massive pile of unsorted material.
| Internet Archive Scholar gives ~873,000 hits. Nice resource by
| the way:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919823
|
| If you knew nothing about entropy, but knew how to research, you
| might start with, "okay, when is the first appearance of the word
| 'entropy' in the literature" and you quickly discover it's Ludwig
| Boltzmann, 1872. Seems to have something to do with energy and
| information, and if we add in those terms, we're down to 284K
| hits. At this point, you might think "I bet someone has written a
| good book on this broad topic, maybe I shouldn't be looking at
| the primary literature until later."
|
| Notice that adding search terms narrows results? Keep doing that
| until you get a smaller number of hits. Now, you can grab the top
| dozen or so papers, and flip to the bibliography, and look to see
| if they all reference a landmark paper (this is related to
| searching by citation count). That's probably one you want to
| look at.
|
| With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines, the
| same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get better
| results. If you find a site with a good article, search that site
| for more. For example, this gives a lot of good results, for the
| role of entropy in machine learning concepts at least:
|
| 'site:towardsdatascience.com entropy Shannon'
|
| It's basically mining a haystack for needles. There are lots of
| techniques and strategies one can use to speed up the process.
| sitkack wrote:
| I point people to ESR's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"
| [1], using a search engine (and libraries) is indeed an
| important skill that must be learned and honed.
|
| I really enjoyed Fravia's [2] SearchLores [3] site on how to
| dig deep into the knowledge of the internet. Most people rarely
| cross the boundary of the SEO sludge into the really good
| stuff.
|
| There are a couple easy patterns, starting from a seed to
| iteratively widen and deepen the context.
|
| Wikipedia, Archive.org, site:edu, filetype:pdf, libgen, and now
| chat.openai.com
|
| I just asked chatgpt, 'What is a good home experiment to show
| the concept of "entropy"' and the answer was excellent.
|
| I then tried the same question on DDG but appended "site:edu"
| and found https://paradigms.oregonstate.edu/activity/325/
|
| Now I am off to do the "Time Dilation Clock Skit" with my kid
|
| https://paradigms.oregonstate.edu/activity/548/
|
| [1] https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
| (something wrong with his certs)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia
|
| [3]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191201105758/http://search.lor...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines,
| the same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get
| better results.
|
| Not anymore. For a decade or so.
|
| Nowadays adding terms on general purpose internet search
| engines makes your results less focused, not more.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. Something like:
|
| 'entropy shannon machine learning differential'
|
| will give more focused results than just 'entropy',
| certainly. I suppose there is some limit, is that what you
| mean? Even there, if I add 'literature review' the results
| get more focused.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you add terms until a search engine gets out of results
| it considers relevant, it will start rewriting your query
| until it finds relevant results again.
|
| Your examples only work because there are plenty of popular
| sites that talk about this stuff.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think what you're addressing here is that search
| engines are not infinite. I think one of the things
| that's changed here in the past view years is 'infinite
| shit SEO engines'. Some of these sites are obvious and
| you can type random statements and see that some series
| of garbage sites attempt to give hits on it. There are
| less obvious versions of these sites, and I'm assuming
| they are much harder for Google to detect.
|
| Now things boil down to the Chinese room problem. Take a
| topic with no 'popular' sites that can work as traffic
| directors. How can Google determine if you're
| authoritative on the subject, or if you're just a SEO
| site spitting out spam?
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| I'm only commenting because by coincidence, I wrote a similar
| google search yesterday
|
| -----------------------
|
| The first page of results for
|
| "dan dill entropy site:bu.edu"
|
| Yields
|
| https://www.bu.edu/genchem/ch131-summer-1-2021/notes/SecondL...
| dchuk wrote:
| When working with our enterprise customers (we make a platform
| for commercial vehicles), I frequently hear "we want as much data
| as you can give us"
|
| Which I tend to politely respond to with "You want insights.
| Unless you have a means to effectively extract those from all
| that data we can give you, that data is just a liability for
| you."
|
| Most data is noise. Finding the needle in the haystacks (or the
| patterns that are actually the needles more likely) is. where all
| the value is.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Marginally related (software?) rant: every time I want to learn
| how something specific works or I want to do something oddly
| specific I keep running in the same phenomenon. Google mostly
| returns vague abstract fluff and Stack Overflow tells me it
| really, really shouldn't be done because [reason]. It's like most
| of human written content caps out at about the level of
| description ChatGPT could deliver. Like there's a "knowledge
| event horizon".
|
| After that it always ends in hard to parse research papers,
| specifications, jumping around the source code of multiple
| libraries, debugging or reverse engineering. If I get lucky I
| might land on a 15 year old blog post that no man has seen since
| inception and it describes exactly what I wanted to know.
|
| And that's just software. Humans know exactly what parts went
| into it and how it works. Why must wisdom always be squeezed out
| of a rock? Why is only the fluff copied thousands of times making
| research harder each day? Why are there never indicators which
| way to dig for more details?
|
| T__T
| [deleted]
| shanebellone wrote:
| I cannot relate to your experience. Python docs are almost
| always sufficient for my needs. I rarely use Stack Overflow but
| find it more useful for examples or semantic discussions.
|
| I view documentation as a set facts and stack overflow as
| additional color.
|
| What type of projects require this workflow?
| elorant wrote:
| Because it's easy to monetize crap. So no one takes the time to
| reproduce valuable content.
| winReInstall wrote:
| The problem is one of the precision of the question and the
| scope of the answer. Usually some questions are just indicative
| of a complete lack of understanding of the field, basically
| making a whole comp science course necessary to answer in
| depth.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
| unity1001 wrote:
| Google screwed its search during Eric Schmidt's term with the
| mentality of "Brands will sort out the mess" to 'combat spam'.
| The result is a few big sites dominating the search in
| everything instead of the original results that used to be
| before those updates. The first infamous one being 'Panda' I
| believe.
|
| It succeeded in eliminating spam from a lot of small sites and
| instead resulting in an even bigger spam from the same big
| sites for every category. Great for people who were doing shoe-
| shopping at, well, Amazon, probably, but bad for everyone else.
|
| Then they increasingly personalized search results via AI. And
| that changes your search results so fast that you may not get
| the same seach results for the same exact keyword in a week's
| time.
|
| Im increasingly of the opinion that corporate, 'business
| mentality' should not run any major tech corp. It sees
| everything in numbers and extreme abstractions, juggling them
| to make a desirable false reality happen in paper and in
| metrics, screwing up the real world for every user.
| fleddr wrote:
| Panda has taught me a lot.
|
| Just before it hit, I had a small site that was on the rise
| in terms of traffic. A hobbyist site, no ads, all original
| content, and very much not "thin". An enthusiast site, much
| like the original internet. Incoming links were organic and
| spontaneous, from serious sites.
|
| Panda crushed it. Massive pagerank downgrade and traffic
| decimated to about 5%. In mere hours. A false positive, I
| suppose. I spent 3 months trying to figure out the reason but
| nobody, including Google or SEO specialists were able to
| provide any tangible answer.
|
| That day etched a few important lessons into my long term
| memory:
|
| 1) The size of Google's power. It effectively has the power
| to decide whether you digitally exist or not. The ultimate
| traffic controller.
|
| 2) Even a good faith move by Google may have 1% of false
| positives. Which seems totally rational until you realize
| that at Google's scale this could mean millions of people
| being totally fucked out of the blue.
|
| 3) Worse, when that happens, there's no accountability. You
| can't go anywhere for help, undo being a false positive,
| you're just randomly fucked and that's it. You cannot depend
| on anything ran by Google.
|
| Although I'm fine and it wasn't exactly a pivotal moment in
| my life, it radically changed my view on Google. Early on, I
| was a fanboy. Google kicking lame Microsoft's butt with
| miraculous products like search, maps, gmail. I was cheering
| them on. As of my "lesson", I've grown increasingly cynical.
|
| That was 10 years ago. They've become infinitely worse.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Entry-level content is easier to produce and consume. It is
| also guaranteed a larger percentage of traffic due to the high
| influx of newer developers.
|
| Example: it's 2022 and we still somehow upvote blog posts
| detailing one's stack as if that has any impact on anyone else.
| hosh wrote:
| Wisdom can't be squeezed out of a rock. The experience of
| wisdom is individual, because wisdom is transformative. What's
| being transformed is not the knowledge but you, your
| consciousness. It's local in that sense. It's not something
| that can be packaged or productized.
|
| Wisdom comes from an awareness of the greater whole. The
| insights do not come from analysis, but rather, synthesis. It
| engages with the intuition rather than the intellect.
|
| Although it can seem mystical, I think there are authors who
| have been able to express ways to engage in wisdom even if they
| are not directly talking about it. For example, Christopher
| Alexander has some interesting things to say about wholes,
| centers, and unfolding:
|
| Seeing Wholes -
| https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/01/14/christopher-alexander-s...
|
| Centers - https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/01/08/christopher-
| alexander-c...
|
| Unfolding -
| https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/whatisanunfolding.h...
| tremon wrote:
| In my view, wisdom is just more situational than
| intelligence. The latter is about abstracting away a problem
| to its core so that the situation becomes tractable to reason
| about. With enough abstraction, it becomes easy to write down
| ten different solutions to a problem, which is then what you
| find online.
|
| The next step in the process is to undo your abstractions to
| determine which of the previous solutions (if any) is the
| best one for your particular situation. It's not entirely
| identical, but I tend to think of intelligence and wisdom as
| deductive and inductive parts of the same process.
|
| So I don't think that means that wisdom is so far removed
| from scientific enquiry that it becomes mystical, far from
| it: instead, it requires so much more rigour and discipline
| to codify wisdom into laws that it just doesn't happen that
| much; and even when it does happen, the most you'll find is
| fuzzy frameworks on how to deal with certain problems rather
| than the hard and accurate rules you can find in deductive
| analysis.
| hosh wrote:
| If that is how you conceive of "wisdom", sure, and I can
| see where you are coming from. It looks at limited notions
| of wholes (the whole of a chain of logical steps).
|
| However, wholes are nested. The computer you are using to
| read these words, wherever you are, are part of a larger
| whole. Further, there is a paradox in which, while parts
| make up the whole, it's the whole that makes the parts.
|
| Taking those all the way, "The" Whole in which all wholes
| are parts of, then, is boundless (no edge), and it is
| beginningless, (no causal origin).
|
| My understanding of the scientific method is that it is
| ultimately limited in what it can find. It is not
| necessarily true that the scientific method is capable of
| explaining everything, though it is broadly applicable.
| That method is very good for analysis, but not synthesis,
| and focused on the origin in causal chains rather than the
| teleos.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| As a response to the GP, You're making this much too hard.
| Google's results have become the crap they describes fairly
| recently - in the last two years, with a specific and
| noticeable change (and good stuff is even still there if one
| works hard and the crappiness might have receded a bit
| lately, even).
|
| Sure, one also needs understanding to get something out of
| search. But Google when was in it's sweet-spot, it could get
| a researcher extra knowledge and insight. After all, a
| researcher needs both a holistic perspective and information
| they'd know at the start of an exploration.
| hosh wrote:
| Some years ago, Google+ had this question for me as a way
| to populate my profile: "What are things you still cannot
| find on Google?". I know why they asked that question, yet
| I was tickled by the more interesting question: "What you
| will _never_ find on Google? "
|
| I was so tickled that I put it on my profile here on HN and
| elsewhere -- but all of those things I put down are
| different ways of saying "Wisdom".
|
| Google has aspirations about organizing the world's
| knowledge, and making it easy to search for facts and
| knowledge. What I'm saying here is that people have never
| been able to find wisdom in a Google search -- and never
| will. Each person finds it within themselves through
| awareness of wholes.
|
| So in my view, it is not that it's getting harder to find
| wisdom from a Google search, but rather, the proliferation
| of knowledge and facts over the years have increasingly
| made it even more distracting to find wisdom within
| themselves.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| I think what you are talking about are what a few hundred
| years ago you called prophets. Some people can pass on wisdom
| but it's a very rare skill, and followers can often exhibit
| the cult like behaviour that's so repulsive to others.
| Probably because they can't pass on that wisdom to others.
|
| Also, many so called prophets can easily exploit this skill,
| which they might well do if that's their personality type.
|
| Just typing this out has made me think it's almost like
| passing on wisdom and the religious experience are probably
| inseparable.
| nodespace wrote:
| I think its because, very often, wisdom requires rewriting
| a fundamental assumption about the world. And people tend
| to tie up their identity with their fundamental
| assumptions.
|
| As a result these changes can destabilize a persons
| identity, which causes said person to look for the closest
| source of stability, often the 'peophet'.
|
| This gives the 'prophet' enourmous power over the person,
| not just because of the identity destabilization, but
| because when you change someones fundamental assumptions
| about the world, those changes don't nessecerily have to be
| truthful or helpful for the person. The person only has to
| think the changes do.
|
| This identity change and stability dependence is probably
| what causes the cult like appearance/ behaviour.
| hosh wrote:
| Yet, in the Tantric and Classical view, art was a way that
| ordinary people can connect to wisdom. No mystical
| experiencies or psychedelic substances necessary.
|
| What's amazing to me about Christopher Alexander and his
| work is that he's able to describe the process of
| generating such art (in the form of architecture) to
| ordinary people, using plain, relatable language. The links
| I posted in the earlier comment are examples.
|
| In other words, you don't need to be someone with a rare
| skill.
| kovac wrote:
| This is true and very unfortunate. My response to this is that
| when I want to learn anything in-depth, I use textbooks written
| by experts (e.g. professors, industry experts often from the
| past). It's hard to verify the expertise of blog authors and SO
| contributors unlike the authors, and blog posts can often be
| more about self-promotion than sharing deep insights. Sometimes
| I even write to these authors asking questions and they
| actually respond. To some extent, old internet is still alive
| and beautiful. It's just buried under a lot of noise.
| jvans wrote:
| Agree, textbooks are very underrated. The three blue one
| brown guy had one of the best tips for textbook selection
| that's been extremely helpful for me. He suggests that
| textbooks by single authors are the easiest to understand and
| in retrospect that matches with my experience. Multiple
| authors tend to refine the work to the point where it's 100%
| correct but explained in a way that only someone who is
| already an expert would understand.
| Shinmon wrote:
| I feel you.
|
| I think this is due to the fact that the overall concepts are
| usually quite easy to understand and therefore easy to talk
| about.
|
| As soon as you have to dig deeper you need to invest
| significantly more time to talk about it and your audience
| becomes really small.
|
| This is amplified by people creating newsletters, content
| (marketing) in general, but the actual knowledge/wisdom is not
| given away. It's incredibly frustrating but happens in almost
| all technological field, especially when they are fast moving.
|
| In mechanical engineering for example a lot of wisdom is also
| put into norms, standards and so on. Books are written about
| it. But 10 year old books are still completly valid while in
| software every couple of years a new framewokr is the new hot
| shit.
| Swizec wrote:
| > But 10 year old books are still completly valid while in
| software every couple of years a new framewokr is the new hot
| shit
|
| The more I look at it, the more it feels like software hasn't
| had a fundamentally new idea in decades. Frameworks improve,
| networks get bigger, compute gets cheaper, and we spend most
| of our time dealing with domain modeling, cache, and
| statistical inference.
|
| We've made great strides in the ease of building and encoded
| many lessons in our frameworks, scale is bigger too, but the
| underlying guts of software engineering have been very stable
| for decades.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Best description I've heard for this is "institutional
| knowledge". It is not uncommon for a workflow/process to be
| "well documented", but over the course of time, the people that
| actually do the process have found small little tweaks that are
| not part of the original documentation nor do they ever get
| added to the documentation. Due to this, following the
| directions will never result in what the current workflow does.
|
| You see this a lot in recipes, and I've heard tales of military
| being susceptible to this, large manufacturing processes, etc
| where the tweaks are susceptible to being lost if large
| cutbacks/layoffs were to affect the people with that tribal
| knowledge.
| p0nce wrote:
| Try books.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| That is kind of exciting though! I'm in the same boat and
| feeling the frustration of not being able to easily branch
| swing to the specific information that I want because the path
| is no longer clear.
|
| That doesn't happen for trivial topics or problems though! It's
| a sort of new frontier where we have to re-solve potentially
| solved problems because the solution isn't pervasive enough to
| be trivial.
|
| We have to push ourselves to overcome a knowledge limit, which
| throws a nice fat monkey wrench into the idea of having "All
| human knowledge in the palm of your hand".
|
| There's undiscovered territory out there and it's hard to see
| unless you get above the trees.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, there's a reason ChatGPT delivers this kind of content.
| It's what is was trained into, and it's just rewiring the logic
| in the facts it was given.
|
| (It's very impressive how it rewires the logic, but it can't
| really know anything, by design.)
|
| And yes, that horizon is very real. It's what the internet
| rewards, so it's what almost everybody delivers.
| pojzon wrote:
| Its worse than that. Someone posts a good solution on github as
| a comment -> 50 ppl create a paper about it on medium.com ->
| 500 copy-paste websites replicate it to their database of
| shitty ads ridden sites.
|
| Finding something more complex than few cm deep is becoming a
| hellish task.
|
| I blame Google for lack of moderation and getting their SOE
| gamed like a little pipsqueek.
|
| Juniors are dying happy coz of how fast they can find trivial
| answers.
|
| Seniors get shafted. Its so bad that I started to build my own
| github repo woth various answers I needed over the years.
| jstanley wrote:
| > It's like most of human written content caps out at about the
| level of description ChatGPT could deliver.
|
| Don't worry, it won't be long until we're lamenting that most
| of ChatGPT's output caps out at about the level a human could
| deliver.
| simpsond wrote:
| It seems like SEO and content marketing have long term side
| effects. I have experienced what you describe, and it's
| frustrating.
| AlexB138 wrote:
| Google has been SEOed to death essentially. Little to no
| valuable content can be found there anymore, beyond exactly
| what you laid out. The only place I've found to find good,
| solid content to fill the gap between blog-spam and the sort of
| deep dive you laid out is technical books.
|
| Granted, there's a lot of chaff in books as well, but their
| quality to junk ratio is wildly better than Google, and they
| generally go much deeper.
| solardev wrote:
| I can't wait until you can give ChatGPT an ISBN and ask it to
| answer any question by citing that book. The SNR of a book
| may be high, but when the cost of finding that signal is
| having to go through 400 pages of dense material, line by
| line, word by word... well, Google wins.
| volkk wrote:
| wow. i love this idea
| titzer wrote:
| > Google has been SEOed to death essentially.
|
| It's the nature of the incentive system that they set up.
| Their only grand vision for the internet was one where Google
| hit its growth targets every quarter. If you do the math on
| that, then Google has to be enormous in 2022. Guess what,
| Google is enormous in 2022, and the only way they could
| figure out how to do that was to keep growing their ad
| business. So here we are.
| pxue wrote:
| the only fix is to "pay what you can for good content"
|
| Free means we the users become the commodity.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Or the entire opposite direction, ensure that it's not
| possible to get paid for shitty content. Kill the web ads
| market by legal restrictions to tracking and targeting
| ads, facilitate ad blockers everywhere.
|
| In this discussion, the people making the good content
| don't do it for the money, but the people creating spam
| do. Kill the money, and the commercial SEO crap goes
| away, and only the enthusiast content stays - as it was
| in the 'good old days' when simply getting clicks on your
| site could not get you any money.
| pxue wrote:
| ads market will always be a cat/mouse game, a wild goose
| chase. you'll never be able to kill it fully.
|
| > the people making the good content don't do it for the
| money
|
| citation needed. there're two driving forces:
|
| - money
|
| - clout
|
| they're interchangeable. if you have one the other
| becomes much easier to obtain. if the writer don't do it
| directly for the money, they're most definitely doing it
| for the clout.
| titzer wrote:
| Or taxes. Imagine if all online transactions had a tax
| that went to supporting internet infrastructure. I know,
| I know, couldn't possibly.
|
| Our imaginations have run out because those sweet ad
| dollars are too good to pass up.
| salawat wrote:
| Or... And bear with me...
|
| Don't pollute the frigging index with SEO garbage. Google
| didn't tell everyone to SEO. People didn't even start
| doing SEO.
|
| Then some arsehole went and had a brainwave about "what
| if we sold people on tweaking their pages to try to get
| all our customers fighting each other to show up on the
| front for the front page"?
|
| I still remember my first time overhearing some SEO guys
| pitching to somebody while eating lunch. Spat out my food
| when it dawned on me what I was hearing unfold and
| started to realize that guy was likely not the only doing
| that.
|
| The librarian's assistant in me had to be held back that
| day.
|
| Why? Why would you pollute the Index that way?
| Monsters... Convincing people poisoning the town well was
| a good idea...
| PeterisP wrote:
| > Google didn't tell everyone to SEO.
|
| Google gave lots and lots of ad money to websites that
| did SEO, so they effectively did tell everyone to SEO -
| crippling their own search product in favor of their ad
| machine.
| niels_bom wrote:
| https://kagi.com/
| incanus77 wrote:
| This. The problem outlined is that of finding that old post
| which has exactly the right answer, and instead being
| bombarded with new, not-quite-relevant fluff. That's not a
| problem of technology, but of priorities.
| the-printer wrote:
| > After that it always ends in hard to parse research papers,
| specifications, jumping around the source code of multiple
| libraries, debugging or reverse engineering. If I get lucky I
| might land on a 15 year old blog post that no man has seen
| since inception and it describes exactly what I wanted to know.
|
| What you're describing takes a lot of time and nerve. Those are
| two of the foremost requisites of the pursuit of knowledge.
|
| The Web is working. It's enabling you to even access those old
| manuals via the Internet Archive, papers via Sci-hub, source
| code on GitHub and of course that old blog post on page 7 of a
| DuckDuckGo query.
|
| The Web works y'all!
| plastiquebeech wrote:
| When I was young, we didn't have StackOverflow or Google. We
| had to hike through snow to access the internet at all, uphill
| both ways!
|
| In those days, we would usually read the manual when we needed
| to dig past a surface-level understanding of how things work.
| The manuals are dry and dense, but they're much easier to read
| with modern niceties like "Ctrl+F".
|
| IMO, this is one of the reasons that people recommend using
| software with a long track record. If you have a question about
| some parameter in a systemd service script, and the internet
| doesn't have a ready made answer, the details are all written
| down in the manual.
|
| https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd.service.5....
|
| Plenty of modern tools have comprehensive detailed docs like
| this. Python, Go, even most widely-used JS frameworks. The
| primary sources are often downranked in search engines because
| they don't sell ads, but it's a good idea to find and bookmark
| them when you start working with a new technology. RTFM!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| a chatgpt program trained on just unix man pages would be
| interesting.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Documentation now is no where near the quality of older
| stuff. The GW BASIC manual is awesome. The manual for
| WordStar, PC-DOS, COBOL-80, and so on... these were
| marvelous.
|
| The thing is... languages were smaller because they hadn't
| started the accretion of thousands of libraries and
| frameworks.
|
| In my experience, every language out there is somewhat easy
| to learn and master. The ecosystem around it is an insane and
| ever-growing Katamri Damacy of (largely) crap. We all must
| know it, must use it, and must contribute to it because no
| one trusts the work of the individual and only the work of an
| aggregate of individuals... people often don't even trust
| their own code.
| imiric wrote:
| > Documentation now is no where near the quality of older
| stuff.
|
| I wouldn't make a blanket statement either way, but there
| are certainly counterexamples to this:
|
| - The mpv manual[1] is a work of art.
|
| - The Arch Linux wiki[2] is a treasure trove of information
| for not just Arch-specific topics, but Linux in general.
|
| - MDN[3] is the defacto standard for any web documentation.
|
| - The PostgreSQL[4] documentation is quite thorough and
| high quality.
|
| What I think explains your point are two things:
|
| 1. There's just a vast amount of software since those early
| days. "Software is eating the world", and it's
| realistically impossible for most of it to be well
| documented.
|
| 2. A lot of information is spread out and produced by users
| of the software; in books, on blogs, tutorials, forums,
| videos, etc. Sure, this might be seen as a failure of the
| software authors to produce good documentation, but many of
| these resources wouldn't exist if the web didn't make them
| accessible. In some ways this is better than having a
| single source of reference, as you can benefit from the
| collective wisdom of the hivemind, rather than only from
| what the author thought relevant to document.
|
| [1]: https://mpv.io/manual/
|
| [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/
|
| [3]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
|
| [4]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/
| mhuffman wrote:
| >In those days, we would usually read the manual when we
| needed to dig past a surface-level understanding of how
| things work. The manuals are dry and dense, but they're much
| easier to read with modern niceties like "Ctrl+F".
|
| Then, after that didn't work, we had to go to find the weird
| bearded guy that didn't like to talk to people, but knew
| everything. He would usually tell you the answer, but in a
| condescending way that made you understand that you only came
| to him in "emergencies" and that you were kind of stupid for
| asking an "obvious" question. Actually, now that I think of
| it, that is stackoverflow now!
|
| Thank god message boards started taking off! ... but sadly,
| then the "real" Internet came and killed it. :-(
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Before the real internet came and killed the forums, the
| weird bearded guy would lurk on the forums. He's the guy
| who makes you answer general questions like,
|
| "Why would you want to do that?"
|
| "What's this for?"
|
| "Did you try searching before asking such a stupid
| question?"
| mhuffman wrote:
| lol, this was the pre-Internet problem. It usually went
| like this...
|
| >"Why would you want to do that?" because it seems like
| the right thing to do? Is there a better way.
|
| >"What's this for?" the boss wants it
|
| >"Did you try searching before asking such a stupid
| question?" I read the manual and thought about it a lot
| (remember this was pre-Internet)
|
| so, there was a lot of "rough" hand-holding to learn the
| ropes for edge cases.
| plastiquebeech wrote:
| Those are the same questions that people ask on SO,
| although the respondents aren't exclusively men with
| beards.
|
| OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you
| not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is
| not the cause of that "weird bearded guy" problem, but it
| is one possible solution.
|
| We're talking about software developers, not wizards.
| It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw
| a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient
| grimoires.
| lazide wrote:
| Even if they aren't literally weird old men with beards
| who want to make you feel bad for bothering them, you
| know deep inside there lurks one. (Jk - also, have been
| the cranky one, even if I didn't have a beard at the
| time).
| mhuffman wrote:
| >We're talking about software developers, not wizards.
| It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw
| a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient
| grimoires.
|
| Back then, it seemed a lot like that!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Those are the same questions that people ask on SO
|
| On the good threads that become helpful, yeah.
|
| On most of it, no, those are not the questions people ask
| there. They will focus on unrelated marginal issues, try
| to refuse to answer the question, just assume the reason
| the person is doing it (even when explicitly told on the
| question), and just throw wrong answers on the wall to
| see if they stick. (Granted, throwing things on the wall
| is a useful way to answer some questions, but not all.)
|
| It's good that Google rewards the first kind of thread,
| but the second one is what sends people away from the
| platform.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've seen SO answerers who don't know the answer to a
| question try to force it into an "X-Y problem" and steer
| it until the question turned into something they could
| answer.
|
| Q: "I'm trying to configure Foo to produce Bar, but it's
| giving me this error!"
|
| A1: "What are you _really_ trying to do? " [Unsaid: I
| don't know how to produce Bar either]
|
| A2: "You should not be trying to produce Bar. Instead you
| should produce Baz. I know how to do that--follow the
| following steps..."
|
| A3: "Producing Bar will not solve what I imagine your
| goal is. In the general case, you may need to produce
| many different results, which I would rather answer
| about..."
|
| Q: "Uhh, thanks everyone, but I'm just trying to
| configure Foo to produce Bar."
| mhuffman wrote:
| My favorite is when they do that, then take the incorrect
| made-up answer to a question that was not asked to close
| the question due to: Duplicate of..., Off-topic
| because..., Needs details or clarity, Needs more focus
| and Opinion-based ...
|
| Many such cases!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| ha! I see this in the dev/qa dynamic all the time. It
| also happens between product to dev/qa as well.
| spacemadness wrote:
| There is so much imposter syndrome and insecurity behind
| those type of answers. I wish we all had better filters
| online when our fragile egos go into defensive mode.
| eternalban wrote:
| > Why must wisdom always be squeezed out of a rock?
|
| Dictionary says there are 3 components to wisdom: knowledge,
| experience, and good judgment. Machines can help with the first
| requirement, knowledge, to an extent but leave you frustrated
| (as you note). They can even help you dig out wise chestnut
| buried somewhere (as you did) but then you hit the other two.
|
| This is how it is supposed to work: armed with knowledge, you
| apply this and gain experience, and after a few close calls the
| fortunate also develop good judgment, informed by experience of
| application of knowledge.
|
| You want all that squeezed out how?
| swayvil wrote:
| "Vague and abstract" and "a warning" are the minimum-effort
| responses. Therefore they will be found in the greatest number.
|
| Most responses are there just to get your attention.
|
| This whole thing runs on attention.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Humans know exactly what parts went into it and how it
| works. Why must wisdom always be squeezed out of a rock?_
|
| Partly, because so many developers famously hate writing
| documentation and hate commenting their code.
|
| If developers followed Donald Knuth's Literate Programming [1]
| then it would be a big improvement.
|
| People rely on a lot of "tribal knowledge" without ever
| bothering to write it down, and out of all the fields, software
| development seems to be particularly notorious for its anti-
| documentation bias.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The problem here is Google and SEO incentives. Or even
| perceived SEO gains by writing shallow articles. Notice how
| many of the articles have a "Pricing" and a bold "We're Hiring"
| link ;-)
| vinyl7 wrote:
| See also the Preventing the Collapse of Civilization talk by
| Jonathan Blow
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
| worldsayshi wrote:
| This knowledge event horizon is bound to stay around the
| current position for as long as our primary medium for
| information is text/video/sound (i.e. linear).
|
| When you google for some programming story you typically look
| for a story that describes how to combine concept A, B, C and
| maybe F. The more concepts you add the likelyhood of somebody
| having described a good implementation story for the
| combination of those concepts goes down. But you don't need to
| add many such concepts before the number of potential stories
| become very large. So for any non trivial number of concepts a
| blog article is not likely to exist.
|
| We could only really change the game by going from text
| representation to intelligent representations. Rules or general
| AI.
|
| However, my main surprise in all this: why do we need this many
| combinations of concepts in the first place? Why isn't the
| total domain of things that are interesting to do for
| utilitarian reasons more limited in size?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The degree to which most of the Internet's actual
| intellectual/informational value is still, in 2022, simply
| providing more-efficient replacement for inter-library loan
| (that is, book piracy websites), for many fields, has me
| wondering if it'll _ever_ fully deliver on the potential that
| many of us used to think it had.
| nathias wrote:
| it's because you're confusing knowledge wrappers for knowledge,
| the payload is always difficult to parse
| johnfn wrote:
| This is correct. It's because, basically definitionally, the
| amount of people who have deeply engaged with any topic is very
| low compared to the number of people who have shallowly engaged
| with it. This means that the amount of reference material
| written by people with deep understanding will be much much
| less than the amount of reference material written by people
| with shallow understanding.
|
| "Back in the day", this problem was addressed by having
| significant hurdles in order to publish material on a topic.
| E.g., books used to be the primary way to learn about a topic,
| and in order to publish a book you must 1) deeply engage with
| the material for quite a while simply to write the book and 2)
| become fairly credentialed / convince a publisher you're worth
| their time, etc. Same thing with academic papers.
|
| The internet has completely removed all barriers to publishing,
| meaning it's up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, like here on HN the blogs are usually written by people
| who just learned about the topic and then you go to the
| comments to see what the people who know more says. People
| who know seems to not think it is worth it to write a blog
| about it, but they can comment on posts others write and
| correct them when they are wrong.
| volkk wrote:
| misaligned incentives. people get rewarded for simply
| publishing SOMETHING. look at companies, bootcamps,
| whatever the hell. most promotions are given bc you've
| written some low effort blog post that really add nothing
| to the broader intelligence of software building. hell,
| even bootcamps are like "go write/publish something!!" and
| most of these people have barely a clue as to how software
| operates. GL sifting through all of that useless content
|
| i wouldn't be surprised if a very large percentage of the
| last decade of tech blog posts are just remnants of
| someone's promotion, and is now hyperlinked on some resume,
| or linkedin page
| tayo42 wrote:
| Is that really true about books? Wouldn't you just need to
| convince someone your going to sell enough and how accurate
| the information is wouldn't be important? Im sure you can
| find books or textbooks claiming evolution isn't real.
|
| > meaning it's up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.
|
| I was thinking about this the other day. How do you sort out
| conflicting information when your not an expert your self. I
| don't know who to trust sometimes.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In general you talk to other known experts in the field and
| see what they say.
|
| If you don't find an expert in the field and you publish a
| crappy book you tend to get a number of reviews (hopefully
| before you send it out to retail) that your book sucks.
|
| When selling books about fake evolution you're not looking
| for an expert in the field, you're looking to see if you
| have an audience that would eat it up.
| sul_tasto wrote:
| This is what credentials used to signal, but I'm not sure
| they're as reliable anymore...
| nradov wrote:
| That used to be at least somewhat true about scientific and
| technical books. Major publishers protected their brands by
| hiring editors with some subject matter expertise. Of
| course, we understood that those books could be outdated,
| incomplete, or biased but for established publishers the
| quality was generally fairly good.
| harvey9 wrote:
| You as a buyer have publisher's reputation as a filter.
| There's still chaff but it's a bit easier to avoid.
| interroboink wrote:
| I feel your pain, and have had similar experiences.
|
| I do feel like wisdom is inherently an "internalize for your
| own mind" process, and on some level, nobody can do that for
| you. So of course you will be scrabbling around trying to piece
| things together until it clicks in your own mind.
|
| I've found having a discussion with another human, who
| understands the topic, is very helpful. And it is one case
| where an "academic" setting can be useful, assuming you can
| actually talk to the professor rather than being forced to
| parse some unfathomable textbook.
|
| Even that example -- a textbook -- is similar to what you said.
| It is literally designed to help you understand a topic. And
| yet, my experience with them mimics yours. A lot of the
| material is uselessly general, and a lot of it is uselessly
| specific and technical. And it almost never answers the
| specific question you actually want to know at a given moment.
| So, you have to internalize the information (slowly) and
| eventually get there.
|
| Maybe there is an "event horizon" of me being able to absorb
| new material, rather than something external.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| IMO there is a missing middle level here : Between Information
| overload and (real) wisdom, there is synthesised knowledge. I
| don't believe AI will be "wise", But AI will definitely
| solve/assist synthesis, which is a big part of the issue
| discussed here.
|
| This of course does not solve any of the underlying causes
| (incentives structure..) or the "real" wisdom scarcity itself.
| How do you solve these in a society where quantity reigns
| supreme? You can't.
| EGreg wrote:
| Just wait til GPT-3 bots produce the information
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| It's already underway. I run into a handful of sites every week
| now. Here's an example https://testfoodkitchen.com/what-is-a-
| top-round-roast-good-f... - it seems plausible at first but the
| whole site is bizarre non-information.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| From the site:
|
| "Is top round tender?
|
| Top round tender is a dish made from the top of a chicken's
| head. The name comes from the fact that it is usually served
| at the peak of a chicken's life, when its flesh is soft and
| pink. It is also called an "enormous" or "giardine" bird."
| EGreg wrote:
| I just want to wait when they amass more shares and likes
| than nytimes.com and collectively have 100x as much content
| as the current sites.
|
| They'll be the new Vice and Vox, but run entirely by AI
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ai-writing-is-here-
| and-...
| ngoilapites wrote:
| In any case we've been always starving for insights
| fedeb95 wrote:
| that's true, but makes you wonder how much having more
| information helps in gaining insight. I think many hold this as
| a fact that's always true
| pdonis wrote:
| How is this article helping?
| graycat wrote:
| Ah, to heck with _wisdom_!!
|
| We are drowning in data while starving for information!!
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think you're getting downvotes for the phrasing, but this is
| an insightful point:
|
| We have signal; which only becomes information when you
| successfully decode it.
|
| Which raises questions: eg, would we be better off sampling
| less and analyzing more -- to extract a better portion of
| information from the already captured signal?
|
| But the confusion itself also points to a lack of wisdom --
| lots to think about.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| there's also a lot of noise
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you look at the system as a whole, at least when it
| comes to search engines, you would even say it demands
| noise. If there were no potential for monetary gains in SEO
| spam sites then the amount of noise groups like Google
| would have to filter would drop dramatically.
| easybake wrote:
| > _The drop in quality and rise in quantity of papers published
| makes keeping up with the scientific literature both expensive
| and inefficient in terms of time and energy, which slows down
| acquisition of knowledge and leaves less time for reflection and
| gaining experiences that are prerequisites for wisdom. So what
| incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to aspire to be
| wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for wisdom? In
| Chinese thought wisdom is perceived as expertise in the art of
| living, the ability to grasp what is happening, and to adjust to
| the imminent future (Simandan, 2018). All of these attributes
| seem to be advantageous to a career based on solving problems but
| you need the sagacity to realise that the rewards are indirect
| and often intangible._
| wellbehaved wrote:
| Wisdom has never been popular, the dynamics that led to the death
| of Socrates have continued from his day to our own.
| wellbehaved wrote:
| Ergo the shadowban.
| WJW wrote:
| Some people get shadowbanned because they are right but too
| obnoxious, some people because they are too obnoxious and not
| even right. The second group tends to think they are in the
| first group.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| People who are shadowbanned don't want to hear it, but they
| almost always are banned for being jerks, trolls, and/or
| propagandists. It's not because they said "the truth" and
| nobody wanted to hear it; it's because nobody wanted to hear
| _them_ because of the way they 're acting.
|
| But of course they all think that they're martyrs for
| speaking the truth.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Oh, we poor cognoscendi, forever living in the world of
| resentful ignoramuses?
|
| Perhaps taking the example of Plato, a starting-point for
| wisdom is to try to define your terms, in part through
| recalling what others have said.
|
| Take e.g., the citation "In Chinese thought wisdom is perceived
| as expertise in the art of living, the ability to grasp what is
| happening, and to adjust to the imminent future (Simandan,
| 2018)."
|
| Aristotle and Plato would call this phronesis, practical
| wisdom, where the root phrein refers to the gut -- where, not
| co-incidentally, Zeus put/ate his wife and gained by her wisdom
| (and modern-day scientists eagerly study the GI nervous
| system's role in anxiety). Aristotle rooted that in
| understanding politics (vagarities in how people react),
| economics/incentive systems, and of course the physical world
| in terms of knowledge-required, but in light of the recent
| well-educated democratic leaders who became tyrants, he posed
| it mainly as a question of character, not knowledge. (Remember
| Aristotle left his home to become the tutor of Alexander the
| Great.)
|
| Some related terms from that time and place...
|
| Nous: pure thought, thought considering itself, typically as
| validation for principles and coherence of chains of reasoning.
| Quite similar to Descartes' notion of the irreducibility of the
| sense of one's own mental activity, combined with the pureness
| of its continuity (that must of course be grounded in God).
|
| Dianoia: two-thought, logical and a dialectical thought
| depending on reasoning chains from point to point. (cf
| Paranoia, i.e., concurrency dianoia, and Parmenides: "Mortals
| wander two-headed")
|
| Aisthesis: perception, awareness.
|
| Pistis: belief
|
| Doxa: opinion
|
| Episteme: understanding (standing around, or around the
| pillar), scientific reasoning, from facts with an account from
| principles. nb Theaetetus' initial stab at defining Episteme:
| "as far as I can see at present, episteme is nothing other than
| aisthesis" - i.e., all knowledge is rooted in perception or all
| knowledge is a kind of perception, depending on whether you're
| empiricist.
|
| Most interesting is the term Sophrosyne, which is
| untranslatable. Sometimes wisdom, sometimes charity, later
| chastity. It's the basis for the Delphic maxim, "Know thyself".
| The ability to stand your post, to know what you know and what
| you don't know. Exemplified by Socrates in the calmness of his
| retreat at the loss of Potidea, where he saved others by not
| losing his head (by contrast to the virtue of courage, the
| ability to move forward notwithstanding danger and fear). If
| you want to investigate why we don't privilege wisdom, you
| could start by seeing why Sophrosyne cannot be translated.
|
| Worth mentioning is Parmenides' (much earlier) idea that the
| philosopher is the person who knows his way through every town.
| In an era when the Mediterranean world was transformed by
| openness to trade and other societies, as grounded in the
| religious obligation to welcome strangers, and when Greeks
| defined themselves in part through the legend of Odysseus
| wandering before he returned home after war (another Sophrosyne
| story), it's somewhat appropriate to our own era.
|
| Theaetetus (who produced a mathematical proof of irrational
| numbers) gave his definition after feeling completely lost.
| Socrates replied by saying all philosophy begins in wonder. So,
| is having a question, or starving for wisdom, is a kind of
| hunger, "resolved" with knowledge, so all we have to do is
| define our terms?
|
| After Socrates took the hemlock and lay dying, Plato describes
| his death rather graphically, as his feet getting firm, then
| his legs, his body, etc until he was fully fixed. The language
| used is exactly that used for "defining" terms, suggesting that
| the process of definition itself is a kind of death. It
| certainly kills wonder :)
| mberning wrote:
| I find it interesting that many different philosophical
| traditions all seem to discover an ascetic ideal in one way or
| another. Maybe "ideal" is not the right word. I think if you
| really examine your own life and existence one would have to
| admit that they would be much better off if they could learn to
| be happy with an sparse lifestyle. But as you point out, this
| is not a very popular proposition either.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I was going to mention this exact thing. I will add not only do
| humans not want wisdom, but they also do not like to:
|
| learn from history (or even study it)
|
| learn from elders (or even be around them)
|
| read books
|
| etc
|
| I do realize that HN is subset of the population who do enjoy
| much of these things, but HN self-selects by nature of content.
| theFletch wrote:
| A lot of stats or insights I see for things I often wonder how
| important they really are. Are they all really moving the needle?
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| What drives me nuts about the usage of statistics in common
| discourse is that it is used prescriptively instead of
| descriptively.
|
| E.g. lets say 50% of gun owners accidentally shoot themselves.
| Now lets say Im talking to someone about how I want to buy a
| gun for home defense. They tell me "well 50% of gun owners
| accidentally shoot themselves, so you're safer if you dont have
| a gun"
|
| This is a gross misunderstanding if statistics. There is no way
| whatsoever to take the _observed_ general trend, and apply it
| to a future possibioity in a single instance. What this
| interpretation misses is that there are variables well within
| your control. A gun owner who follows all safety rules will
| virtually never shoot themselves accidentally. Turns out 50% of
| gun owners are stupid as hell, and you are in control of yiur
| own outcomes.
|
| I see this problem CONSTANTLY in debates online, on the news,
| etc. It is very frustrating and contributes greatly to
| propogating dumb ideas.
| svnt wrote:
| By buying a gun and keeping it in your house you move
| yourself from a population basin of "I will never shoot
| myself" to one where "If I follow these dozen rules perfectly
| I will probably never shoot myself."
|
| You go from a stable basin to an astable mountaintop basin
| where you are responsible for the maintenance of the banks.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Prescriptive" statistics in the sense you're describing are
| _probabilities_.
|
| And they're both used and useful much of the time. The field
| of risk management and industry of insurance are based on it.
|
| Your frustrations are not uncommon. They are, however, rather
| poorly-founded.
|
| They're an excellent illustration failing to get a handle on
| this safety thing (where "safety" is the inverse of "risk",
| as one of yesterday's submissions addresses:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036978>
|
| There's also the philosophical question around the "sea
| battle" question, in which the truth of a statement about a
| future possibility ("there will be a sea battle tomorrow") is
| assessed.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_future_contingents#
| ...>
| avasylev wrote:
| There's a risk of considering oneself better than average and
| that aggregate statistics don't apply to you. Like most
| drivers consider them better drivers than average. I'd bet
| the same with gun owners or any other activity. You don't
| think you can repeat the stupid mistakes, but we all can, you
| get stressed, sick, drunk,... life is long and full
| opportunities to make a mistake and get you back to the
| average case.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| I'm sure you can appreciate that both imperfect causal
| inference from statistics and the belief that one is somehow
| "special" (or exempt from accident and disaster if one simply
| "puts in the effort") are pervasive forms of human folly that
| cause a lot of human misery.
| Jensson wrote:
| Lots of humans are special though and don't have the same
| problems or weaknesses as average people. For example, some
| poor people manage to not get fat in USA, if you are one of
| those then likely many other things that applies to other
| poor people don't apply to you.
| dreen wrote:
| People ask each other where they're from, even though it
| gives you precisely zero amount of concrete information about
| a person, and then proceed to paint a picture going forward
| of that person based on assumptions about other people from
| there. They also do it to show interest, but it doesn't stop
| the painting.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| So you say where you grow up has zero influence on who you
| are?
| dreen wrote:
| No, it does. I'm saying asking someone where they're from
| yeilds no facts about that person if all you get back is
| a name of the country. It doesn't mean they definitely
| grew up there, or that they hold citizenship. But it's
| easy to just take the name of the country and assume a
| bunch of things about the person based on things you
| heard about people from there. There may be statistical
| probabilities there but no certainty. People have done it
| since forever and it's essentially the same mechanism as
| OP described.
| danuker wrote:
| Reaching mass understanding? Innumeracy is everywhere I look.
| Stats are not moving the needle.
|
| On the other hand, you can use stats for personal gain. For
| instance, prediction markets. That might have an impact.
| newsclues wrote:
| I am on a community committee for a safe injection site.
|
| They have shown us a graph showing more people are using the
| site.
|
| I have asked for the same chart to include a metric showing
| that more people are using the site and there are less
| overdoses or medical interventions or another metric showing
| more people using the site results in some sort of quantifiable
| metric of community benefit.
|
| The public health authority who provides the graphs is unable
| or unwilling to provide the information and charts I want.
|
| I thus worry that data is selectively used to prove a
| predetermined narrative.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > So what incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to
| aspire to be wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for
| wisdom?
|
| If everything comes down to incentives at the end of the day, it
| defeats any sense of morality. Perhaps that's the author's point
| here. The wise scientist/engineer does what they believe is right
| and the rest is history. In their attempt for doing what's right,
| they may accidentally create their best work.
|
| This overall reminds me of the search for the philosopher's
| stone. Where many ended up finding "philosophical gold(wisdom)"
| through the process of trying to find it and lead to their own
| individual magnum opus(great work).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece
| warkdarrior wrote:
| "[Doing] what they believe is right" is one kind of incentive
| as not all incentives are monetary.
| stratigos wrote:
| One is only starving for wisdom if one refuses to eat!
|
| Kong Fu Zi say:
|
| "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection,
| which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and
| third by experience, which is the bitterest."
|
| Drowning in information? Youre gaining wisdom the bitter wa ;-)
|
| Starving for wisdom? You may be thinking it is _too_ easy to find
| wisdom. Try a bit harder. Wisdom might be right behind you when
| you are focused on how bad something in front of you may seem.
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