data

Connecting Dots.

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When you read a lot, you find connections. I recently found an example of this through the Marginalian, with the article “The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of Information“1.

We could all use a bit of wisdom in the Information Age.

The quote she pulled that got me interested was by Toni Morrison, who was many good things but was not an information scientist – yet she got to the crux of much of information science in her quote, with a difference.

The full quote, which can be found in a copy of “The Source of Self-Regard” online free here, is:

For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.

Toni Morrison, “The Source of Self-Regard“, 2019

I was floored by this because she connected data to information to knowledge… to wisdom, which is something you see as the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid in Information Science. Gobs and gobs of data make up information, gobs and gobs of information make up knowledge… and gobs and gobs of knowledge gives you wisdom.

Maybe. We hope, anyway. It takes a lot of data to make information, and information is basically purposed data – we look into a cloud of data and try to make sense of it within a context. Information, in turn, is purposed information, which builds knowledge. The elusive wisdom comes from knowledge.

With that simple quotation from her book – and it’s a great book, I read it before writing this – she connected it all to we humans in a very human way. That’s one of the gifts great writers have. I recognized it because I’ve read much on information science and thought much about it, but maybe a lot of people who read Toni Morrison haven’t but she’s exposed them to it.

Maybe more people who are well read on information science will read more Toni Morrison.

Maybe that’s a path from some knowledge to some wisdom.

  1. If you don’t read the Marginalian, I strongly suggest you do. Maria Popova’s managed to do what I had originally intended to do with KnowProSE.com in her own flavor, and she’s worth subscribing to. You can also ma*********@in******.social “>follow the Marginalian on Mastodon here. ↩︎

The Derivation of Meaning.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

There’s a few things that I had planned to write about today, yet they got shuffled when I was re-reading Murakami’s, “Kafka On The Shore“. I had read the book many years ago.

As most good books, it’s worth revisiting after some years because you find different things. This morning, sipping coffee, I found one of those things that applied to much of what I have been thinking about since yesterday.

“”…To get from here to there.” She holds up her right index finger and her left index finger, about twelve inches apart.

“What does it matter what it’s called? she continues. “You’ve got your restrooms and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches. It’s all pointless – assuming you try to find a point to it. We’re coming from somewhere, heading somewhere else. That’s all you need to know, right?”

I nod. And nod. And nod.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore (2005), p23.

Aside from the strawberry-jam sandwiches, I know where she speaks of, and more importantly, I know better what she speaks of 18 years after I first read the book. The transition across space and time is made mundane by the mundane, but the mundane is what makes the exceptional.

There can be nothing exceptional without the mundane. The exceptional is… an exception.

That in turn ties to this post in the Marginalian, “Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT“, which in turn points to some of Norman Weiner’s work.

“Our search for meaning, Sacks intimates, will be forever part of the human organism’s experience of optimal functioning — an experience, to me, qualitatively different from anything an artificial intelligence can approximate, to the extent that it can even have experience at all.”

Maria Popova, Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

And so we get to meaning, but anything without meaning is… pointless. Yet often what we think is pointless actually does have a point we might find later on (by re-reading books years later). Why is that?

Because meaning is a derivation of whatever our focus is, and so in one moment, one’s focus may be on something but years later, the focus necessarily shifts – or you’re stuck in a loop that you should probably talk to someone about.

As we grow, our focuses change. Some things become more important than they used to be, others less important. Where I once used to be notorious for partying all night, I am lesser known now for passionately reading late into the night with a book that I’m comfortable waking up with.

My paternal grandfather’s old adage, “Never lie down with someone you cannot stand up with” springs to mind, and it applies not just to the patently obvious but anything we commit to doing.

Meaning is information seen through a perception of a particular focus, or group of focuses, and information alone cannot fill that void.

Information alone is a one night stand that leaves us without meaning, and maybe even with some version of a hangover or disease.

Meaning varies for each of us, yet collectively at times we find meaning that groups will work towards. And at other times, it means reading a comfortable book through older eyes.

Ebbs and Flows.

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Everything ebbs and flows. Our hearts go between systolic and diastolic pressures with each squeeze and relaxation of our hearts, which are controlled by electrical pulses.

Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub.

Electrical pulses, too, are ebbs and flows, instructions to parts of the body, or sensing information to send to that predictive brain of ours that fills in gaps between the granules of information it gets from our senses.

We ourselves are tides of information, awash with everything we can sense. What we can’t sense, what we haven’t been able to sense, we use technology to interpret to our own senses. We can now see large atoms with our best microscopes on one extreme, and we’re unfolding the galaxy with our latest telescope. We have infrared sensing that we can translate to real time video, and we have equipment that can hear the rumbles of elephants and whales and even the sounds of cut plants.

We’ve shaved the granularity of time down to how much microwaves a cesium atom – a frequency of 9,192,631,770 cycles per second. Long gone is the granularity of daylight on a sun dial. We have a granularity of time based on what we can’t see, and the world presses to make every nanosecond count for productivity. With 8,045,311,447 people on the planet, some dream of 2,080 hours worked by each person – a man-year.

23.75% of an actual human’s life in a year. 33.33% of that life is sleep, if you get 8 hours a night. That leaves 42.92% for… traffic. Spending time with family and friends, and goofing off reading things like this on the Internet

There’s a rhythm to all of this, and it shows in our data, as I skirted in ChatGPT Migrations. And the data pulses around the planet to it’s own little rhythms, it’s own little ebbs and flows, and that gets tracked to make sure that they make the most money from your time.

Ebb and flow.

Get even. Go goof off a while.

Traffic.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

Streaming twice a day on the nearby highway, I see the cars pile up into patterns, each one encapsulating it’s occupants in their own common individuality.

The SUV, the taxis, the sports cars, the lowered cars, the raised pickups, the work trucks… each one we associate with a person in our minds. A stereotype, a bias. Despite stereotypes, we know they’re all individuals that have common traits.

The sports car guy, the lowered car guy and the raised pickup guy probably spend a good bit of time in automotive parts places. We can picture them there, dressed up as mockups of our stereotypes. That’s how Netflix picks your movies and other algorithms make recommendations for products, content, and more – by associating you with a computerized stereotype that is based on actual real time data.

They’re all heading in the same direction twice a day, at about the same time. Very individual. And each suffers individually in the congested roadways, knowing that tomorrow they will do it again. Part of it is stupidity of some employers, part of it is the stupidity of people, part of it is the stupidity of… well, there’s a lot of stupidity causing congestion. It’s like a virus that we can get over, but are permanently scarred by.

Each one of these individuals is doing it for some mix of reasons, from taking over the world to making sure that their children have food. Each of them has hopes and dreams. Each of them has aspirations, each of them has their lifetime’s worth of experience.

Each of them is a physical record of their ancestors, dating back to their, marked by life events – living memory. In minds alone, each human brain is 100 terabytes, with a range of 1 Terabyte to 2.5 Petabytes according to present estimates. Factor in all the physical memory of our history and how we lived, we’re well past that. That traffic is really a huge bit of network congestion – increasingly so with computer controlled traffic lights.

That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of data.

All stuck in the same spot because… the individuals are on leashes that pull them at the same time.

You Are Not Alone.

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#etmooc @audreywatters asks 'Who Owns Your Education Data (and Why Does It Matter?)'Have you found yourself the person who actually reads beyond the links being passed around on social networks and finding the headline misleading?

Have you found yourself the person who notices posted content, by reading it, is actually questionable?

Are you the person who checks the sources and, if interested, does some research on the topic independently in an age where it’s one search engine away?

You are not alone. When the people using their freedom of speech don’t meet the criteria of basic literacy and critical thought, it will seem that you are, but you are not alone.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King, Jr. In this week's issue of TL;DR - wiobyrne.com/tldr/ #truth #honesty #fiction #ignorance #education #perspective #identityOf course, it doesn’t mean you’re right – just as people who talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect often ignore the fact that they themselves are as much of an issue for some as they think others are to them. Basically, stupid people don’t know that they’re stupid because they’re too stupid to know… and that holds true for all of us.

Every. Single. One.

You. Me. That smart person you know who you ask advice from. All of us are not as intelligent as we think. That thing you taste in your mouth when you realize that is humility.

Yet all of us know people who find reading troublesome, who, when you post a link, ask you questions about the information in the link that is contained in the link itself, or worse, express an opinion based only on the headline and accompanying image. They haven’t even put forth the effort to find out.

In my mind, they are troglodytes, too afraid to come out of their metaphorical caves and see what is being spoken of. They shout from the safety of their caves because life for them, outside these caves, is a thing to fear. This isn’t always the case, sometimes the effort doesn’t seem worth the reward, sometimes they’re busy – but if they’re busy, why are they commenting on something that they know nothing about? Great question. When you find the answer, get back to us.

In a world where information is algorithmically spoon-fed to us, where our opinions are easily shifted one way or the other using coded psychology thoughts on distant web servers, we should be more collectively literate. It doesn’t seem to be that way. It seems to be that the more information mankind has at it’s disposal, the less mankind collectively wants to read – but maybe it’s the same percentage of the population. I don’t know.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul. - Brené Brown In issue # 122 of TL;DR. Subscribe at wiobyrne.com/tldr/ #dreams #data #stories #truth #fiction #drama #realitySo the question is, how do we change that? We can’t go off explaining everything to other people all the time – we have other things to do and, sometimes, we’re not that good at it. We can’t bang their head against their monitors, either – and if we could, I’m certain that there would be a Law to protect them soon enough, complete with pitchforks and torches.

What’s the call to action? There really is none except this, if you got to this last paragraph: Stay the course while retaining your sanity. Avoid conversations that are likely to go nowhere. Keep reading, keep thinking. It’s apparent that someone has to.