knowledge

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. ↩︎

Knowing What Something Is.

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Thraupis Episcopus, Blue-gray tanager, also called the Blue Jean in Trinidad and Tobago.

Recovering yesterday from the silicon insult, there was a quote that I kept coming back to as I awoke now and then.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard P. Feynman, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

We use labels to communicate things to other people, and it’s all based on some common perception. The bird pictured is blue-grey, so some very smart person called it a blue-grey tanager, where tanager is a type of bird that has common characteristics to other birds we call tanagers. Then someone who was taught too much Latin in school decided it looked a lot like the ‘Bishop of Thraupi’ (the literal translation). I have no idea why it’s called a blue-jean in Trinidad and Tobago, but it is what it is.

As most creatures, they’re interesting in their own way. I spent a lot of time watching birds in Trinidad and Tobago, taking pictures of them as a challenge, most of which ended up on Flickr and most of which weren’t that great. In doing that, I learned about how the birds interacted with others, what they ate, and when I talk about a blue-grey tanager all of that is behind the label. I know what the bird is based on what it does, how it behaves, etc.

It’s not just a label.

In the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’, a similar point was made in one of the more epic tirades done by the late, great Robin Williams:

…You’re an orphan right? You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?

“Good Will Hunting” (1997), Sean speaking to Will.

The obvious way to go with this would be about identity politics and some of the silliness that ensues with it because clearly labels don’t mean as much as who the people we’re talking about actually are, but that’s not where I’m going with it – though in a way, I am.

When we look at generative AI, and how it can be trained on the way we have communicated in the past, be it art, writing, etc, all it’s really doing is using the labels as puppets. It doesn’t understand what it has spit out in response to a prompt.

I’ve met people like that. In fact, in my younger days, I was more like that than even now I care to admit – reading about things I didn’t understand, and having my world view defined by the views of others. Actual experience varies, and that’s the point of all of it. That diversity of experience is what enriches our society, or should. It’s additive.

It’s impossible for us to be able to share all of our experiences with others, but we can share more if we go beyond the labels. That one picture above of the blue-grey tanager did not just happen. It required me to understand the bird to get close enough with only 3x magnification on one of the original digital cameras to get the detail I did, it took trimming the plumb tree just right to allow the branches to be close enough from the top of the stairs, and it required a lot of patience in developing trust with the birds – that I wasn’t going to eat them.

The very experiences that make us human are the things we need to fall back on to be human these days, not the rote memorization and regurgitation of labels that generative artificial intelligences are much better at than we are.

We need to understand these things.

Whose Knowledge Is It Anyway?

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Every now and then when I consider Copyrights and Artificial Intelligences and Publishing Rights and… I wonder…

Whose knowledge is it anyway?

We have a civilization that is presently built on locking away information in various ways, metering it out for money. The system has downsides as well as upsides, and discussing it isn’t all that fair for the downsides since the downsides don’t have marketing departments selling us on them.

I don’t know that the present system we have is as good as we can do. Yet this lawsuit related to ChatGPT has me wondering about this again.

I looked to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While knowledge isn’t there, education is.

Article 26

  1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
  3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights – English, United Nations, accessed on 30 Jun 2023.

Education, by a loose definition, is the attempt to share knowledge. That’s what teaching is and that’s what schools try to do. Yet the knowledge itself is not something that everyone is allowed to get.

In this brave new world we’re imagining, is there room for the knowledge of mankind being a birthright?

And if so, how will that impact society as a whole?

A Mystery Unsolved.

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“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Imagine my surprise to find out that there were ‘dumb bastards’ in 1959. People from that age group don’t talk about them much. We don’t remember the dumb bastards because we prefer to remember the good things.

It’s like talking about how great a bowel movement was without mentioning what it smelled like. Even doctors don’t ask about that. Nobody wants to remember that.

I digress.

What Vonnegut calls ‘dumb bastards’ is a colloquialism for stupid people. Etymologically, it’s an interesting thing to unravel as to why that colloquialism worked well for that period. ‘Dumb’ was used as a synonym for ‘stupid’, and is easily interchangeable. ‘Bastard’, on the other hand, is just someone whose parents intertwined zygotes successfully out of wedlock. That used to be an insult, because… why?

Stupid bastards, probably.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to elitism when it comes to intelligence, but we do have people who do not meet our expectations. Most people get this wrong, since they mistake a lack of knowledge for a lack of intelligence (that’s ignorance).

The first time you stick your hand on stove while it’s on, it was ignorant. The second time you do it, you’re either stupid or have a heat tolerable prosthetic. Easy way to remember it.

But we have nuance. We have some people who put their left hand of the stove, then put their right on it and expect a different result. It’s effectively the same as placing the same hand on the stove, so we’ll shuffle over to that group over there: People to keep out of the kitchen.

This is not a survival trait. Yet intelligence is not considered a survival trait.

It’s one of life’s great mysteries.

US News sites, GDPR, and Paywalls.

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ReutersInstituteonGDPRReuters Institute posted a thread on Twitter regarding how news sites in the United States reacted to the General Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the fallout. It’s an interesting thread, but the article linked to is actually quite thought provoking.

…One publication, USA Today, rationed EU users’ access, redirecting them to a GDPR-compliant bare-bones version of their site. Other US news sites, like The New York Times, immediately adapted to the GDPR and didn’t block. Although some of the hundreds of US sites that blocked remain blocked to this day, others, like the Los Angeles Times, restored full access after a number of months, and others after a number of years.

The differing strategies of these news sites allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects on consumption of temporary website withdrawal and temporary rationing…

This holds interests for other reasons, which I’ll get to later. What they found was:

…In conclusion, our study supports the theory that, under particular conditions, unavailability can reduce a product’s desirability, affecting future choices. Sour grapes, in this instance, had the upper hand…

So this demonstrates how making something exclusive doesn’t always make it more sought after.

The full study, “Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union“, is also worth a read if you want to get into the details – as I think you should.

The reason I brought this up is that we often consider site technical issues or business decisions as something that impacts whether a site’s content is seen. It has a latency issue after correction, it ends up, and while there’s not enough information from the study, it does seem the proportionality of return to use is proportional to to how long the content was unavailable. There are two issues I’ll bring up, the first being…

Paywalls.

I take issue with paywalls.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in writers getting paid, and I would like to get paid sometime for writing. I subscribe to a Iona Italia on substack and Unherd.com presently, and have been toying with going back to subscribing to Scientific American. I’m tough when it comes to subscriptions. I subscribe to Iona because I think reading her can make me a better writer – and while the same is true for Unherd.com, I enjoy the articles because they’re not just run of the mill, even those I find issues with. It’s original.

However, today I saw an interesting article on Twitter by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which dutifully distracted me by pointing out it was my last ‘free’ article for the month as some sites do. They have been getting me to click, according to the HBR article limits at present, 4 times this month and it’s the 19th.

I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the other articles I read on HBR. Still, what’s the cost, then?
$12.50 US a month.

So for 4 articles in 19 days, that would put me at 6.3 articles in 30, which comes up to $1.98 an article for me. I’m sorry, HBR, I just don’t see spending $2/article, when an article might take me 7 minutes to read. Now, this is not to say HBR doesn’t have good articles, but how often are they interesting enough for me?

Short answer: not enough for me to subscribe.

Does that mean I’m unwilling to pay HBR for articles? No. It means I don’t want to pay their monthly price because I can’t depend on them to be interesting to me every month. This was the problem with magazine subscriptions I had (and why I’m still debating renewing my ancient Scientific American subscription), whereas with Unherd.com I spent around $49/year, and while I’m not reading them every day, I peruse the site at least 3 times a week, reading at least12 articles a month. Quick math, dropping a dollar off the annual subscription gives us $48/year, which comes up to $4/month, where I’m reading 12 articles in a month and paying… $0.33/article.

More importantly, given it takes me the same amount of time to read an article on HBR as Unherd, I’m getting more time reading for the price. Now, this is unfair. HBR is a niche market and few of their articles would appeal to me – but the few that do, I might pay for, but I’m not going to pay more than I do for a can of Coke for something that lasts me 7 minutes. I’m a reader, not some client visiting a hooker.

New York Times does this, as do a few other sites, and each time I go through a similar process. I call it ‘signal to noise’ because for me, that’s what it is. I get better signal to noise with Unherd than I do with HBR, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the signal from HBR. I’m just not willing to pay for what I consider noise. Attenuate, attenuate!

So in my mind, people are leaving dollars on the table. I might start an account for $10 and pay 33.3 cents an article, and replenish the account if I get value for it. If I’m reading enough, the subscription price might be a deal.

This all lead me back to the days when I sat with Phil Hughes in Nicaragua and discussed revenue for print publications with him, then publisher of Linux Journal. He of course had a lot more experience than I, and he told me why print and web advertising were such different beasts – it has to do with verifiable views, which at the time were easily gamed by simply refreshing the pages. Now they can be gamed by bot farms, so the cost of web advertising began low and has credible reason not to increase except for one major thing: User accounts, which the newspapers and magazines have unimaginatively done without considering the money they’re leaving on the table.

Why am I so concerned? My real issue with paywalls is that they keep me from accessing information, or knowledge, and that affects how I make decisions – just as it affects how you make decisions. When you cut out segments of society and create silos of information, the Internet simply is repeating the same thing that print publications do except… you can’t let me read your magazine when you’re done, and I can’t do the same. There was a time when people would find valuable things in old magazines laying around.

So what happens when I see that I’m out of articles on a site? I roll my eyes, move on with my life and ignore links to the site for an indeterminate period, much like the Reuters Institute paper shows. It could be a month, it could be 2 months… and I’ll simply forget I have ‘free’ articles to read.

Yet even with that, I have the luxury of spending 33 cents on an article. Some people don’t. Some people may not even have access to a credit card in some countries, and just like that, the digital divide becomes an informational divide. The only real answer in my mind is to increase advertising costs to cover that of the writers, the editors, and the boss’s nephew manning the photocopier and fax in the basement.

Derivative Knowledge

Now, all of this impacts something else.

It impacts AIs being trained on the Internet, who are unlikely to see paid content and thus are stuck reading free websites. That seems stupid, but in the house of cards of business, maybe there’s an upside to having an AI trained without subscriptions. I just don’t know what it is.

There was a time when I thought all information should be free. There was even a stab at a Creative Commons license for developing nations, which would have been more equitable and allowed those who could afford to carry the cost for those trying to catch up. This could also work for AIs being trained, but, with the popularity of VPNs as they are, information accessibility in developed nations could easily be subverted by simply using a VPN server in Haiti, as an example.

And all of this leads up to derivative knowledge, because that impacts decision making – not just of machines, but that of people.

If the media industry on the Internet wants to actually be read and interacted with… understanding these things better makes sense. Or, that latency of not visiting could catch up, or… we could just leave a bunch of people behind because we couldn’t find a better solution.

Blind

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BlindedWherever I worked, I usually tested the hierarchy’s patience with my ‘going out of scope’. It started in secondary school, actually – I remember the day – when I had gone off wandering outside of the Chemistry curriculum (but within the textbook).

I’d been doing my own notes independent of the class – things that I found interesting. I didn’t understand a curriculum. I was just having fun learning, and so I had foolishly thought that my work would be appreciated when I showed my work to the teacher.

He wasn’t impressed, particularly since I wasn’t doing too well in his class. He wanted me to focus on the curriculum – but no one had given me a curriculum, they’d given me a book. He told me I would continue to get bad grades in chemistry until I focused on the curriculum.

What we both didn’t know at the time is that I didn’t care about the grade, I cared about learning stuff. This could have been a pivotal moment for me in formal education, but it wasn’t. That would come almost 2 years later when I decided I needed to pass their tests.

Similar stories followed me throughout my careers. I was never interested in what society thought I knew, I was always interested in what I could learn. At first, there was little benefit, but later on in my careers in Medicine (USN), software engineering (all over) and writing it came in very handy because I not only knew things that others didn’t, I also didn’t think like others did.

Since I wasn’t interested in their prizes, I didn’t have to play by their rules. And since I didn’t play the ratchet game of educational landmarks, I didn’t limit myself and didn’t stop studying things after I got to a certain point. So many people languish, letting the fluid education they have become concrete, set in stone.

In solving problems, this became my greatest strength – that I was immune to siloed knowledge. It drove managers and CTOs nuts at times, having a software engineer wandering around and talking to users and people who supported software, an unheard of thing in modern software development, but well within normalcy in the elder practice. Know the users, know the uses. Know how it’s used, know how it might break.

Plan for everything.

But sometimes it doesn’t work that way.

As a software engineer, I usually found myself in trouble with management because I was always doing things ‘out of scope’. I’d wander around at times, talking to people who supported or used software I was working on for a few different reasons. At one of the last companies I worked for, I was told repeatedly that upper management saw me wandering from my desk too much.

My Director at the time thought I was unfocused, and yet every project I was given was done on time despite my wanderings outside the building or over to other departments. He wasn’t wrong, he just wasn’t right, and in retrospect I think he wrote that to pacify upper management. Either way, I didn’t really care, but saying that was a great way to make sure I got a crappy raise.  I ended up getting a crappy raise anyway, but in a way that was my fault for not negotiating harder.

What had happened was pretty straightforward. The company had some complex software systems, and when I started the then most senior software engineer was on his last week. I learned as much about the systems as I could over that week, trailing him, getting to understand the big picture of the spaghetti code that interns had written. The few with true specialized knowledge held onto it as their job security.

I learned a lot in that week, but not enough. Nobody who was interested in solving the problems actually knew anything, nothing was documented, and so I began writing things down as I had been taught as a young Software Engineer at Honeywell. Some of it was accused of being wrong by those whose job security was threatened, and my response was that they should fix the Wiki. They never did, of course.

Things changed within the company, part politics, partly near revolt in the Software Department (another article there!), and so structures that were once fluid became siloed. This isn’t as much of an issue as people might think if people actually document what they do appropriately, and it’s shared with the department overall – so there were problems that arose because the software complexity, and entropy, had gotten to critical mass – and problems arose that required someone to be outside of the silos.

At around that time, I was asked to a meeting about some issues and I stayed quiet the entire time. One of the company’s officers asked me to stay after the meeting, and my Director was there too. He asked me, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

So I explained to him that since everyone was off doing their own things, and that I had no insight into how things were actually changing in the software across multiple teams, I felt blinded. Where once I had a working knowledge of the systems, I no longer had it because I wasn’t able to see what was changing, and how it would affect the systems on a larger level.

There was a silence. Nothing changed. And after a few system screwups that brought the entire system down, caused by undocumented and sometimes ill advised changes in the code by people, including myself (mine were documented)… I gave up.

I knew we were working blind. However, people who had never peered behind their version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave couldn’t see, and because they couldn’t see, they didn’t care.

I Was Going Somewhere With That.

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Little Green Man says THAT WAYOne of the more ‘fun’ things that happens with writing is the distraction – when you end up off on a tangent because of other things.

Like earthquakes. Introspection because of how you see other people react about earthquakes. And then, because you’re already distracted, you end up writing about an attachment to vehicles.

And that actually fits in with all of what I was getting at. Granted, some people are distracted by the antics of people who they implicitly give authority to with their attention, or have that societal attention deficit disorder as frameworks do what they were designed to.

When the earth rumbles and people realize just how powerless they really are – when they can’t run away from something and there’s nothing to fight – a morbid reality sets in that can’t be so easily dismissed… for a short while, anyway. It’s not as if understanding plate tectonics is going to save you from an earthquake. Breaks in frameworks begin to show, and the ambiguity of how safe one really is seeps into the society.

Time moves along, the ambiguity pumps are manned as people find explanations from either science or religion or that-person-down-the-street-who-knows-everything… they find some comfort, getting rid of that ambiguity.

And suddenly, they’re acting as if nothing happened at all. As if they are safe, as if the few hours of their lives they spent with seismologists was enough – because to them the world is dangerous to know about, it’s dangerous to understand what happens outside of those frameworks.

People don’t want answers. They want comfort.

And, oddly enough, that’s an important point on the way to where I was going.

Cutting Both Ways

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NowThere are things that we know and things that we do not know. The troubles of humanity seem to revolve around the problem of confusing the two.

What We Know

We tend to be biased toward what we know. What we know, what we have learned, these things give us a definition of the world and people around us. This is how we learn to judge things; it’s our mind being ‘efficient’ in allowing us not to be overwhelmed by the world. It’s about creating a world that we know so that we can comfortably work within it.

It’s a way of mitigating risk.

What We Don’t Know

Curiosity leads us to find out what we don’t know based on understanding that we don’t know it. Few wish to deal with unknowns – in a world largely built on our understanding of what we do know, we balk at what we don’t. Even if we don’t know it, we expect someone else to know it and we even pay us to teach us what they know – but there’s an implicit error in what we know because it is largely a broad brush that paints over what we don’t know. It’s a scary thing for people sometimes.

But What Do We Know?

See, here’s the rub. We believe we know what we do only because it hasn’t been proven to be different. And what do we know? We know what we experience. Everything else is hearsay, be it in a book or something someone else tells you – regardless of how much you trust them, because, really, trust is about knowing and not knowing.

Trust is about believing someone based on previous experience. Trust is about believing that someone will act a certain way under certain circumstances. If anything, Life probably has shown anyone that has survived the first 10 years of life that trust is fickle because people are fickle because… people confuse what they know and what they don’t know.

A broken promise to a child isn’t something the child forgets easily, but it’s an easy mistake if the promise was made on expectations proven wrong. “I will be there” doesn’t take into account the last minute thing that drags you away.

What we know is an illusion of permanence. It’s a snapshot of how we believe things to be, and anyone who has survived more than 2 decades on the planet will have experienced the turmoil of the way things are versus the way they thought things were. Whether they understand it or not isn’t important until it becomes important to them.

Where knowledge is power, not acknowledging lack of knowledge – lack of certainty – is the other edge of that sword.