[ExI] NYT ninny

[Jef Allbright]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:
>  >  effective exploration. What really frustrates me is not the ignorance
>  >  of the masses, but the dissipativeness of the cognoscenti.
>
>  Perhaps the greater subjective distances from one another causes the
>  signal to possess less apparent strength?

Huh?  I tried interpreting that several ways but couldn't arrive at
any substantial meaning.  [Subjective distance, indeed.]

"Subjective distance"  => ok
"Subjective distance from one another" => Between whom?  The ignorant
and the cognoscenti, I guess, but there wasn't any suggestion of a
dynamic between them.  They were related through my contrasting
percepts.
"Subjective distance ... causes" ... something? => It's jarring to see
any assertion of the form "subjective X causes Y" because subjective
implies not modelable, regardless of the actuality of the subjective
X.
"...the signal to possess less apparent strength" => "... the signal
to apparently possess less strength"  => "...the signal to appear
weaker"  => To what kind of signal can this refer?

Huh??  Please let me know if I'm missing something key here?

If you are somehow suggesting that there exists a "signal"
representing the right or best course into the future, then we have a
difference which is interesting, because so many naive futurists seem
to assume the something like that.

To recap, Damien expressed his dismay at a particular instance of
"stupidity", representative of broader patterns in our society.  I
agreed, and expanded on the theme with some examples perhaps painting
a picture of broader trends.  I then observed from a higher level of
abstraction that perhaps such stupidity isn't really such a problem
(in the partial sense that a rising tide raises all boats. and there
will always be a long-tailed distribution.  I followed that up with
intent to confront any "thinkers" who got that far thinking they were
riding the peak, with the idea that this peak is inhabited by Brittney
et al and exploration of the bleeding edge is inherently a
**low**-probability affair.  I then concluded with an implicit
call-to-action with a reference to the "dissipative"  meaning
entropic, cognoscenti.

Does the foregoing help? I recognize that my writing is typically
terse and overly abstract, but hardly vague.  My programming is the
same.


>  I do not have a paper to prove this theory, but I believe the
>  'geniuses' of the first wave of scientific worldview were able to
>  possess cross-domain knowledge of nearly every field.  Today it takes
>  20+ years of specialized study to be able to speak with existing
>  participants in a limited realm of expertise.  The sheer volume of
>  information to be learned is prohibitive of the kind know-it-all
>  mastery that we expect of the term genius.

I would agree that the relationship of individual contributors to
technological innovation is changing much as you suggest, but as I
pointed out in my earlier post, I think what's most significant is not
the direct discovery/development but the evolution of increasingly
effective structures supporting discovery/development.
Retrospectively, such structures are often recognized as particularly
elegant, in sharp contrast to your view that innovation tends to
depend on general breadth of knowledge.  There's a strong analogy to
genetic programming, where success depends on a diverse set of
possibilities, exploited via a strong model of probabilities.


>  I agree that what was once considered intelligence is often lost in
>  background noise

Well, that wasn't my point, and isn't my belief.  I think we are still
within the developmental window where a strong individual intelligence
can make astounding progress, not by grasping all the relevant
knowledge, but by having a very good grasp of sense-making.

- Jef