What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists, anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who think there is, should be, or have a plan.
I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can grok the world. If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon me like a heat bath. Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM: > Funny. > > Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he > lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially, > that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and that > keeping current is "a very awkward problem" both personally and > institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the argument > at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving the > lectures, and it's still truer now. > > I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the > time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to > work and do something really smart. > > So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if you > can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it for > you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted. > > And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its > projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know > what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off to > make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into. > > So, why is progress supposed to make sense? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -- Bertrand Russell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
