[HN Gopher] We are drowning in information while starving for wi... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-21 23:00 UTC)