Scratchpad

Plato on Protagoras

agreement, certainty, emphasis, knowledge, plato, virtue —

7 Jan 2009

Managed to make it to the Rose Reading Room at last. Bought a new scarf on the street. And the Internet fairy came two days early! Life is pretty good.

It took a couple of days to synthesize Plato's Protagoras (it always does, dammit), but when I woke up this morning a bit that had been nagging at me started to fall into place a little more. Let's see if I can recollect the gist of the argument from my memory and scribbled notes without doing too much harm to the poor thing:

The ultimate conclusion is that virtuous things are based on knowledge and can therefore be taught. This is achieved in fits and starts, but finally through the example of courage. Basically, it is agreed that all (healthy) men do pleasurable things and not painful ones. However, in some instances they choose wrongly the thing which is a short term pleasure (drinking) but a long term pain (cirrhosis). But, since they are healthy, and it was earlier agreed that all healthy men choose pleasurable things, the only explanation for the bad decision is that they were not knowledgeable enough about the long term pain their choice would cause. In other words, if they had been knowledgeable about cirrhosis, they would not have drunk. The same set up is used for courage—cowards flee from battle because fleeing would seem to provide them with short term pleasurable benefits (not getting stabbed to death), however, courageous men are courageous because they understand that battle needs to be done for the longterm victory and glory to the nation, yadda yadda yadda. Ergo, Protagoras and Plato-as-Socrates conclude, if a man has knowledge (and it is agreed that knowledge can be taught), he will also be virtuous. In the argument somewhere also appeared the assertion that knowledge is the highest thing that man can possess, though they admitted that not all men agree with them, but that that is because other men are wrong (seriously, that part was just like the playground, and that is almost exactly how they put it).

This was nagging at me for a while because, honestly, it just doesn't seem right. As I lingered lazily in bed this morning it started to occur to me why, though I don't think I've worked it all quite out yet. But it centers around a phenomena that I was discussing with my friend (whom we shall call Isabel) recently, in which we both observed that many other liberals seem to believe that if only everyone became educated enough, goshdarnit, then they would agree with the liberals.

There are two assumptions here that I don't believe are right. One is that people with the same set of information will agree on things—in addition to it being impossible to force all people to have all the same pieces of information, it is also impossible to force people to place the same emphasis on the same pieces of information, whether because of their personal life experiences, biological brain quirks, personality, or goals. The other is that the speaker making such a conclusion is definitely right, which, given the fact that no person can have all information at their disposal at any given time and is also subject to the weighting bias mentioned above, is a rather bold presumption.

Now, these things are awfully big, so I'm afraid I can't flesh them out much further than this at this point. But I think I will really need to come back to these two ideas a lot more, because they seem like they may hold some pretty important keys for me.

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Knowledge Paths

cognition, curation, hci, interface, knowledge, mapping, paths —

18 Dec 2007

Oh, man. I found this excellent e-mail to Litza as I was cleaning out my Inbox the other day (to put the direness of my need to clean my Inbox into perspective, the conversation below is about 2 years old). I'm still really obsessed with this idea although it kind of fell by the wayside. On a positive note, I think a lot of other stuff that's floated across my desk the last couple of years gives me a few more words to explain it with and possible actually do it at some point.

Litza: What do you mean exactly by the web interface "allowing the presentation of multiple sources at once on the screen"? Can you give me an example where this is done? Do you mean data sources? I like the idea of showing full paths -- do you mean "downstream" paths (where the user can go) or "upstream" (where the user came from) paths? That offers some interesting possibilities and challenges.

Alexis: Well, right now, to follow a link to related information, you have to actually leave the site, or open something in a new tab. Why not click on a link and have a window on the same page appear, so you can look at things simultaneously? I mean, that's how people see connections between ideas. I don't think it's done anywhere else yet, although there are some people trying, in various ways, to create systems that do this (like Ted Nelson). I guess you could create a whole new system to do it, but you could also do it on the Net as is, using existing technologies as "complex" as CSS (kludgy as that would be).

Note: this idea is something I was trying to get at in a comment on the NYPL Labs site just a mere month ago. The screen should be a workspace, not merely a reader. In some ways 2.0 has made this much more of a reality, but rarely do interfaces allow us to manipulate the information itself - we simply play with the design of things. There are a few exceptions to this, mashups being a good example thats really starting to explode a lot more.

As far as the concept of a workspace, it is totally unnecessary but I would love to implement the above using touch screens instead of mice.

(...continued) As for paths, I am referring not to where users have been (although that is okay), but rather how ideas are connected. Kind of like a flowchart. And each part of the flowchart is a link to something about that, and when you click it it opens in the window you are looking at, and you can still see the path and the new data next to any other windows you have open. If you are talkin about, I don't know, text mining, you might want information on Natural Language Processing, spiders, mapping, neurology, XML and Java and show how they are connected, and let users look at all of them together. Not the best example, but it works for the time. And then if they want to get really excited about the XML angle, you could have a finer path to go into more detail about XML, with its pros and cons and history and examples and technical specs.

Note: I finally have a succinct word for what the fuck I am talking about here. I want users to be able to actually curate their own libraries.

(...continued) On a grander scale, what about a system where everyone could create these sort of thought-paths, and you could access anyone else's thought-path on a topic and pull the actual thought-paths into your site to supplement/expand your own? Like maybe you are good at broad overviews of things (text mining), but the finer details of XML are not your forte - just find someone who is an expert, and pull their thought path to your site for those that want to follow that particular thread.

Note: The curated subjects are modular and reusable, probably by using XML.

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Which is better - to think about food, or to eat food?

academia, culture wars, information, knowledge, progress —

17 Dec 2007

Dan Cohen had an interesting blog post a few days back that I've only just bothered to read. Of course it turned out to be quite fascinating, which just goes to show that I should keep on top of these things better.

At any rate, the post in question is on digitization and repatriation. Specifically, he asks if digital objects, photos, etc. are so finely detailed that they convey as much information as the original object, should museums give back stolen artifacts and keep digital versions of the object for scholars to look at?

The interesting offshoot of this, at least as far as I am concerned, is the question posted by a reader "Which is more valuable - information about an object, or the object itself?" Scholars, naturally, would tend to say the information. Without information, an object is simply a pretty trinket. But when you imbue it with meaning, when you investigate it and understand it, then it obtains actual value.

Although I actually agree with this on a very gut level, as both a fake-scholar and...well...okay, fine an information fetishist, are you happy?....I also differ very deeply from many academics I've met in suspecting that this is a personal obsession and not, in fact, some sort of fundamental truth. I also suspect that this is likely at the core of the public's distrust and turn from academia (another topic of personal fascination and dread). The public, on the whole, doesn't care about ideas. They care about what they can do with those ideas. Ideas, knowledge, information for their own sake are simply wanking. But put those things to good use, and then we have something to subsist on.

So which is better? Cooking up a wonderful and delicious meal and being content in the fact that it's there and we know it's good? Or actually enjoying the fruits of our labor by eating the damn thing?

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All Recent Thoughts on AI, Translation, Flexibility, Truth, Understanding

artificial intelligence, boundary objects, cooperation, flexibility, knowledge, learning, play, rigidity, translation, truth, understanding —

31 Aug 2007

Agh, 50 things going on in mind at once, don't want to lose them. Sorry for incomprehensible shorthand:

Boundary objects & boundary spanners as tools for Understanding. Acts of Translation. Data v. information, meaning & importance & relevance v. facts.

Why are we so stuck on "truth" anyway? Notion of truth. Useful or not so much? Conversation at UChi, re permanence of truth, & Chang's Inventing Temperature - is a more reasonable and useful (and attainable) goal progress instead of truth? How is progress related to learning, understanding, or knowledge?

Flaws in western logical system.

Above ties in with other thoughts on why current AI will never work, see Picard, Affective Computing, but expand beyond merely being emotional to being flexible - computers, and humans, can't learn if they can't make free associations on existing/growing knowledge base, and if one can't learn, one can't be intelligent...learning also requires ability to make mistakes and be creative, and creativity requires ability to resolve (accept) contradiction

Above all, flexibility in understanding. Creativity, adaptability. Lose rigidity. Allow to be wrong, change mind, make new connections.

Rigidity result of lack of play. "Speaking of faith" NPR week of August 27.

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