On Tue, 8 Oct 2013, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Revolutions are good things, even if the methods can be harsh, crude and
> imprecise.
Ignoring the semantic debate possibilities over the ambiguous word
"revolution" itself, I disagree. Taking only the political definition to
task, the problem with revolutions is that they are operationally
destructive, not constructive. It is what happens after the revolution
that determines whether "good" will or will not result. Participatory
social evolution works better in the long run (e.g. RDA?).
>> Yes, but humans are getting poorer at designing their particular queries.
>
> Based on what?
Observation of the emotional manipulation of an increasing proportion of
humans that is making them incapable of critical thinking to obtain
accurate information. Take for example the prominene of, the legislator
mentioned in, and the comments made about, the article "Arizona lawmaker
refers to Obama as 'De Fuhrer' on Facebook" in today's news. Note the
cause AND effect relationships involved.
> Humans should not adopt to what query engines can understand, it's the
> engines that need to be better at understanding what the humans want.
It's the media and marketers (and Mark Zuckerberg) that are good at
"understanding what humans *want*", and that's done us a lot of good
(not). I'd prefer query engines that understand what people NEED--
knowledge, not just stimulation.
Zucker rimes with ... ? :)
> all animals currently alive have to some degree overcome a whole lot of
> things that would normally be self-destructive.
Sorry about the somewhat convoluted rhetoric. What I meant was that all
animals are self-obsessed for the sake of survival within limited niches
that become balanced as a result. Humans, however, have too much potential
influence and, when operating out of personal self-interest, disrupt all
balances, thus becoming self-destructive (as a whole species).
> What's so special about us?
The uniquely human capacity to perform critical thinking rather than
predation, blind obedience, or purely instinctual or emotional behaviors.
> I feel you're a bit imprecise here. Stimulation has no bearing on the
> problem of parsing information, and would be, at best, a secondary
> problem.
Tell that to the increasingly ubiquitous political talking heads who
would intentionally parse false information to instill overstimulation AND
try to prevent (defund) the provision of accurate data and analysis of
their behaviors.
Information overload is a form of over-stimulation.
> How is neuroplasticity suppose to fix the problem of information overload?
The problem isn't the concept of information overload, it's
neurophysiological overload itself. Neuroplasticity simply allows for the
restructuring of brains subject to overload. Train humans to control
overstimulation (both cause and effect) and engage in practical critical
thinking, and the "overload" problem no longer exists.
Rather than trying to avoid presenting "information overload", assist
people in dealing with the mental process of overstimulation.
> There's a bell curve in there that you have to pay attention to long
> before you get to grade anything as competence levels
Let's not grade anything.* Instead, let's create information environments
that neutralize the causes and effects of overstimulation and instill
critical thinking.
*I take that back. "Grading" levels of certain human behaviors (not
people) can be used as instructional tools. Consider, for example,
challenging potential consumers of information to recognize absence of
empathy, misdirection, glibness, self-obsessive speech, manipulative
rhetoric, unprovable hypotheses, logical inconsistencies and particularly
entire matrices of "unforeseen consequences" and "possible hidden
agendas."
> at which point you're going down a route of empirical data matching
> models of human cognition which, as Karen pointed out, is a muddled
> thing.
We've got supercomputers that should be programmable to sort out the
constantly incoming data on all aspects of cognitive competence and
dissonance. The problems are: (1) we are not applying the "scientific
method" to social problems (especially in government); (2) we are not
feeding all the data into computers (for comparison see "When astronomers
met computer science"); (3) we are not using computers to interrelate
every bit of *possibly* relevant data coming from different directions
(specializations); (4) we tend to employ doubt before we employ
confidence; (5) there really are human predatory forces at work that would
interfere with all of the above SOLELY to protect and enhance their
positions of power and control, and we are not dealing with that issue
directly.
On that last point, we could program computers to identify *effectively*
predatory behaviors on the part of humans and causes of those behaviors
along with vulnerabilities to them (as the information becomes available).
In the process, we can use the information gathered and analyzed to inform
people and interest them in contributing to the process.
> I'm assuming you mean training your mental capabilities to deal with
> what is presented, as opposed to present something that require no
> [mental capabilities :) ]
Don't forget: "The medium [message] IS the massage."
"Cogito ergo sum." No cogito, no sum.
Cheers!
jgm
John G. Marr
Cataloger
CDS, UL
Univ. of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
jmarr_at_unm.edu
californiastop_at_hushmail.com
** Forget the "self"; forget the "other"; just
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Received on Tue Oct 08 2013 - 16:22:28 EDT