Warning, freeform thought ahead

[silveradept]

None of my umpiring shifts ever get done on time. Well, unless there are forfeits or early-ending games involved. So I'm finally back. Thfffft. Today was a productive day in terms of making Organization XIII suffer mightily for their plotting. Although I do admit that it took some doing, and that the hardest difficulty level in this game lives up to its billing.

Well, picnic times have been happening. If you haven't had yours yet, then maybe you can get this stuff in time. Bring along the 100% compostable dinnerware, the extreme roller skates, and don't forget your Zorbing ball. Have fun in the fields, the flowers. With all that wide-open space, there's plenty of room for some mental digging as well.

AMD and ATI joining forces. This is likely to be a good thing for all.

The Death of the Double Entendre - or why advertising is so simpleminded, and subsequently sucks. I'm inclined to agree that things are playing down to the lowest common denominator, and mostly because that's what the majority of people/consumers want. They don't want Marilyn Monroe holding her skirt down over an air vent, they want her posing nude on the cover of Playboy. Not only that, but they want her to have her legs spread and leave nothing to the imagination. Probably a few others want to see Marilyn having sex above and beyond the spread of her being spread. The language is simplifying, "humor" is simplifying, but in front of that, the mind is simplifying itself, as well. (Thoreau quote here, wielded ferrically as Lao Tsu dances in the dandelions.) My mind is likely simpler than my ancestors'. I can't recall all the stories of Torah or the Christian Foundational Writings, even though I grew up with them. Complex calculations are done more by machine than by mind these days. I don't know the complete details of the inner workings of most of the devices that I use on a daily basis. I haven't been drilled in the cycles of the seasons, when to plant, when to reap, et cetera. By memory standards, I may not measure up to the ancients. By higher thought in science and philosophy, I may not measure up to the ancients. Or, more likely, their shadows and archetypes built by the people that followed them. Perhaps Issac Newton would be best to wield here (shoulders of giants - is that the right person? I can't remember.) as a defense against needing to reinvent the wheel every generation. With increased specialization and segmentation, more machine-like behavior and work/social interactions, maybe the mind is just moulding itself to the new environment around it. Is it somehow wrong to think, in such an enlightened, electrically-powered age that the Seven Liberal Arts still should have an important role, and that the American education system isn't doing nearly enough to produce the well-rounded students it claims to do so, instead preferring to make drug-and-mass-culture-dependent machine-cogs?

There's an interesting side-street here about the requirements of sufficient prosperity to have an idle class that can even begin to consider philosophising, much less over a digital medium to an audience that is scattered across the globe. Probably another one about the enormous waste that occurs, then, when that idle class chooses to expend its energy on what passes for mass culture, in the basest forms that it takes. My point, though, is that in some regards, compared to the past, today's society doesn't stack up. This forms the conservative wing of most societies - learn from the past and try to keep its good things. The obverse of that point is pretty important, too - compared to past societies, we do have a leg up on them in some situations - science (SCIENCE!) being one of the obvious ones. We have a much better grasp of how the gods work now. Philosophy, once considered an art, has become a science (which may just mean that it took on some needless complexities as well as the rules of logic). We understand why getting drilled in the head is likely to readjust our world views, and are learning more and more why the magic plants work the way they do. Of course, we also understand much more about what can happen when the gods get pissed, too. Not all knowledge is virtuous knowledge, and there's probably a significant part of Forbidden Lore in the scientific corpus.

We know more about each other, more about how we behave, more about how to control how we behave (more mechanical mayhem, maybe?), yet it can seem at times that with our increased knowledge and technology, our tolerance, empathy, and compassion for each other is declining. Not that this is necessarily true, but it can appear that way - global blogosphere power and insta-communications can make both parts of a Stalin quote true. The tragedies multiply and spread, the statistics do the same thing. The monkeysphere appears and is exploited by interests that are likely running counter to the way of progress. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, and then it's hilarious, replayed on America's Funniest Home Videos and Jackass. There's always a THEM, be it homosexuals or Muslims or A-rabs (nasal a sound, there) or just the Joneses next door. Keeping up?

Praise God and pass the ammunition, we're hunting wascaly wabbits! There's always another wound to discover, there's always something more you wish they'd say. We didn't start the fire, but by God, we should finish it! We don't need no water, let the mother-fucker burn! Or are you unforgiven, too? Dandelions ahead, malapropisms strictly forbidden. Ever seen a walking Spoonerism? Here I am, you lucky fans. I'm ready for my close up, of course, but I might be on minute fourteen. Just lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it, you only get one shot. The Way that can be named is not the eternal Way. It's all about sound bites, isn't it? Genly Ai finally understood why the Haddara-trained Gethenian, Estraven, spoke in aphorisms - it's about data compression. Westerners write books. Everyone else collects sayings and passes them on.

What does it all mean? (That question's been asked a lot through the ages.) Is there a unifying thread amongst the chaos? Or is the chaos the unifying thread? Does everything reduce to No-Thing, Not This and Not That? Well, science says it will, at least according to the current theory. AC said "Insufficient data." Not "Impossible problem." How does one being in the cosmic swirl, with such a limited lifespan, manage to make enough of the universe to ensure that the next generation steps forward? When it comes to the Long Now, who has the capacity to see and plan out millenia? Seldon certainly did. Is the Zeroth law enough? Which -topia are we going for?

Rrrgh. Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space. Wish I could wrap my head around it all. And maybe it all just comes down to a boy, his tiger, a cardboard box, and some uni-directional bonding strip for reinforcement.

I just hope this makes sense to somebody. I suppose I've shown off the simplicity of mind by riddling the whole thing with various culture bits, popular or otherwise. Shouldn't need them as a crutch, but I never did get trained in all of the Seven Liberal Arts. And so I resort to shorthand. Finally, I'm going to bed. Tell me if anything I said helps. It probably looks more like a Gordian knot, now.

Comments

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

The Zorbing thing reminds me of a Far Side comic, set on some distant planet. There's an alien driving along the planetscape in his vehicle, with the following statement on a bumper sticker:

"Ray guns don't vaporize zorbians-- Zorbians vaporize Zorbians!"

It seems, the Kiwis have made it so we can. Or at least make the Zorbians FEEL half-vaporized!

Have teh best

-=TK

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I think I just bent my brain reading that. You think on a very different level than I do. Not lower, certainly. Perhaps higher, definitely at a different angle. I certainly don't think your tying in assorted cultural references is any kind of crutch. Nobody thinks in "pure thought," ideas do not, and cannot exist in a vacuum, there's always images, situations, stories and other things attached to them.

Out of prying curiosity, do you know what your IQ is? (Not that it's terribly relevant, as IQ is only a very specific measure, and has little to do with skill in the softer sciences, but I'm still curious.)

[silveradept]

I don't think I've ever had an actual IQ test in many years. The one that did happen was in second grade, and for the time, it pegged me at 149 or something. At least, I think that was the number.

So no, I don't really know. Any reason why you ask?

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

IQ tends to remain constant, so that's a decent indicator. I think at ages 6-10 are the ages at which you should have your IQ tested for best results. Above that, you start hitting a ceiling and your IQ seems to be lower than it actually is. Below that, you can't sit long enough to answer the questions.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Just curious/nosy. I've never had an official test. I've taken half a dozen internet tests, and they fall anywhere from 115 to 160. Not that I believe the 160 one, I'm not that smart.

[silveradept]

Oh, I dunno. It's possible you could be in that area. You've obviously got talent and erudition and ability. Intelligence id definitely not that far behind.

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

No, advertising sucks because it's mass-produced media designed to coerce people into shelling their money away for shit they don't need.

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

There is also so much of it that it wouldn't matter what kind it was, even if each peice was hand crafted and origonal, it's still done to overkill levels.

[silveradept]

It's definitely that. It's that mass-produced part that seems to be driving the subtleties away - to be accessible by everyone, it can't be smarter than the dumbest comsumer.

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

Knowledge is changing, and public schools aren't helping, but it's not diminishing. We actually know about a lot more than older generations, of even the ancients. They knew a lot about very little, and we know a little about so much more than they even knew existed. Yes you don't know exactly how the car, computer, atm, slurpie machine, or electric fan work, but you've got a fair idea on each and you really don't need to. You've also probably got a fair idea about how crop rotation, windmills, planting seasons, and ox drawn plows operate too. And then think of all the other things you know how to do, make work, build, think about.

Compare that to some 10th century farmer, who knows only how crop rotation, windmills, planting seasons, and ox drawn plows work, but knows it so well they could do it in the dark. Even then, a lot of the time, it was one village elder who told them when to plant and how to plant things. Even into the 20th century farmers relied on books and almanacs written by others telling them when to plant and stuff. And really, as a librarian, how important is it to you that you know the best time to plant wheat? How important is it for you to understand how to properly thrash and sort grain? It might one day come in handy, but how important is it now?

Our views on so many things have changed so dramatically, and in so many ways it's almost unfair and is certianly pointless to compare one group to another.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Quite so. We in the 21st century have tremendous breadth of knowledge. We have the same complexity as any other period in history (in fact, in some ways, we have more complexity of thought—we can handle things like communicating over telephones, the internet, the tremendous wash of (mostly trivial?) information we can access via television and radio and the internet. This isn't a trivial task.) It is also counter to the common sense to evoke Isaac Newton as an example of a "sophisticated ancient"; yes, he was, but he was also probably one of the two or three most intelligent people in Europe at that time. Compared to the majority, he was as unto a god (and compared to us, in his field, he's merely very good.)


I was going to write about the monkeysphere, but I see its already been mentioned. (In terms of cultural depth - well, it is common for decadent societies to become more... unsubtle and extravagant in their entertainments. One could argue that this is the case here.)

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

You're deffinatly right on compareing Newton to the average man of his time.

Along with our breadth of knowledge is also the depth. Newton or Voltare could understand all the science in their fields because there wasn't that much science to know about (When you take science today into account). Now we have so much information on so many subjects that a person can spend their whole life researching just one aspect of the rock strata in a specific part of Arizona.

The lack of subtlety could also be a reaction to the sheer amount of entertainment avaliable. I've heard is suggested that when you've got as amny choices as we have, only the loudest and most obvious ones will break through the mental barrier we make to jsut tune everything out. It needs to rise above the constant hum (or din) that has become white noise as it were. It's an interesting idea, though I think it might have some flaws.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

One might argue, I suppose, that provision of unreasonably large choice (or, unreasonably significant resources) in non-essential things like entertainment is a sign of a decadent society, though?

And yes, our current society is good at breadth (but shallow) combined with depth (but narrow), probably more so than any other society so far. Unfortunately, this is probably an inevitable result of the limitations of the human brain in processing information (I say "unfortunately" because it has been shown that interdisciplinary work generally pays off very very well compared to focussed research).

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

But it is increasingly difficult to be /good/ at interdisciplinary work because of all the information one needs to process.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

I would argue that it isn't a limitation of the human brain for processing information. To be perfectly honest I do not believe that any human being has hit the limit of the information processing capabilities of our brains.

I would argue that the limiting factor comes from our imperfect connection to the world: all information we have access to has to be interpreted from global symbols to local ones, and the process is fraught with ambiguities and the inherant complexity of attempting to transfer knowledge effectively through multiple levels of message encapsulation. Even learning something that attempts to remove as much ambiguity as possible - like mathematics or programming - involves many steps of interpretation, each of which takes time and is subject to potential errors.

The reason that most people don't know how their car works, how the innards of their computer works, how the very neurons they are thinking with operate and so on isn't down to a lack of capability as such* but simply because they only have limited time and interpretation resources and those must be prioritised to things that impact their life. People are quite willing to believe that computers work because of pixies because they don't want to expend the resources required to correct that view given that their mental model is sufficient to actually use the device.

I suspect that, if there was some way to overcome the problem of actually getting accurate, concise information into our brains without the inherant time and error correction overhead, interdisciplinary work would be far more possible, but people just don't have the time to study everything well enough.

* although even I'd argue this, for a different reason. My teaching experience has convinced me that some people are simply more capable of thinking logically and mathematically than others, and I do not doubt that similar biases occur in other subject areas. However, whether this is a cause of people specialising in certain areas or the result of it is open to debate.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

Perhaps. My point was actually more that in interdisciplinary work, one must be as good as the experts in all of the fields, at least the subset of which is relevant. Which is exceedingly difficult if that subset is not defined. There is limited use for a computational biologist using 20-year old biological models and computing algorithms. The key to interdisciplinary study these days is not to have one person good at the whole thing, but to be good at one side and have a passing understanding of the other side, enough to communicate with an expert on that other side. The limitation may be in processing power or in limited bandwidth, but the fact remains that the field progresses so far that it is difficult to be as good as a focussed researcher in a single field in two fields.

(Interdisciplinary work being the very challenge I hope to face in graduate school.)

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) 'ferrically'?

Interesting: it reminds me of similar streams of conciousness that occupants of this brain have produced while sleepy and lacking mental discipline. Especially near the end, it seems mainly like an entity hemorrhaging everything that flits through its mind, association connecting to association, and all finding their outlet in text.

To make something of great, lasting worth... or in short, to do what one normally does in each day... involves taking that internal torrent, and restricting the flow: taking all the ideas, guiding their path through an effort of will--concentration on the desired direction of interest, though this requires to first think of it and discards other routes which one might otherwise have stumbled across without thinking--and packaging together only those which get the desired point to be imparted across.

Thoughts of value, there... it would be interesting if everyone in the world communicated thus, each sentence fragment having a completely isolated meaning, being completely isolated and necessitating judgement on itself alone, bereft of aiding context. Much like what it is to be able to see others' thoughts, really, which thus imparts greater self-understanding in how one's own situation relates to the world as it is. Your entry was difficult to read, but thank you.

[greenhornline.livejournal.com]

Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space. Wish I could wrap my head around it all. And maybe it all just comes down to a boy, his tiger, a cardboard box, and some uni-directional bonding strip for reinforcement.

If that's what it comes down to I'm all set and have tigers and cardboard boxes to share.

(amusing tid-bit that fits right in today)

Hope this brought a bit of amusement to this whole thing and no dude you aren't alone in all this thinking and it's now get me thinking. Good thing I have en English paper to write

[silveradept]

Hrm. I seem to have unintentionally timed this just so. Yay for coincidences.

[greenhornline.livejournal.com]

yay for Calvin and Hobbes and random cardboard boxes

[yarha.livejournal.com]

That was a rant. I'd believe it if facts were given in support, else I'd be demonstrating the 'lessening condition of man' by exhibiting a lack of skeptical thinking.

Yarha, Show Me the Money

[silveradept]

I make no claims to factualness, as this was about perception, for the most part. And as you can see, there are plenty other people here who say that the views expressed in the entry aren't quite right.

Silver, No Cash to Speak Of.

[jokermage.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to say that you broke my thinkmeats. I feel stupid for not understanding your point.

[silveradept]

I'm not entirely sure that I understand it, either. No need to feel stupid, as there may not have been anything intelligent said.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I understood most of what you were saying there, i think, and I don't think you're simple minded for using pop culture references/quotes. Sad to say, but that is how the majority of our society interacts with each other, building upon reference upon reference until you no longer know where a reference came from and if it was your own thought, or the thought of somoene else being exploited. Even the simple "More Cowbell" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Cowbell) sketch mentioned in the article has spawned countless of other references to the "more cowbell" phrase, to the point where I'm sure there are countless people who use that phrase at a ball game or whatever and have no clue as to the origin of the phrase.

Advertisements - be it telivision, radio, or print are getting raunchier and raunchier. It's almost as if no one has a sense of decorum anymore. There's a George Carlin sketch from the late 70's that talks about a cigarette ad and how in the ad they are making subtle references to sex, and then the big finish is watching the bullet shaped train pass though a tunnel. something like that is subtle, but still gets the whole sex-thing across. Lately it seems being subtle has gone completely out the window - I recall flipping through a magazine and seeing ad after ad of scanilty clad women and wondering what exactly was being advertised...and it turned out to be something completely unrelated to the scantily clad woman. Use scantily clad people in adverts for underwear, sure...but in car ads and food ads? Half the time when you watch a commercial on TV you have no clue what the item being advertised is until the end of the commercial because the commercial has nothing to do with the products being offered.

As for not knowing the innerworkings of all the tech stuff you use daily - phone, computer, car, etc., I think it's definitly a result of "dumbing down" education. A good portion of the time, those of us who want to be smart and want to know how things work get branded a "geek" or a "nerd", and then we still wind up not learning what we want to know, because there isn't anyone to teach us. I'm sure most of the staff at GM or Ford have no clue how the part they make actually works - they simply do their job. As things become more "modern" for lack of a better word, things get simplier for everyone but the person doing the designing of the modern device. Instead of items being hand crafted by one solitary person things are made on an assembly line (three cheers for ford?) where each person sticks on their own part, but again I bet they have no clue how their part makes the rest of it work. Heck, a lot of factory work is outsourced to Mexico, where peopel work in maquiladoras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladoras) just slaving away so that somoene can have their panasonic TV or their GE appliance.

Right anyway, i'm rabling and got side tracked and forgot what my point was in this comment, so I shall end it here...and maybe I've made sense, maybe i haven't, and maybe my interpretation of your entry is completely off base.

other thoughts...

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

compostable plates - awesome. I wonder how much they cost and where one can get them? I would think that most of the planet would be wanting these, in particular fast food restaurants.

exteme roller skates - woo. I'm telling you, I'm going to get a pair of roller skates so when we're in town together you can just pull me along :-P. Zorbing looks fun...and a bit nauseating.

AMD + ATI - the only thing that concerns me is this might mean no more ATI with Intel. I'm NOT a fan of AMD.

Oh, and I've got some good-ish news, so poke me when you're around.

Re: other thoughts...

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Buh? Why the AMD-hating?

Re: other thoughts...

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

My mom's laptop has an AMD in it, and it's caused nothing but problems.

Re: other thoughts...

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

...the processor itself has caused problems? Or is it just that the laptop is unstable?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Free-associate much? Sounds like a long day and some well-earned rantage. I caught a lot of your references, I won't claim all. And I agree with much.

'Tis a much sadder world that we live in now.

[silveradept]

Free association is often how my mind remembers thinggs, or compresses them, or organizes them. There are some truly random things you can pull out of my mind if you prime it properly.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Sounds like me and most of my friends. I once had a punning run with two friends substituting the words Smoke and Fire. I think we were/are the only ones who thought it was funny. It was a very slow RPG that night IIRC.

[silveradept]

Got to keep the brains occupied somehow. When you're not trying to sell them off, of course.