Nick -
Still, me being supposedly a scholar, and all, makes it a bit rough.
So, I guess I */am/* embarrassed. Sorry!
It was all I could do to not smart-assedly claim you had sucker-punched
us with that quote. But on followup of the (mis)quote, the mangling
was minimal... the spirit was preserved... it was an "honest" mistake.
If anyone got sucker punched it was Penn Jillette himself who is
implicated as the biggest disseminator of the misquote. The hub with
the most spokes in the transmission network as it were.
It brings up some interesting issues. In particular how the ease of
communication (personal and mass) has lead to much faster dissemination
of (dis)information. It seems there must be a parallel between this
and the revolutions in finance and economy where money was made more
liquid/fluid/lubricated to speed things up and ultimately change things
qualitatively. I'm sure we are already way past that point with
information now as well. Language itself started the game, writing
helped it transcend space and time, then various steps in publishing
technology (from scriptoria to printing presses to newspapers to
electronic printing to blogging).
Loosely Coupled Distributed Computing Paradigms include the
possibility/necessity of working with possibly flawed or dated
information, accepting the overhead of possibly having to roll back a
local calculation when revised information comes in. It seems like
strategies of late binding and rollback are necessary today. But is it
possible?
I feel that this is how I read news, possibly always have, but even
moreso with the Internet. While there are a number of hoaxes running
around at any time (doesn't just have to be April 1), there is always a
plethora of early misinformation coming out of any event.
Was it Mark Twain who claimed to always read the news a week (or two)
late because by then you knew whether what was reported was true or not?
I'm working on a DoD funded project which includes trying to formally
deal with this problem... of multiple qualities of uncertainty in
information and the ability to not only propogate information and
uncertainty through a knowledge network but to encode and propogate
contradictory or revised information.
I'm curious how many of the educated, intelligent people on this list
handle this problem personally?
How do you know what you know? There were standards around Scholarship
(as Nick points out) and there are standards about journalism and
sourcing, but... obviously those standards are just reference
standards, they get ignored, bent, abused, fumbled all the time.
If we have ethnographers in the house, it also seems that there are
methods for teasing apart the facts from the stories we tell to string
the facts together... multiple observers can report the same events but
still draw radically different conclusions about the implications.
- Steve
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