Slam Dunk!
Maybe dementia is just part of the annealing schedule? Assuming of
course there were actually a Plan(tm).
What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people
who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that
conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism
and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit
they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists,
anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who
think there is, should be, or have a plan.
I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a
plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can
grok the world.
If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no
plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the
more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or
gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon
me like a heat bath.
Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM:
Funny.
Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he
lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially,
that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and that
keeping current is "a very awkward problem" both personally and
institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the argument
at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving the
lectures, and it's still truer now.
I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the
time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to
work and do something really smart.
So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if you
can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it for
you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted.
And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its
projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know
what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off to
make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into.
So, why is progress supposed to make sense?
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