more on The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google (fwd)

["David J. Farber" <farber () nexus inconvenient net>]

===== Forwarded message from Gene Spafford <spaf () cerias purdue edu> =====

\From: Gene Spafford <spaf () cerias purdue edu>
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 10:51:01 -0500

Dave (and Mark, and IP):

Data is not necessarily information.  Information does not 
necessarily lead to knowledge.  And knowledge is not always 
sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom.

Having Google or Alexandria or the Library of Congress contain all 
works in a particular form at a particular time is potentially 
useful, but without critical skills and background any arbitrary 
reader is likely to find nonsense and believe it fact, read fact and 
conclude fiction, or simply be left in a state of greater confusion 
than before.   This is perhaps the real lesson of Babel.

Using Google (or searching in a major library) right now I can find 
convincing treatises that the world is flat, aliens walk among us, 
and that the world was created a mere 6009 years ago.   There are 
pages that "prove" that there is  no God, that there are multiple 
gods, that the one "true" God is revealed by religion X/Y/Z, and in 
keeping with the above, that God was an alien in a UFO.

During the Dark Ages of the West, the monasteries (and eventually, 
the universities) were the custodians of the world's knowledge.  They 
kept all the books and preserved them as best they could.   Yet, for 
all that wealth of information, they still believed that the world 
was flat, that the Sun revolved around the Earth, that a lead ball 
fell faster than copper when dropped from a building, and that 
imbalance of the humours was the cause of disease.  The clerics and 
academics also had a tendency to burn or ban books that didn't meet 
the religious or political standards of the day -- which says 
something about changing perspective and the fear that fallacy might 
be found in the current regime more than anything else.  After all, 
blasphemy is indignation not that some apostate is in error, but 
rather fear that he or she is correct.  Questioning the status quo 
can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at 
the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows 
you wish to butcher.

With our current knowledge, we can look back at the works kept by the 
monks and preserved through the ages, and we can appreciate both the 
early scholarship that created them and the great effort to maintain 
useful copies.  We can look at those combinations of myths and facts, 
at the transcription errors, at the subjective editing, and at the 
faulty translations, and understand some of history (provided that we 
don't imbue too many works with mystical inerrancy based on religious 
philosophy, or use a lens that is too focused on issues of class, 
race, religion, gender, or economic state of being).

But the sum of human knowledge is dynamic.  If we pick any point in 
time and read all the works from that point, our knowledge of the 
world would be incomplete and contain fallacies.  Think of the 
advances in the various sciences and arts as time passes.  A 
collection of all books and papers worldwide from 10 years ago would 
be missing so much that we have have learned in the succeeding years.

Google can aggregate all web and paper-based information, and they 
can build fantastic search engines, but that will not directly lead 
to truth or wisdom.   For that we will continue to need education, 
training in critical thought, and good editors who can help us winnow 
the fact from the fiction.  We also need to somehow accommodate faith 
and superstition as human qualities.  (Of course, faith and 
superstition are perhaps the same thing: belief, sometimes reinforced 
by anecdotal coincidence, that cannot be supported by repeatable, 
unbiased experiments .  Declan's recent post about John Brockman's 
effort is worth looking at here: IP Message-ID: 
<BE02BF3B.A30B%dave () farber net> )

This all has bearing on previous discourse we have seen on this list 
regarding issues such as privacy, copyright, restriction on the flow 
of scientific information, the role of the Internet in countries with 
oppressive regimes, the conflicts between most religions and secular 
scholarship, and many more.    We have too many people who believe 
(in the sense of either superstition or faith  :-):
        * that a vast collection of information, such as the 
Internet, can by itself lead to knowledge
        * that knowledge and wisdom can be obtained by reading and 
understanding one or more books or WWW sites  -- whether that 
knowledge is inerrant programming of C# or divine guidance that the 
"end times" are coming
        * that collecting enough information and mining it can 
eventually reveal all hidden knowledge (e.g., DARPA's TIA)
        * that if something is stated often enough, or believed by 
enough people, then it is true
        * that having sufficient knowledge allows one to predict 
elements of the future, or make wise decisions (e.g., almost any 
political issue)

To conclude this little essay, let me suggest a very interesting and 
classic short story (very short) by Jorge Luis Borges,entitled "The 
Library of Babel."   An English translation can be found online 
(using Google, of course :-) as 
<http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html>. 
This is something I ask all my advisees to read and think about as 
context for their work as scientists and leaders.

--spaf


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