Streaming

The natural tendency of both geography and biography is to stream things, to let nature take its course as diverse forces and pressures (forces confined, or spread out over areas) act on fluids. And so it is with human education.

The most effective thing is to let fluids find their level, and then channel them accordingly. The least effective thing is to do co-current heat transfer or to force all fluids to spread evenly in a thin and unnatural film over a thin and unnatural landscape (like some movies I've seen).

When people are streamed (at airport gates, by means testing, or in education), it is always a nett gain to society in terms of resources saved, as long as the streaming medium is relatively responsive to changes in the environment. What we shouldn't do is abandon any idea of streaming in the name of that soul-deadening anti-scientific anti-human thing called 'artificial equality'.

And that leads me to banding in school systems. If we no longer have it, is that a good thing? The point is that it is bad to avoid banding. This is because people do it anyway. It is biologically impossible for humans to avoid comparisons.

The better solution is to make ALL the data available and let humans test themselves against the data, making their own sense. Is a school that claims 'green' efficiency really so if it spends $500/head on electricity and water? Is it better to send your children to a school that is religious and cheap or secular and expensive? And what if one masquerades as the other?

What I propose is that far from scrapping banding, ranking and streaming, we should make all the data publicly available while suppressing the names of individuals. Show at least the bulk population data. For every school, release their accounts to the public for reasons of accountability. Let everyone see what schools do, so that people can make conscious pseudo-rational decisions that they can no longer blame on anyone else.

How's that for a different take? *grin*

Search Engines

Many of the students I meet these days were born after 1992 or so (that is, after I began teaching). A lot of them seem to think that Google is a 'search engine', or that the various other 'key something in and get something back' websites are 'search engines'.

Actually, they're not. Or at least, not what I would call 'search engines'.

They're the front end of a group of search algorithms that link back to a carefully-cultivated database of information about the Internet. They're like the cutting edge of a knife, or the point of a screw — definitely the business end, but unable to exist usefully unless the rest of the machine is wielded correctly.

A true search engine is one that generates searches, just as an internal combustion engine is one that generates internal combustion, and a calculating engine is one that generates calculations. Similarly, those searches can be used to power other tasks through clever linkages and channels. This is true of internal combustion and calculation as well.

An engine, therefore, is a producer of power that is the result of processing basic material. It is still useless unless the output is connected to something that can make use of the output.

So what is Google then, if not a search engine?

You, dear reader, are the search engine. Or at least, the meat casing around the search engine that is your brain and nervous system. You generate the searches. You sift the findings. You use the search results by interfacing with the real world. Google is only the carburettor, the feed that you control as you search.

The consequences of not knowing this are dire. I have many students who don't know how to use Google and its huge Swiss-Army-Knife-style adjunct collection of tools. They think you just key something in, without taking time to think about what makes the best query, and get results.

Well, yes, you do. But not often the most useful or the best in quality. You get advertisements and awkward pieces of irrelevant stuff, unless you know how to refine your search. If you can do a search that yields fewer than 400 hits, this is extremely useful, since you won't have to trawl through so much junk.

Doing a properly designed query is like filtering the fuel and air input before combustion. It makes for smoother performance. So too does using the right mixture of fuel and air, in the right doses.

This is what I have to teach the students of today. I suspect that the majority of students these days are extremely test-savvy and terribly information-dumb. Information, to them, is connected to 'technology', but not to 'brain' or 'cognition'. How sad.

Data Encoding

Today I had the misfortune to be looking at the latest draft output from one of the Ministries, those warded Grand Temples of the Meritokratia of Atlantis. The earnest young priests had coded two different functions with the same range of codes, then used that range of codes differently elsewhere.

Here is an hypothetical example of how it would have worked in practice.

Let's say that a person is the target of an imaginary ailment like Maladrach's Pyriferous Pustules. Then the possible procedures for treating it are MPP-01 (douse in water), MPP-02 (dowse for water), MPP-03 (pop the pustules), MPP-04 (pop the postulant), MPP-05 (postulate a pop). And the outcomes of the treatment might be MPP-06 (full recovery), MPP-07 (terminal spontaneous combustion), MPP-08 (referral to pyrothaumaturgic specialist) and so on.

Of course, you can't tell by inspection whether you're looking at a treatment or an outcome, since the code MPP is the same! Worse, if you have new treatments, you can't insert one after MPP-05, since you used running numbers for the outcomes that start immediately after MPP-05.

To make matters worse, these people decide that for smaller practitioners with fewer options, you could use MPP-01 (douse in water), MPP-02 (dowse for water), MPP-03 (full recovery), MPP-04 (referral to a specialist) and so on.

In other words, the same codes are used to represent completely different things in a different context.

If I had been coding, I would at the very least have used something more like MPPP-001 to MPPP-nnn for MPP Procedures, and MPPO-001 to MPPO-nnn for MPP Outcomes. And I would have reserved MPPP-nnnn and MPPO-nnnn for future use in case wonder-working turned out to be more complicated than the present state of the art.

It's a shame that the OSA probably prevents me from showing you, dear readers, the very slides themselves. Then you would see and be scandalized both by the great waste of your tax dollars and the calibre of the brains consuming said dollars.

The Paradoxes of Freedom

What most of my students don't get is this thing about Gibbs's free energy. Why is it that when ∆G is positive, things are non-spontaneous and when ∆G is negative, things are spontaneous? Using the equation ∆G = ∆H - T∆S tells us the mathematical story, but fails to tell us the human story. And so, some random thoughts cascaded through my mind...

In brief, Josiah Gibbs defined this free energy in terms of how much work you could get out of a certain well-defined amount of substance in a fixed state without a nett change of state. Call this a 'lump'. If the lump showed a positive ∆G, you'd need to ADD energy to it to get anything done. If the lump showed a negative ∆G, work would flow out from it spontaneously.

This, with some other thermodynamics, leads us to the reason why ultimate freedom is a silly ideal for humanity. If everyone had perfect information, you wouldn't have a free market — rather, everything would equilibrate. If the equilibrium were dynamic (i.e. no dominant strategy existed) people would have to change their output all the time. If the equilibrium were static (i.e. a dominant strategy existed), then people would be bound by their knowledge to produce specific things, and it would be in the majority interest to maintain this equilibrium regardless of free will.

Also, information freedom requires abundant energy. You need energy to produce, transmit and receive information. The more energy, the better the signal. However, energy requires gradients. Somebody will have to suffer. Ah, but suffering might be negligible if the energy available were huge enough! Yep, at which point, one of two things might happen: a) you wouldn't need all that because you'd have enough energy to be godlike; or b) you would be envious of relatively small differences because of energy inflation, if you were still human enough. Or has Moorcock has hinted, having what feels like infinite energy would lead to what felt like infinite boredom.

Freedom functions best in a relative sense. One feels more free relative to others being less free. One feels free to do work for something, against something, with something, or in spite of something. If we were all free, we would all be enchained by that freedom. Or by each other.

Pass Times

How long does the pass last, how many passes is that? The swiping wipes the slate, the swipe moves the page, the moving finger having written is no longer part of time.

I realise that information, once discrete and chunked, is now indeed a flow, a river, a torrent like the one which rampaged into the Mediterranean Basin when Gibraltar gave way. There is no thinking about it, and even the coasts are drowned.

Many centuries later, Phlebas the Phoenician learnt something about that. Very, very briefly did he know it. And then, it was all pearls and coral.

The Cloud of Unknowing

The world is badly broken. The problem is a simple one: humanity has begun to assume that all difficulties can be overcome, all answers can be found, given enough cerebration and enough data. This is why we invest huge amounts of land, money, energy and hardware in storing enormous archives of data, most of which will be redundant, out of date, trivial, or impossible to convert into information.

The reality is sobering. We will be expending all of those resources because we think we should keep our stuff, our work, the unblessed fruit of our hands and minds, the debris of our data transactions and online interactions. We have overvalued the products of our thinking despite the fact that they have create problems we cannot solve, or created answers insufficient to those problems.

When London grew too crowded and too corrupt, the only solution for its chaotic and filthy tangle was the unthinkable Great Fire of 1666. Totally gutting the medieval Roman inner city, it destroyed the homes of seven-eighths of all London's inhabitants. It was this destruction of existing constructs that instructed the development of modern London and the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren.

Imagine this: what if ALL humanity's electronic data stores, in all forms and formats, media and mediating devices, were destroyed at one blow? A tragedy? A disaster?

I would say not. I would say it would be a golden opportunity to discover exactly what humanity is really made of, and to rebuild anew. However, I am not so sanguine as to think humanity will do better. Rather, I am inclined to believe that we will do worse.

January Session

For some reason, January is when all the budding epistemologists crawl out of their winter depression to hunt the elusive responses to questions on the theory of knowledge. It is interesting to see how one can be of help and yet not so helpful.

Just the other day, I had a note from a young person saying, "Errm, could you make your responses easier to understand so I can put them in my essay?"

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that one. I admit my ramblings are not always easy to understand — hey, in retrospect I myself can't figure out a few of them. But mostly, they aren't so difficult, and they do make some sort of sense.

Over the years, the time-sensitivity of human knowledge needs has increased to the point where impatience has become a counter-virtue. Everything is needed quickly with minimum effort. Every fix must be shot up into the brain, bypassing the sensible metabolism of useful filters.

It distresses me. It leads to problems with universal attention span and ability to retain stuff. Recently, I discovered that Primary 4 students (children mostly turning 10 that year) learn all the facts about air that O-level students (young people mostly turning 16 that year) need to know. Yet I've noticed that for some reason, most of the 16 year olds have forgotten all of it.

Then again, when I was in school, carbon dioxide levels were at 0.03%, and now they're at 0.042%; they've gone up 40% (yes, yes, confusing, I know) since then. Some things need to be updated and the latest figures used, certainly. But topics like discussing how doubt is the key to knowledge will never go out of fashion.

Learn to live with that, young people. Learn.

Democracy and Information

Imagine that each person is a mathematical point, a node. Each node can have two states: informed or not. And the nodes of a community are all connected in a network. The value of the network is determined by how many continuous chains of 'informed' nodes can be traced within the network, and how long and complex they are.

Logically, then, the value of the community increases the more 'informed' nodes there are. But in real life, the problem is that this imaginary construct is not real. In real life, people have infinitely different informational states and do things with their information, some of which are detrimental to the network.

Governance has two properties. First and most morally supportable, it allows the community to act optimally in keeping the community viable. Second and most unfortunate, it allows the community to divide itself into nodes that govern directly and nodes that don't.

In a democracy, information is supposed to make humans wise enough to govern themselves or to choose proxies that will do it for them. The problem is that information without effective application is not knowledge, and information without optimal effect is not wisdom.

That problem in turn is a problem of complexity — quite often, nobody knows what will be effective, let alone optimally so; worse, the people who are likely to figure it out are a minority that shrinks relative to the size of the population. If there is only one right answer, then as the population grows, the number of people who will figure it out will diminish in percentage simply because of the law of regression to the mean.

But hang on, some will say, surely they can share that answer, thus raising the percentage. Sadly, no. They can share that answer but it may not be believed, as was the case with Cassandra. In fact, the larger the number of non-enlightened, the harder it is to inform them, let alone convince them. Sharing is harder, and sharing effectively is worse.

In the end, it seems, the problem of very large numbers is simply solved but hard to accept. Since a large number of people will act as if it is controlled by a statistical model, then the larger the number, the more likely that effective control will either be by unremitting tyranny (perhaps, a machine autocracy or theocracy), or by complete anarchy with the understanding that any outcome will be considered right. The latter is the logical outcome of true democracy.

Empirical observation will show that neither extreme is viable. What is viable is a synthesis of the two extremes, but with one important proviso for each: the unremitting tyranny must not be unremitting, and the complete anarchy cannot be complete.

Tyranny must be balanced by forces that deny it, for nobody is wise enough to be God. And chaos must be checked with wisdom, for nobody will survive complete chaos. In both cases, information is the key; it must be withheld from those who would misuse it, and yet it must be available to all.

The state of information is never fixed, but the status it has within the continual negotiation of society is what keeps a society viable. The capacity for never-ending argument punctuated by tyrannical acts and anarchic opposition is what makes societies work. If you remove all punctuation, you get a text that is too malleable; if you remove all flexibility, you get a text that is too unpalatable.

So if you want democracy, you need to be prepared to sabotage it and yet defend against others' attempts to sabotage it. You must prepare to be rightly wrong and wrongly right. If you cannot tolerate this rather Heisenbergian situation, you should opt out altogether. Enjoy yourself.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an illusion, but a necessary one. The word comes from Latin privus, which means "one's own". The idea that we can own something that nobody else can touch is what makes us persons; if everything we had was shared to some extent, then the only unique thing about us would be the specific configuration of things we shared.

But this age of free information flow is beginning to deprive (to separate, to alienate) us of privacy's illusion. The logical consequence of everything about you being shared to some extent by others is that you may no longer be a unique identity; your information can be duplicated and the sum of what you are may be shared.

Hold on, though. Most people would agree that a person is more than just a state of being, but a time-bound entity filled with memories and experiences. That, unfortunately, is more accurately described as 'an entity with the perception of being time-bound, filled with edited information purporting to be a record of past events, bearing the marks of experiences which are ill-defined and sometimes imaginary.'

The problem, as we have learnt over the last 20 years, is that our brains are always shifting. The curse of humanity, we have come to know, is not that our brains don't regenerate, but that they do, and they also shift configurations and modify memories and change the nuances of what we think, even before we know anything is there to be thought. We are the sum of mental processes we can't control, if we are the sum of such things at all.

In fact, some people have come to realise that the more people share a person, the more that person lives on in more dimensions. A person who is 'larger than life' is simply one whose total impact on others is much more than the usual. My grandparents, all deceased, live on in some legendary sense — people who were taught by them, who had experiences with them, tell me stories that seem true to me (and probably are true as far as those people know) about them. When we say that memories live on, that is true; but like living things, they change and mutate before reproducing again.

This is a problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography. You grow up in an environment. You tacitly learn its rules. You learn what you can say, what you should do, and so on. But if you don't commit all these things meticulously to another medium, it remains tacit knowledge, shifty and ill-defined. It becomes private knowledge, set apart only for you, and perhaps applicable only to you; in the extreme, there's something schizoid about it.

But all cultures thrive on shared experiences and shared rules, no matter how untrue or unreal they are. That is how myths and legends define societies — in this day and age, none more so than the myths and legends of science and information technology. 'Privacy' used to mean 'deprivation' — it may yet come full cycle in this age.

When Libraries Used To Be Helpful

When I was young, 'Ask a Librarian' was one of the ways of gaining knowledge. If you didn't know, you looked it up. If you couldn't find it, you asked your parents. If they didn't know, you went to a library. There, a helpful librarian would point you the right way...

Those days are gone, as Karen Carpenter might have sung. I shall reproduce below a brief conversation I had recently with the National Library of Atlantis, in which I asked an innocent question regarding a matter that had derailed my line of research.

=====

Are Straits Times/ST Weekly issues for 1888 accessible online in digital format? I don't seem to be able to find any. And if not, why not?

Thank you for using Reference Point. According to the FAQs on the NewspaperAtlan database, the following papers cover the period around 1888: Atlantean Weekly Herald, Straits Eurasian Advocate, Straits Observer (Atlantis), The Straits Times,
Straits Times Overland Journal, and Straits Times Weekly Issue.

Here is how you may access the NewspaperAtlan database.
Link: http://www.nl.atl/ --> Click on [NewspaperAtlan]

Please click on the FAQs link to find out more details on the coverage of this news database.

Hope you find the information useful.

Regards,
Newton Singh
Reference Librarian
Lee Kong Simi Ref Library

National Library Board, Atlantis

Date Created:01 Aug 2010

=====

No kidding. My point was that I couldn't find them, regardless of what the FAQs said. And how do you think I reached that conclusion about 1888 in particular? By using the abovementioned database, of course! Atlanteans make it a habit to imply that it is your fault when you ask a question about their faults. The original reply is available here. Enjoy.

=====

Afternote: Comrade NBL made an interesting point. He wondered if the librarian above would pass the Turing Test. I said he probably would, since I couldn't distinguish him from a machine.

Secular Reason?

By some odd coincidence, I was going to write something about this because in the last few weeks, a lot of guff has been spewed forth about religion, lack of religion, society, religious impact on society, minimising this impact, and so on. Then Stanley Fish wrote this op-ed piece in the NYT.

It's by no means complete, and it has holes of vagueness in a few spots, but it highlights the problems of purely secular reasoning. These can be summarised like this: 1) it's not human to reason ONLY from 'what is known'; 2) 'what is known' is known only by the rules we form from 'what is known' — ahem; 3) if you reason from 'what is known', then how do you determine what to do with 'what is known', since that would mean that 'what is known' determines its own ends?

From this, one possible conclusion is that one should look for stuff that is not based on 'what is known' in order to figure out what we ought to do with 'what is known'. The problem with that is that there are many things which are by definition illogical and nonsensical (that is, they are inconsistent or incoherent with 'what is known'), and we can't know which (if any) of them actually provides the answer to what we ought to do with 'what is known'.

This leads us in the other direction. We have to figure out, if we want to reason secularly, what to do with 'what is known' based only on 'what is known'. Is this useful, or is this just saying that 'secular' is a mispronunciation of 'circular'?

George Holyoake in 1896 defined secularism in terms of 1) improving the present life by material means, 2) science determining the range of benefits available through material means, and 3) doing good for your present life is good, whether or not you can determine other forms of 'good'. Nietzsche defined it in terms of something more empirical — what is strong survives and is therefore better than what does not survive (and is therefore 'weak'). Kant said that the test of a moral assertion or maxim was whether a viable world could be imagined in which everyone behaved according to this — the 'categorical imperative' test.

Later, the idea of utilitarianism (measured numerically, statistically or economically in circles of ever-increasing complexity) was championed by people like Bentham and then J S Mill. This was Kantianism upside-down — you assess if the end is good, not bothering with the principle or practice leading to it. Marx was dead against this, pointing out that such assessment, based on humans, would change in each era and circumstance of mankind.

The latest word on secular reasoning is probably that of Ayn Rand. She said essentially that you should live for yourself only and that keeping yourself alive in certain ways, because of the pleasure of being alive, should be the main principle of existence. It provides a strong and readily-available basis for a secular life.

So it turns out that yes, there are secular reasons for doing things. Whether they are good reasons or not is arguable. They are probably the best reasons that reason can produce from what reason affirms to exist. Still, the sense of the order of the world being nothing but a circular orbit is sometimes painful. From an information science point of view, can data determine information? Can information determine knowledge? It all seems the wrong way round.

The Knowledge-Baseless Society

I always feel privileged to have lived through such an interesting period. It began with the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, the death of Che Guevara and the launch of the Magical Mystery Tour, the unveiling of the Concorde supersonic jet and the discovery of the lost city of Thera. It was the Summer of Love that year.

I also lived through a time of punchcards as a programming mode, tape drives as main storage, crude mathematical programming that launched the Apollos into space. And when I was growing up, all the information in a library was either in the huge heavy volumes of the Britannica's Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia, or in 3" x 5" index cards in little steel cabinets from which you found books on shelves.

It was a time in which knowledge was ubiquitous but not easy to access. From Gutenberg's time, knowledge had been less ubiquitous and even harder to access. But I was born at the dawn of the microcomputer age.

In the four decades (and some) since then, I've realised that things have changed a lot on the information front. Young people have often been fobbed off (or allowed themselves to be deluded by) the idea that since knowledge is so readily available, you need only look for it when you know you need it. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people don't bother to stock up on it 'just in case'. The raven mind which sought juicy bits to devour and digest gave way to the magpie mind which kept the shiny trinkets for display; the magpie mind has given way to the peacock mind which displays its own stuff but can't be bothered to look for other stuff unless peculiarly moved.

In a sense, information is still accreted, if you think of information in the IS sense of ordered data. In quite another sense, there is far too much non-information — stuff that will never lead to effective praxis and growth. It's quite possible, and in fact probable, that many people hold a view different from (or to, depending on the direction) this. But let me tell you what I have seen.

In Atlantis, I have had the privilege to work with many bright people, the heirs of the bright people of the same institution in ages past. In the old days, those bright people dug up their own information and poked and probed at the fabric of knowledge. Some bright people made things and found hacks through the wall of reality. These kinds of bright people are fewer now. If you ask them a question, the response is not one of 'let me find the answer' but one of 'how the hell would I know'. In an age of Wikipedia and Google, it is appalling how much slower the average student is at digging up facts than my father, who still uses a physical library.

Modern society has been touted as knowledge-based. It isn't really so. It seems more disinformation-based, dysfunction-based, category-based but using false and fishy categories. It is a knowledge-baseless society, save for the sub-societies in which knowledge structures are carefully built and examined for cracks and holes. The centre cannot hold; this was true long ago. But what is left?

Freedom of Information

I like the idea of freedom of information. To 'inform' means to shape knowledge; just as knowledge is data given meaning, information is knowledge given usefulness. But 'information' carries with it the sense of being bound. You have shaped it, like clay is made into a pot — how then can it be free?

Freedom of information, I suppose, simply means that usefully shaped meaningful data is made public, so that anyone who can use it may use it. Because the data are most often linked to real-world phenomena and real-world organisations, such stuff can be used to keep a handle on reality. If Atlantis loses 35 billion gold crowns, how much is that? Is it something that could have been used to save the world?

It is therefore with great happiness that I have been delving away on the banks of the river, mining information. What did people do? What did they say they did? Did they know what they were doing?

You see, when an agency declares that they have done X1 and X2, and you point out that X1 is not consistent with X2, then you have caught them. They have no choice but to admit to a) inconsistency, b) falsehood, and/or c) incompetence. Sometimes it's just laziness, which I'd put under c) for corporate incompetence.

I remember all too well the day that I received an email from a ministry requesting a list of all the awards issued to us by that same ministry. I told them to go get it themselves, since it was on their own website. I even provided links. Some people were not happy. I replied, "If these people are too lazy to pick up their own stuff which is lying around in public, why should we encourage it?"

A certain person said, "Help them, why not?" I replied, "Yes I am, I am helping them to stop looking like lazy idiots."

Celliberation

Losing your cellphone is traumatic, but as my friend the Lawman said, you can retrieve 70% of the data by online means. What's cool is finding a cellphone you thought had been long lost, with a working subscription which you set aside for emergencies. There is obviously a part of me which is paranoid and used to working in the shadows.

And so I now have a working phone, and it has 50% of the numbers I had because that same paranoid me actually backed the numbers up on the phone itself, and not the SIM card in it.

I am occasionally frightened of me.

Methinks

I used to attend a lot of meetings at which I would find my brain in some sort of peculiar gear, not quite neutral, but without much transmission of power into action despite the incredible energy going into running other things.

One day, the boss asked, "Why do you keep falling asleep at meetings? Not enough sleep?"

I was torn between the truth and the other truth. So I gave him both barrels. "Working too hard, so my brain switches off to save energy when not engaged."

There was a curious mix of outrage and confusion on his face.

The thing is that both these things were true. I was working far too hard, with too little of consequence to show for it, doing things that resulted in other meaningless things. At the same time, my brain was terribly disengaged during meetings because every now and then, we'd be listening to the latest gossip and irrelevancies just spun off from the rumour mill.

It got so bad that I took to hooking my laptop up to the room projector so that I could refute the sort of nonsense people were spouting. Things like "Hey, the results were soooo bad that year..." or "Last year we said that..." could be refuted just by pulling up the relevant minutes of past meetings, or statistics with comparisons and graphs.

That's when I realised the second thing. You could be right, but it wouldn't save you. That's a bit like the Republican party in the United States now. Alternatively, it was a bit like what I call the Half-Assed Theory of Leadership: 'You are either right behind or left behind.'

You see the thing is that when people think up wild fantasies and crazy theories, they hate being shot down immediately after take-off. The idea of contention as a mechanism for disposing of the trash before it begins to fruit seems to be anathema to such people. It makes them feel bad, and somebody (normally the shooter) will have to pay.

Fortunately, the shooter was also the de facto minute-taker for some of these meetings. This second mechanism helped to preserve a record of true proceedings in a handful of important cases.

You see, meetings are for people to come together to do work. They should never be rambling story-telling sessions in which people essentially say, "Methinks that..." and the whole lot of 'methinks' form a body of literature for further development. It's not about opinions alone, but about informed and considered opinions, preferably with sound justifications.

Global Consciousness

Listening to Howard Gardner is like the modern equivalent of the 1960s psychedelic era. These days he is touting his vision of global consciousness and how it should be nurtured in students. Everyone should have a working knowledge of how the world works, he says. Everyone should have access to the Internet and make use of it. Socioeconomic competencies and flexible skills, that's the way to go.

Well, he's right. But there is one small problem which we need to grapple with. How long does it take the billions of the world's population to transit successfully from one mindset to another? In the old days, you could sequester populations because travel was not easy. The technology gap could be steadily exploited and one population could dominate another that way.

The problem now is not a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate physical space. The old days of ships and planes as conduits for information are largely done, except for courier services and packages from Amazon and other niche areas. The problem now is a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate cognitive space.

This gap is an oscillating one. As the world progresses at its current pace, everyone will eventually have broadband access. Technological development is so rapid that whole societies can jump forward in time, from landline phones with plug-in exchanges to broadband wireless in five years. But the human cognitive gap is unpredictable.

These days, I struggle with Google and all the other paraphernalia of modern Internet life. Don't get me wrong: I've lived more than half my life on the Internet and I'm not that bad for an old fogey. The searchable infosphere makes information retrieval so much easier than it used to be. Everyone can now call up expert help. But the skills required to determine the validity, reliability and utility of the information are harder and harder to teach. There seems little point in constructing an excellent bullshit detector only to have it fail under the sheer weight of the ox-dung.

It leads to some sort of anomie in which people don't want to memorise anything because the information is always out there.

Somehow, the idea that having the data in your head for processing is faster than getting online to retrieve it has not quite sunk in. About the only area where this is too obvious to avoid is what I call art-form physicalities: things like dancing, fencing, sculpture—the more tactile and physical arts. You can't plan your next move online in such things yet, or if you can (as in some of the graphic or language arts), you will still not be able to compete with the mercurial power of the human instinct.

You can have the whole Library of Congress online, but the skill required to research a topic and mould it into something that will influence others is as elusive as the attempt to pin down an approach that will work for everyone. You can have the entire history of the world online, only to discover that it comprises many histories, and it's difficult to tell which ones are more reliable than the others, and where.

These are the limitations that Gardner and gang are trying to address. But I suspect that every school and every individual must craft their own approach to knowledge. Now that we're all drowning in data, the issues we need to deal with are far more complex than they used to be. The questions still sound the same though: What is truth, and where can we find it? If we think it's true, what do we do with it? And how can we communicate this truth, this quicksilver ephemeral thing, to someone else?

Due Diligence

It's interesting to read official documentation. In the transition period between a closed and secretive system and an open and informative one, stuff falls into the cracks. In 1997, the 7th International Conference on Thinking was held in Singapore. Shortly thereafter, Singapore's Ministry of Education began to put all speeches, press releases and other documents online. The same thing began to occur at other institutions in this country.

This change was profound because some decades prior to this, founding father and leading politician Goh Keng Swee had already vented his spleen at the two things which, in his view, were retarding the progress of the country: the 'cult of secrecy' and the 'cult of obedience'. His venting did not change things much, outside his own offices.

But what I think is the problem is that a culture that is not used to information handling tends to fall into two kinds of error. In the first kind, the lack of sufficient information (or the tradition of providing such) makes people think that information is being concealed when actually it isn't. The second kind is that the information provided may be copious and yet presented badly, thus giving a false impression of incompetence or incoherence.

It is not that this happens a lot. It's just that when you look at the documents produced by certain institutions, you are irritated to find yourself asking questions like, "Who on earth vetted this?" or "Who did the proof-reading?" or "What is this person trying (not) to say?" The underlying problem is one of narrative; people are so concerned with getting the facts out that the story connecting them and making them relevant is totally missing.

Purveyors of information really ought to exercise due diligence in their craft. Errors of fact are one thing; errors of presentation leading to a presumed state of factitiousness are quite another. This is especially relevant now.

Why the increased relevance? Obviously, with the economy the way it is, anything that shakes confidence is a BAD thing. If people knew exactly how much they could rely on information, and how much not, then confidence would be more stable. In an information vacuum, or perceived vacuum (such as that caused by a can't-believe-everything-they-say attitude), erratic behaviour dominates and confidence is unstable.

This is one reason why people are cynical when they look at institutions calling themselves 'world-class'. The world is not in such a good shape, it seems — and 'world-class' tends to put such institutions in the same class as Citigroup and General Motors (and Lehman Brothers, and AIG, and so on).

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Update:

Some people have pointed out that this post is evidence that I am some sort of demented anarchist who is seeking to haul down the venerable institutions of our time. I don't think so, for two reasons.

Firstly, none of these venerable institutions started out by claiming 'world-class' status. They earned their own recognition based on the sound vision and policies of their founders, and were only later labelled 'world-class' by others. Being 'world-class' is not an intrinsic property of a successful organisation, but an extrinsic one, sometimes attached by libellous associates who are in the habit of using ill-defined labels. I don't think that removing this label makes an institution less worthy.

Secondly, the damage that some of these institutions have suffered (in terms of reputation, worth, quality, prospects etc) is mostly of their own making. Anyone in his right mind would agree. Or anyone in the real world.

Information Age

Personally, I think that I experience the greatest discomfort (or sometimes, a frisson of schadenfreude) when watching authority figures talk nonsense in public because information is running ahead of (or has escaped from) them. Sometimes, the old and well-worn (or still well-wearing) opinions of past pundits or an earlier generation of authority figures are trotted out on parade, now woefully inadequate except for a museum.

Yes, people should keep updated at least in the areas they profess to talk about. That's the very least that the information revolution should be good for. I shiver when I look at John McCain's campaign, running as if their boss has not a clue about the nature of the internet or the technology that enables it. It is not good when a maverick boss, one who professes to bring change to an establishment by virtue of his outsider status, proves to be a maverick in terms of being behind the normal curve of information.

I would answer such people by saying that perhaps the answer is not generally (there are some exceptions) to be found in those approaching their 60s or 70s. This is sadly because the information revolution of the 1980s and 1990s came when they were already maturing or happy to be 'matured'. I've seen leaders in their mid to late 40s and 50s totally clueless about information technology and yet acting in the capacity of CEOs and CIOs without missing the missing beats (or even hearing the beat).

It is also tough for those in the 50s, 60s and 70s because most of them missed the neurobiological and cognitive advances of the last decade – or at least they might mouth the words and catchphrases but not have bothered to look at the research in detail. At this point, I will probably be accused of ageist bias.

Well, perhaps. My last memory of my paternal grandfather studying anything was when he was in his 80s. He was reading a book on cloning and the moral issues involved. As a medical doctor who retired at the age of 78, he was astonishingly well-read and could hold his own in conversation about current issues in almost any field which he was interested in. I wish more were like him.

But that brings me to my main point. The key lies in the phrase 'information age'. I've been to libraries where they look at the average copyright date for reference books. The more current that average figure, the more likely the reference section is up to date.

Those who are older need not be disadvantaged. They already have more experience, and all things being equal, that is an advantage. They should probably have developed more wisdom, and all things being equal, that is certainly an advantage. They quite likely have some advantages in resources found in networks, community, material wealth, and so on.

Sadly, not all things are equal. But the library analogy remains useful. More senior members of society can keep themselves up-to-date. They can learn how things work, using the stored experience, wisdom and peer-to-peer networks (and other resources) accumulated over their longer lives. They can keep in touch (even as the peers drop out by attrition). And they can continue to be more productive, by leveraging against these advantages, than many of their juniors.

The point about 'information age' is that your information age need not be as old as your physical or chronological age. Grandpa was doing his own readings and research until the cancer that killed him got to his brain. My grandparents (now sadly all gone) read the newspapers (a main information source) avidly. They saw things happen, they felt the patterns of the world.

There is still plenty of the game to be played, plenty of the race to be run. It isn't over till it's over, and who knows what happens then?

No Clue

We live in a world that is full of information. That is nothing new. What is new is that there are three factors that have increased so quickly over the last 8 years that they are on the verge of precipitous descent into uncontrolled states. The three factors are pretty obvious:

• increasingly free access to information
• increasing complexity of information items
• increasing complexity of relationships between information items

A note here: the first is often taken as a good thing; this is not true for the simple reason that the free access is not equal, ubiquitous, instantaneous or rational.

We've been fed a mantra that the information age is good for you. This is true only by comparison to what can happen with insufficient information. The problem is an old one and has two components: 1) we are happy when we have enough information to solve existing problems or answer existing questions; 2) we are happier when we can find new problems to solve and new questions to answer. The two form a cycle, although the viciousness or virtuousity of the cycle is debatable, depending on the kind of problems. There is therefore never enough information, we always want more, and hence an age of increasing access to information is a Good Thing.

The sticking point perhaps is that there is a point at which we can no longer be our own data specialists. In the not-too-recent past, it was possible essentially to have restricted information access (or to restrict information access) and still be expert enough to get the job done. But people have incentives to stand out and hence earn greater rewards. So they recast the roles of professional, expert, master of a discipline, until they stand out. It is a question of whether your information brokerage level (whether it's a skill, a talent, a knowledge base, a database, a process, a capacity for synthesis etc) is outstanding enough.

It never will be, and that will eventually be because the human mind, no matter how complex or augmented, will never know enough. To address this based on my first three points, let's begin with access.

Access to information is a good thing when the information requirement is known in advance. For example, I need to know the best place for beer and pork knuckles in town. I ask people, search websites, do other information-gathering activities, until I have an answer I am satisfied with. Then I go and try out my search results physically. At the end of the experience, I will have updated my own database and am now qualified to offer my own opinion.

However, the questions of "What shall I eat?" (which according to Douglas Adams, is a relatively sophisticated question) and "Where shall I eat?" (which according to Adams is the most sophisticated question in this domain) are a lot more complex if I have no idea at all – or if I have too many ideas, brought on by a vastly greater access to information and travel capability than my ancestors had. With this, and the fact of human variability in opinion, I might face the centipede problem. That's often described as asking a centipede, "Which foot do you first move when you start to move?" and watching it attempt an answer, fail, and never walk again.

Access to information is inherently unfair, as it leverages off information sources and technology in depth, scale, range and speed. We keep talking about free markets, free speech and ideas, things like that; we fail to realise that unless information is ubiquitous, instantaneous, immediately processed, appropriately processed, and acted upon at once, all this is a very shady approximation to anything that could possibly be considered realistic. And yet we persist, perhaps beyond the limit of humanity's ability to make sense of it.

Which leads me to the second point. The information packages and 'chunks' we are presented with are sometimes far too complex. They cannot be evaluated fully or sometimes even usefully by us, our expert systems, or any other information processing tool we have. When the education system was a master teaching five apprentices in a workshop, the possible interactions and processes were far more limited that when the education system became a teacher teaching 25 students in a modern chemistry lab with internet access.

Where in the past, a sound-bite (like 'atoms are indivisible particles which our material universe is made of') could essentially be a workable fragment of reality, the present nature of education and information demands much more (like 'atoms are social constructs which can be considered to be statistical models of...') and sometimes too much more.

The modern sound-bite is of course not just a fragment of text encapsulating a key idea. Watching viral videos on YouTube or looking at campaign slogans and advertising literature, you will see that the entire semiotic domain is exploited at deeper and deeper levels. This is intended to affect us in ways that increasingly complicated analysis say might just be useful as the psychological leverage to push us into buying (into) things. We can no longer evaluate any of this easily; what's interesting is that neither can the merchants of materialism, the nabobs of nationalism, or the emirs of entertainmentism.

My third point is that as information chunks become more complex and more accessible, the number, kind and usefulness level of all their possible relationships spirals way out of control. Who is to know what might possibly be tangentially useful or critically useful? Only in very well-defined domains is this possible; domains such as a deliberately-limited math textbook or an intentionally-limited chemistry lab. With people inventing derivatives of data (information), second derivatives of data (information chunks and packages), third derivatives of data (knowledge packages and information systems), and fourth derivatives of data (information networks and dynamic knowledge bases), we are seeing an approach to the (we think) final level of the true artificial intelligence.

The likelihood is that this 'final' level will probably be centipeded after a while. Yes, it will be like us but smarter in some ways (mostly by more coherent and more rapid processing and access); yes, it will be like us in not knowing what questions to profitably ask for the unknown future.

And so, the correct thing to say is that unless one looks for some other standard by which to look at life, the universe and everything, the answer might as well be '42'. Information doesn't provide us, on its own, with answers to some questions. You might say, "I'm sorry, but I haven't a clue," to the question of what life is all about. Then, I would direct you to try some useful games.

Static Dynamics

Get moving get moving get it moving get yo' aaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

It is that moment in the movie when it all falls apart for the first time and you see a hidden presence dismember the elite team of marines, commandoes or whatever you think is more elite than that. The video and audio feeds are suddenly cut, and everything is overwhelmed by a hiss of static. The true story of the hidden world is here, buried in the informational distress.

In 1952, Raymond F Jones wrote a seminal SF short story, Noise Level. In that story, a group of world-class scientists are shown a grainy video of a man levitating with no visible means of support or propulsion except a small backpack. The pack explodes and pieces of the pilot are strewn all over the place just as the video feed is cut. The authorities tell them that they must not reveal what they have seen, and that the remains of the pilot and the equipment have all been disposed of because they were completely destroyed.

The scientists are then set this problem: recreate the antigravity machine from scratch, given access only to the dead man's lab. It is a classic in vacuo problem-solving situation. Fortunately, they are world-class scientists.

They visit the lab, only to find a well-equipped building with no notes, papers, drafts or any other evidence. They are told, "Don't speculate on classified material. Just see what is there and come to your own conclusions." The library contains every book there is on a wide range of fields, including the occult, which makes some of the scientists rebel at what they say is a joke. This is close to the truth, as the video was a complete fake, and the scientists figure that out eventually.

But in the end, they invent an antigravity machine. It is huge, half the size of a building, but it works. The moral of the story is that if you think it can be built, you will build it. But there is another moral: the faceless authorities can fool you into doing work of an amazing kind which you will not be credited for and which even they did not know could be done. It is all a matter of using the static dynamic to create a pattern of noise from which any information can be created.

There is a cure to this kind of reckless experimentation and manipulation though. It can be found in one of Frank Herbert's lesser-known creations, the Bureau of Sabotage. Essentially, somebody must throw a wrench into the juggernaut's inner workings. This gives everyone time to figure out what ought to be done. The enforced and temporary stasis gives dynamism to a chaotic state.