Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I had a boss who equated knowledge with wisdom. He was smart and knowledgeable but wise, I'm not so sure. Opinionated, certainly.

It’s worse then facts being a question of majority opinion, facts are a question of a single opinion; mine, or yours, as the case my be. What we believe to be true, or fact, is subjective. Things can be true and not true at the same time to different people. “Ice cream is the best!”

Trust is a network, most definitely. Bruce Sterling's Maneki Neko is my favorite expression of where I think we’re going with that.

I think you should reconsider your restatement. You say "understanding" and not "truth" is a property of networks, but I think truth is difficult to understand.

There's a great book named "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos, John Worall and Elie Zahar which looks at a particular mathematical theorem as it evolves from conjecture to proof, and about the stops along the way. It's path is not straight at all. For several decades this theorem was considered solved, but then someone found an error in the definitions (not in the proof!!) which caused it to become open again.

I mention this in this context because Math is considered by many to be close to having facts. You would be hard pressed to find facts in, say, sociology or psychology. The definition of literary fact is hard to imagine. Economics has a bunch of facts, but most of them aren't true. Math has real facts, though, or at least that's what we think. The book opens up the process by which mathematicians get to facts, so called, and shows that the facts are not all that clearly true or acceptable.

I'm not such a big believer that the internet has brought us much in the way of either truth or understanding, though I will admit it's been fun. I read recently that we will soon drop off an energy cliff in the next five years, when we run out of natural gas. (Is that a fact? Jim Kunstler seems to think so.) This cliff will make the 17% of our current electricity supply unavailable, since it's generated from natural gas. If that happens, and the US' supply of electricity drops to 83% of it's current level, what impact will that have on the essentially electronic entity which is the internet. Will it become too expensive to operate? I don't know. If that happens, and the use of the internet decreases, networks will shrink. Will that mean that truth or understanding will shrink, and that there will be less truth or understanding in the world?

One of Lily Tomlin's characters says "Reality is nothing more than our collective hunch." And we can maybe take one definition of 'reality' to be 'the sum of all facts'.

When my chemistry professor studied chemistry, atoms consisted of protons, neutrons, and electrons. When he taught me (40+ years ago) atoms consisted of these and about 10 sub-atomic particles. Now there are many more.

"Facts are facts"? And what are the 'facts' about the structure of the atom?