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January 31, 2022

Meaning at the joints

Notes for a post:

Plato said (Phaedrus, 265e) that we should “carve nature at its joints,” which assumes of course that nature has joints, i.e., that it comes divided in natural and (for the Greeks) rational ways. (“Rational” here means something like in ways that we can discover, and that divide up the things neatly, without overlap.)

For Aristotle, at least in the natural world those joints consist of the categories that make a thing what it is, and that make things knowable as those things.

To know a thing was to see how it’s different from other things, particularly (as per Aristotle) from other things that they share important similarities with: humans are the rational animals because we share essential properties with other animals, but are different from them in our rationality.

The overall order of the universe was knowable and formed a hierarchy (e.g. beings -> animals -> vertebrates -> upright -> rational) that makes the differences essential. It’s also quite efficient since anything clustered under a concept, no matter how many levels down, inherits the properties of the higher level concepts.

We no longer believe that there is a perfect, economical order of things. “We no longer believe that there is a single, perfect, economical order of things. ”We want to be able to categorize under many categories, to draw as many similarities and differences as we need for our current project. We see this in our general preference for search over browsing through hierarchies, the continued use of tags as a way of cutting across categories, and in the rise of knowledge graphs and high-dimensional language models that connect everything every way they can even if the connections are very weak.

Why do we care about weak connections? 1. Because they are still connections. 2. The Internet’s economy of abundance has disinclined us to throw out any information. 3. Our new technologies (esp. machine learning) can make hay (and sometimes errors) out of rich combinations of connections including those that are weak.

If Plato believed that to understand the world we need to divide it properly — carve it at its joints — knowledge graphs and machine learning assume that knowledge consists of joining things as many different ways as we can.

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Categories: abundance, big data, everyday chaos, everythingIsMiscellaneous, machine learning, philosophy, taxonomy, too big to know Tagged with: ai • categories • everythingIsMiscellaneous • machine learning • meaning • miscellaneous • philosophy • taxonomies Date: January 31st, 2022 dw

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June 24, 2012

[2b2k] How much info per minute, per an infographic

There’s a fun infographic — and aren’t all infographics fun, one way or another? — at Visual News about how much information is made every minute.

It’s poorly sourced (a list of sources at the bottom without references to which data came from which sources, and no links, but, heck infographics are fun!), but let’s assume/pretend that it’s accurate. Beyond the pure massiveness of the amount of data, a couple of “facts” leap out (and these are especially unreliable since they probably come from different sources so the comparisons are likely to be apples to orangutans, but it’s all about putting the “fun” into infungraphics!):

  • There are three times as many tweets as Facebook Likes, even though one is just a no-thought reaction (and the other requires pressing the Like button — heyo! I kid Twitter ’cause I love it. I’ll be @dweinberger all week.)

  • There are 80x more posts on Tumblr than on WordPress

  • There are 2,000x more emails sent than Tweets posted, and 100x more emails sent than search queries received by Google. This seems plausible if I look at my own usage, but I’m old and thus more attached to email than are today’s Digital Youngsters with their IMs and their hiphop ringtones and 4Gs. Nope, email remains the volume leader in terms of number of units (as opposed to the number of bytes, which I cannot figure out).

Info fun! With air quotes around each of those two words!

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Categories: abundance, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • email • info • infographic Date: June 24th, 2012 dw

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July 28, 2011

Gig U

The plan to provide ultra high speed Internet connectivity to universities (mainly in the heartland) is exciting. And it’s got some serious people behind it, including Lev Gonick and Blair Levin.

The NY Times article, seeking to find something negative to say about it, finds someone who doubts that providing significantly higher speeds will lead to innovative uses of those greased-lightning pipes. Does history count for nothing?

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Categories: abundance, broadband, education Tagged with: broadband Date: July 28th, 2011 dw

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April 14, 2011

Our new instinct

MacWorld ran an article on how to set up Apples Pages to print out Avery labels. This is helpful information because Avery doesn’t have nearly as many ready-made templates for Pages as it does for Word. So the article walks the reader through the page and table settings. Excellent.

But MacWorld left out one crucial step: When you’re done, share it on the Web.

Avery doesn’t have a Pages template for its Beige Design Filing Label, Clear, 30 per sheet (#5029), so you made your own? Great! Why should we all have to re-do your work? Share it on the Web. Thanks!

By this time, “and then share it on the Web” should be a reflex on its way to becoming an instinct. The work of one can now remove a task from the checklist of millions. This is of evolutionary importance. Do it once and let the species move on.

Please. Thank you. And share it on the Web.

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Categories: abundance, culture Tagged with: collaboration • sharing Date: April 14th, 2011 dw

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