botwerks

i had this in my instapaper favorites from my reading queue a few months back. with the recent santorumism in the news as of late, this popped back into my noggin.

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

somehow, i ran across this – the original New York Times review of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.  every few years i reread 1984 just to see how it measures up against life many years later.

orwell was an optimist.

in the mid-90s someone gave me a copy of engines of creation.  this blew my mind.  well, more accurately, that, plus a copy of neil stephenson’s the diamond age, blew my mind.  nanotech is still a ways off from realizing the vision laid out in either of these  books. but we’re starting to see the nascent forms of this kind of create your own product with the emergence of low cost stereolitho gear and and micro-manufacturing.  the raw materials are just a little less raw than drexler (or feynman if you want to be pedantic) posed we’d be crafting with.

but that really isn’t the point of this posting, i followed a link erix drexler’s blog the other day and ran across this little gem - How to Learn About Everything.  in this article he suggests the following workflow:

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

i’ve been surprised by how close this is to my knowledge acquisition process.  i don’t necessarily read Science and Nature (at least with the objectives he’s outline) but i do have a nasty habit of  hoovering information up from a wide array of sources and applying my filtration to things and establishing the linkages that are interesting or relevant to me.  this seems to be more than a little useful when it comes to tackling problems from different perspectives or understanding how to break things down into digestible chunks for research or fixing.  i don’t know how many folks apply a similar process to knowledge / information acquisition, but in a world where you have to constantly throw some information out on a regular basis, supporting this mode of knowledge acquisition is increasingly difficult.

about a year ago we were in new zealand and we were surprised by how much emphasis they placed on environmental protections and labor management.  it’s an impressively progressive country on an amazing array of topics, from civil liberties, environmentalism and nuclear non-proliferation (i suppose having U.S. atomic testing fallout impacting you will tend to color your perspective on a number of these topics.)  that said, for all of their regulation they’re apparently outranking the U.S. when it comes to ease of doing business.

here’s a remarkably detailed breakdown of the elements contributing to this ranking.  i suspect that rick perry for all of his regulation hatin’ might do well to rip a page or two from the kiwis.

as an aside – on the international economic statistics front, you would do well to download the OECD’s iPhone Fact Book app.  there’s a crapload of interesting stuff in there and the next time you’re wondering where a country sits economically or in the development curve you can do so from the comfort of your couch.