From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 15:20:12 MST
Adrian Tymes wrote:
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > Has anyone else begun to get the feeling that, wherever you go, you are
> > there to represent the Net groupmind? I don't have a wireless wearable
> > so it's not really true, yet, but on this occasion the sensation was
> > quite strong.
>
> ...and this is a new sensation for you?
>
> Devil's advocate: it's not reliable. Not all the answers are out there,
> and even if they are, finding them can be impossible if you don't know
> the proper terms. At best, it's an assitant to classical learning and
> knowledge - albeit a potentially very powerful one when it works.
A common misconception among isolates. I've heard legends about
information that's supposedly "not online", but have never managed to
locate any myself. I've concluded that this is merely a rationalization
for inadequate search skills; isolates can't find some piece of
information and so they conclude it's "not online", which any diligent
epistemological scrutiny easily shows to be a nonsensical conception. If
information exists it is necessarily online somewhere. The URL, Uniform
Resource Locator, is precisely that; uniform. Anything which cannot be
located by a URL is, by definition, not a resource.
Thus, when isolates say that finding certain information is "impossible"
if you "don't know the proper terms", they betray a poor epistemological
grounding; "finding information" is in fact *synonymous* with discovering
the proper Google search terms for that information. As for claiming that
Google is an "assistant to classical learning and knowledge", this ignores
the fact that all classical learning and knowledge is available through
Google. (By definition; anything that is not only *not found* on Google
but *not findable* through Google, even in principle, is not "knowledge".)
However, much other information, such as online webcomics and today's
weather, is available through Google, yet not a part of classical learning
and knowledge. Thus, classical learning, insofar as it is "learning" at
all rather than random noise, is not an assistant to Google, but merely a
subpart of it.
The notion of "supergoogular" information is not only empirically
unverified but epistemologically nonsensical, with the only conceivable
interpretation being information which can only be googled using special
keywords. No such keywords having ever been provided, we can conclude
that so-called supergoogular phenomena are fantasies concocted by isolates
to cover their resentment of superior Google skills.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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