From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 17:32:49 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> 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.
Provably untrue. There exists some information which has been written
down on paper, but never recorded in any electronic form. (Organic
neural networks not counting: those are more chemical than electronic.)
And then there is information that is not even recorded that much. For
example: what is the layout of the room I sit in while I type this? To
me, at least, this is not mere data, for I must use it to navigate the
room. And yet this information is not - at this moment, at least -
available online.
> The URL,
> Uniform Resource Locator, is precisely that; uniform. Anything which
> cannot be located by a URL is, by definition, not a resource.
"Uniform" is not "universal". It was established to consolidate the
format of addresses of information; that is not the same as saying it
includes everything.
> 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.
Ah, but that just proves my point. (There's also the act of finding the
correct link within Google's results, which could be several pages into
the results.) Different statements of equivalent terms are equivalently
true or false, and may be used to emphasize and illustrate different
facets of the claimed facts.
> 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".)
Erroneous definition. Surely, how to find Google itself if you are not
already at Google is a piece of knowledge. Not to mention, how to turn
on a computer, how to use a Web browser, and other such prerequisite
skills to using Google. (Some of which, granted, may be findable
through Google, but not all.)
Plus, I refer by this "classical learning and knowledge" to the
quasi-intuitive pattern recognition and deduction taught long before
Google's existence. You can find specific facts through Google, and
using them build up this learning in some fields if you know how, but
this is not the same as the learning itself being available through
Google.
> 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.
Circular reasoning. You assume that everything is available through
Google, therefore you conclude that everything is available through
Google. If you do not understand why your reasoning is therefore
rejected outright, you might want to google for "circular reasoning".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 08 2003 - 17:35:47 MST