Knowledge and Focus

At Edge.com, Researcher David Dalrymple discusses the effect of the Internet on knowledge and focus:

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

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Quote time

I love to collect quotes. Such a high ratio of thought-provocation per word! I'd even bet that there is a the seed for a novel in most well-honed quotes. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Some of these quotes have made the rounds (the oldies-but-goodies), though I'd bet that you'll find more than a few that you've never seen before. Enjoy. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.

Robert Byrne

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), Jumpers (1972) act 1

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

Douglas Adams , Last Chance to See

“It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative to faith is punishment — that’s how you train dogs, not develop people.”

Deng Ming-Dao

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Wald (1906 - )

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

H. H. Williams

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That strange relationship between power and truth

I have a question for readers and a request for guidance. My gut feeling is that political power has nothing to do with truth. It doesn’t matter that someone is encouraging me or threatening me to believe that 2 + 2 =5. The truth is that 2 +2 is always 4. Even if someone enacts tax incentives for me to say otherwise. Even if police officers put guns to my head. Even if every other person in my country ostracizes me and calls me immoral. It seems, though, that there are what seem to be (to many people) strange but unrelenting version of truth that are guided by the exercise of power. This occurs most often in closed systems. For instance, one would be scolded if one stood up and announced that Mary wasn’t a virgin while in a Christian church. If you take a megaphone at a Fourth of July picnic in middle-America, you’d better damn well say that the United States is the world’s greatest democracy, even though our voting rates are pathetically law and even though our political system is thoroughly corrupted thanks to legalized bribes termed “campaign contributions” (see this telling comment, which SHOULD shock us into starting a massive revolution). Within a closed social system, then, it seems as though political or social power can be used to make many people mouth many blatant untruths. After mouthing them for long periods, many of these people start believing these untruths. For instance, did we invade Iraq to confiscate known weapons of mass destruction? That idea served as truth to many people during the run up to the invasion (some people still cling to that falsehood). Now, with a new power order in place in Washington DC, the prevailing truth is that the Bush Administration intentionally conjured up fake evidence regarding WMD. This inter-relationship between truth and power reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion that scientific fields undergo periodic revolutions ("paradigm shifts"), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. I’m also somewhat acquainted with various “post-modernist” writings that seem to address this general issue. For instance, consider this definition of postmodernism by Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler, which I pulled from Wikipedia:

A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.”… Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.

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