John Miedema

How to Make an Elephant Statue

17 November 2009 6 Comments

This entry is part 35 of 45 in the series I, Reader

Offworld, Pt. 3

Want to make an elephant statue? Get a big rock and cut away all the parts that do not look like an elephant. It’s an old joke that makes a good point. A concept only becomes well-defined when contrasted with its opposite. It is the same idea explored earlier about self and other. In the information world, the discovery of other is facilitated by the extensions of technology. In contrast to other, the self is better defined. Definitions bind things. The self becomes finite, a robot. Turning off the technology can refresh your humanity.

Hit the off button on your computer and see what happens …

Consciousness. Turning off the lights may leave one in the dark and cold, at least for a while. Carl Jung says that pain is a precondition for consciousness. Heidegger says that it is only when things break do we look around and become aware. Pirsig refers to this condition as ’stuckness’. It’s only when we get stuck that we look for new ideas.

Fewer false leads. Harvey Whitehouse observes that humans are predisposed to see agency or pattern. This may be adaptive in the past when false positives for predators do not represent a danger. The web is like a forest, with many false paths. We spend a lot of time tilting at windmills.

Decisions get made. In his book, Blink, Gladwell says it is false that more information is always better. Too much information can obscure the few critical items needed to make a decision. A counter-perspective is LeGault’s Think: Why Critical Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. LeGault argues that the decline of the West is due to a lack of critical thinking. Can both be right? As I see it, Gladwell is talking about a trained intuition. When a person is learning a new domain of information, he or she cannot pick out the few critical items needed to make a decision. It takes experience to make critical judgments. Turning off the frantic activity of the web can increase critical thinking. An open mind is like an open window. It’s good to get fresh air but leave it open too often or too long and the mind can get a little drafty.

Sanity. Our brains have inhibitory neurons with the purpose of slowing down excitation of the brain. The inability to limit information in our neuronal processing is associated with disorders such as epilepsy. Normal brain processes require downtime. “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’ Macbeth does murder sleep! The innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care. The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

Security. Like all programmers, most of my work involves trying to get at stuff: files, databases, other programs. In the old world of Microsoft, it was easy to get at just about any resource with little fuss. When Linux showed the world how to do security, Microsoft rewrote all their software to catch up. These days, it seems like half my job is simply getting the right permissions from network administrators. Frustrating, but I appreciate that security requires putting in the appropriate stops.

Copyright/Delete-right. People fuss about copyright on the web. I think they should fuss more about delete-right. The web is essentially a big copy machine, so copyright infringement occurs frequently. I can protect content to some degree on my own website by deleting stuff I don’t want copied. I can’t do this on other websites. Many websites won’t let you permanently delete your own accounts or data. The ability to delete information truly defines our ownership of it.

Economic balance. Tired of plunking away on a computer all day at work? Nobody likes an economic recession, but these periods are like fires in a forest; they force us to leave dead-end jobs and take on untapped potential. In the Upside of Down, Homer-Dixon makes just this point. A Canadian MP tried to say how a recession can be good for the health, but was forced to apologize.

Justice. I heard that the Toronto Police force no longer keeps numbers on race during arrests, etc. The practice is a way to decrease racial profiling. Sometimes less information is a good thing.

Series Navigation«The Information Race and Pushing the ButtonEvery Story Deserves a Good Ending»

6 Comments »

Mark said:

“A concept only becomes well-defined when contrasted with its opposite.”

I get your point, John, and I agree in some cases.

But. Not all concepts–most?–do not have opposites. Also, many that do are culturally-bound. The West particularly loves–or at least thinks in–opposites. But most are rarely true opposites.

Just as there are few true dichotomies there are few true pairs of opposite. Thinking in this way is valuable, but it is also, and perhaps more, dangerous.

# 17 November 2009 at 1:45 pm

John (author) said:

“The West particularly loves–or at least thinks in–opposites.”

Interesting observation, especially since an elephant, a symbol of the east, is in my title.

Your observation anticipates the next and final theme in my series. It has the working title, “Reading Mysticism”, and it is about resolving/transcending opposites, among other things. So your point is well taken, Mark, thanks.

Still, I find that rational, “Western” conversations gain so much more clarity if one is compelled not only to define what one is talking about, but also what one is not talking about. That requirement is often unfair for newly emerging ideas, but mature ideas should meet it.

# 17 November 2009 at 1:50 pm

Mark said:

I fully agree with you, John! As a philosopher (education-wise anyway) I often do the same as far as definition/clarification goes. I find someone else and I are often saying the same thing once assumptions/backgrounds/etc. are uncovered and made explicit.

I knew I was preaching to the choir. That is, I knew you understood this but I wanted to point it out as a minor addition. Thanks for your articulate and rapid response.

# 17 November 2009 at 1:54 pm

barbara said:

you said, “Copyright/Delete-right. People fuss about copyright on the web. I think they should fuss more about delete-right. The web is essentially a big copy machine, so copyright infringement occurs frequently. I can protect content to some degree on my own website by deleting stuff I don’t want copied. I can’t do this on other websites. Many websites won’t let you permanently delete your own accounts or data. The ability to delete information truly defines our ownership of it.”

I totally agree. You can see examples all over the web but it needs to be repeated.

# 17 November 2009 at 6:29 pm

Dave said:

Then of course there’s the right not to be indexed, which Rupert Murdoch hilariously doesn’t understand can be done with a single line of code in the head part of a page.

A friend of mine freaked out a few years ago when I showed him how the contents of a blog he thought he’d deleted persisted in the internet archive. But he wrote to them and they were good about destroying the content immediately. (That’s this guy.) Another blogger-friend was delighted to learn about the internet archive so she could recover a blog she thought she’d lost. So it’s a double-edged sword.

# 22 November 2009 at 7:58 pm

John (author) said:

Funny that I would have written a post about an elephant statue, without making at least a passing joke about my hometown, where Jumbo was killed by a train, and a life-size elephant statue was erected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jumbo1St.jpg

# 30 November 2009 at 8:59 pm