Rick and I have parallel views about this. John Robb and Robert Scoble have been talking about executive compensation (i.e. options) of late. Compensation. Ah, the Sport of Kings...
10:05:44 PM
Volokh on Tobacco Litigation--
MIXED NEWS ON TOBACCO: Big verdict (with a 97-to-1 punitive-to-compensatory ratio) upheld in Oregon; but on the plus side, a smoker has lost in Florida. On a related note, see this interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about Kip Viscusi, Harvard law professor and somewhat of a personal hero of mine (I cited him in a Wall Street Journal op-ed some years ago). To give you a hint of what the Chronicle article's about -- it's subtitled: "Harvard professor says smokers know exactly what they're doing." Also, here's a piece by Kip himself, critical of the tobacco litigation (on the grounds that governments don't lose any money because of smoking), based on his book, Smoke-Filled Rooms. [Volokh Conspiracy]
I'm reading Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and he states on page 143 that you can view the Web as containing two forms of knowledge: the database and the joke. His point is that much of what we seek on the web is knowledge that supplies pure information, i.e. the kind that is in a database. What is the electrical impedence of a particular chip? Yada yada...
But the human quest for knowledge is about more than cataloguing data, and sorting it into relevant piles according to some taxonomy. People seek "fat" knowledge, which is where the jokes come in. Jokes are "sudden knowledge." They depend on the unexpected. And yet that unexpected element makes a point, and supplies knowledge. This is the sort of thing that AI people don't obsess about, but which web-surfers are constantly seeking out. It is the 25 foot wave that we want to ride because the outcome is unpredictable.
Worth thinking about. But not too much, because then you just wind up with a database. Gotta leave room for the jokes.
8:48:28 PM
