Seb's Open Research
|
Thursday, February 13, 2003
|
|
| |
Only a ripe fruit falls
That Osho guy looks like he was one wise dude. Reading this through made me eerily calm all of a sudden.
This is something basic to be understood: the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity -- only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.
In the East, all the religions preach egolessness. So in the East, everybody is against the ego from the very beginning. Because of this anti-attitude, ego never becomes strong, never comes to a point of integration from where it can be thrown. It is never ripe. So in the East it is very difficult to dissolve the ego, almost impossible.
In the West, the whole Western tradition of religion and psychology propounds, preaches, persuades people, to have strong egos -- because unless you have a strong ego, how can you survive? Life is a struggle; if you are egoless, you will be destroyed. Then who will resist? Who will fight? Who will compete? And life is a continuous competition. Western psychology says: Attain to the ego, be strong in it.
But in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches to an understanding that ego is the problem, he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. [...]
When you know too much -- you have known the scriptures, you have known the past, the tradition, you have known all that can be known -- then suddenly you become aware of the futility of it all, suddenly you become aware that this is not knowledge. This is borrowed! This is not your own existential experience, this is not what you have come to know. Others may have known it, you have simply gathered it. Your gathering is mechanical. It has not arisen out of you, it is not a growth. It is just rubbish gathered from other doors, borrowed, dead.
Remember, knowing is alive only when you know, when it is your immediate, direct experience. But when you know from others it is just memory, not knowledge. Memory is dead.
When you gather much -- the riches of knowledge, scriptures, all around you, libraries condensed in your mind, and suddenly you become aware that you are just carrying the burden of others, nothing belongs to you, you have not known -- then you can drop it, you can drop all this knowledge. In that dropping a new type of ignorance arises within you. This ignorance is not the ignorance of the ignorant, this is how a wise man is, how wisdom is.
Only a wise man can say: I don't know. But in saying: I don't know, he is not hankering after knowledge, he is simply stating a fact. And when you can say with your total heart: I don't know, in that very moment your eyes become open, the doors of knowing are open. In that very moment when you can say with your totality; I don't know, you have become capable of knowledge.
This ignorance is beautiful, but it is attained through knowledge. It is poverty attained through richness. And the same happens with ego -- you can lose it if you have it.
(via Carnatic, one quite unusual site)
 8:09:35 PM
|
|
Quick thoughts on emergent democracy
Here are my (mostly speculative and unrefined) thoughts on the questions Joi asked yesterday.
1. Groups with a sense of identity do form visibly chiefly through blog interaction. Witness for instance the recent formation of such entities as the group-forming community, Austin bloggers, EdBloggers, the Emergent Knowledge Management Research group, protest blogs in Venezuela, and the copyright term action reform group. However, I'm not sure that these could qualify as pure examples of emergence, because in each case, there are individuals who have crystallized a vision, assumed a leadership role, and made it happen through purposeful design. But it could be argued that something had already emerged before those visions occured to them.
2. Many of these groups arguably couldn't have formed as efficiently with other means of interaction, either because of signal/noise or interpersonal trust issues.
3. Awareness-raising / popular education groups have often been a successful way to enact change in democratic societies when money wasn't on the "right" side of the issue.
4. Blogs act to amplify weak signals and make them louder without external help. Someone writes out loud what others think privately, then the word spreads. Pre-blogging, weak signals used to stay weak because the people who had the basic awareness and could amplify them were not socially connected in any persistent way. Blogs enable weak ties to turn into strong ties when goals match between people in different social circles / organizations / segments of society.
5. It is unclear exactly how to get people off their chairs and move from writing to more concrete action. (But see FaxYourMP and meetup, which are kinda moving in that direction.) However, communication generates awareness of issues and is a prerequisite for organized action.
6. Personal publishing can influence where customers put their money. I am influenced by Epinions reviewers in my buying decisions. This is perhaps a way to generate change.
7. The scaffolding is only beginning to be put together. Better connectivity tools appear every month. Many things remain to be done. It seems to me that if it gets easier and easier to find like minds, things are going to accelerate.
8. Nowadays people overtly link to people, e.g. in blogrolling lists. But they should perhaps also overtly link to ideas. Idearolling lists. With no taboo against new, original ideas like "Emergent democracy". Idearolling indicates which groups you're involved in on a fine-grained level and can potentially accelerate matchmaking.
9:22:23 AM
|
|
Collective detective on real-world problems
Holly from Collective Detective writes in response to this:
It would be an interesting experience to harness the collective mind and try to tackle some real world problems. I do agree with alf, defining a problem will be the hard part, though there are no shortage of real world puzzles and mysteries. I would like to volunteer space on Collective Detective to try this out, and invite anyone who is interested to email me.
Let's discuss any ideas we might have on this openly. I've just set up a channel for that.
7:57:07 AM
|
|
A beat a day
BeatBlog. Cool concept. "All beats copyright phil jones. Feel free to sample and use them in your own mixes, composition, multi-media presentationss etc."
7:52:28 AM
|
|
reversible.org
This looks a bit like a mutant sibling of the TopicExchange. Each page collects referers and trackbacks. Here's my page (I just made up the URL and it created the page).
7:43:08 AM
|
|
Microcontent Research Center proposal
Liz and Alex's proposal is out. I wish them success!
This is a proposal to establish a Microcontent Research Center housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in collaboration with faculty at the University at Buffalo. The center would sponsor, collect, and disseminate research on the topic of microcontent publishing—in particular, weblogs (or “blogs”)—as a tool for collaborative teaching, learning, and research. It would sponsor regular workshops and colloquia on the topic of microcontent publishing in specific academic and pedagogical contexts, and would engage in collaborative activities with other US-based educational institutions, as well as organizations in other countries currently pursuing related research (specifically Norway, Austria, and Japan).
7:40:10 AM
|
|
From my Radio to your Inbox
I'd like to offer an email option to readers of this weblog. I hear that Bloglet can provide such a service with Radio blogs. Has anybody tried it? Are there clear explanations on how it works somewhere? And which machine issues the mails, mine or Bloglet's?
7:34:52 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
|
|
| |
Dave Winer meetup at Harvard
Donna Wentworth reports quite adequately on yesterday's blog session at Harvard. Frank Field hit the nail on the head, last night and today, wondering about the tension between the competitive culture of higher education, especially at elite institutions like Harvard, and the cooperative philosophy that powers blogging.
10:51:35 PM
|
|
Intelligent software vs. dumb tools
Too often computers manage us when it should be the other way around. Sophistication often does more harm than good, making incorrect assumptions about the tasks we want to perform. Chris Dent has an article that argues convincingly for the relevance of the computer-as-tool view. Good work, and a nice list of references - from the school of Engelbart and Norman, among others.
10:42:58 PM
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
|
|
| |
When "about right" is not enough
Mimicry Nation.
[...] here we have some people who've worked hard for years, and they've learned to get things *mostly* right, who've learned that if they get 80% of the questions right, they're doing well. If they can regurgitate what the textbook says, and make their answers look about right, they do well in school. They've been thoroughly trained and validated into doing things that look sort of right, but which aren't.
The problem is that in the real world, if you have the job of building something that actually works, as a computer programmer or as an engineer, or you need to do something very precise and important, like surgery, you can't get away with anything much less than 100% right. You might get away with 99.99% right, and the last 0.01% will still haunt you. But if you're several percent off, the bridge will fall down, the patient will die, and your software just won't run. You can't *almost* save an account record and still call it an accounting program. It doesn't matter if you made a good effort and that your notes look good if you amputated the wrong leg. [...] [Ming the Mechanic]
9:09:10 PM
|
|
Blog startup advice for newbies. Dave Pollard of How to Save the World offers some advice for blog beginners ported from the world of entrepreneurship. I'll summarize the points here, but you'll have to rack up a hit on his blog to get the full picture:
- Give the market what it wants.
- Be patient.
- Don't copycat.
- Learn from your successes and failures.
- Join a club.
- Network with other blogs and sites. [Radio Free Blogistan]
Here's a tip for #5: visit the TopicExchange... and maybe start a topic.
8:38:08 PM
|
|
Semantic Blogging
I used to think the W3C Semantic Web folks all had their heads in the clouds; I stand corrected since Phil found this in his referers.
Dave Reynolds, Steve Cayzer, Ian Dickinson, and Paul Shabajee are out to demonstrate the value of the Semantic Web by building real applications they call "demonstrators". Among the selection criteria for potential apps (in the analysis and selection document):
- illustrate the overall semantic web vision, good mix of semi-structured data, webness and deeper semantics;
- a good chance of impact and uptake across a large enough community to become a live application and not simply an artificial demonstration;
- the semantic web aspects of the demonstrators should be visible and apparent to the end users and not hidden behind the scenes;
They have identified and explained a lot of concrete activities where the Semantic Web could be useful, including knowledge management, semantic indexing, personal information management, metadata for annotation and for discovery, and knowledge formation.
The two demonstrator applications that they have selected are semantic blogging and bibliographies and semantic community portals. This section briefly explains how they want to upgrade blogging to semantic blogging, focusing on the task of building bibliographies with blog tools (such as Charles Bailey does with the scholarly electronic publishing bibliography).
The requirements spec explains in more detail what this is all about, and guess what? They (rightfully) bring up the TopicExchange as a step towards the use of shared ontologies.
There is some movement in the blogging community to what we call semantic blogging. The Movable Type Trackback functionality [MT_TRACKBACK] allows two way linking between blog items. Some blog commentators envisage the next step, which is attaching semantics to these links [LINKING_DANGEROUSLY]. Richer (hierarchical) categories are facilitated by the RSS2.0 standard [RSS2.0]. The Topic Exchange activity [TOPIC_EXCHANGE] uses TrackBack as a step towards the use of shared ontologies. Further details on these and other activities can be found in the appendix on related work, but it is worth emphasising them here. These developments indicate that there is a real need for the capability that we are proposing. [...]
Trackback can been used to create community topics [TOPIC-EXCHANGE] and thus facilitate emergent ontology formation. XFML [XFML] offers a low cost way to define and link taxonomies, although as yet there is no RDF serialization of the specification. Nevertheless, the combination of the two is an attractive proposition.
Indeed, eh Matt?
This is strong work. I wish I could watch these guys. They see us but we don't see them (except when they put out bricks such as these). Can't wait 'til one of them starts a blog.
8:04:55 PM
|
|
Watch the middle
Clay Shirky's piece on weblogs and power laws has (predictably) been doing the rounds this week in blogspace. A lot has been said, interesting and uninteresting, but I think Jonathon Delacour is the one who came up with the most insightful commentary, saying that the most interesting action happens in the middle of the traffic/link count distribution.
And I believe it is indeed so because that's where the new and valuable interpersonal connections are being made, every day. Big bloggers can't track their readers and commenters; diary-like bloggers don't care to.
6:49:25 PM
|
|
Groups forming...
There are two exciting recent developments where people are organizing around blogs and wikis. The first is the "Emergent KM Research" collective, whose objective is to build a new research area in Knowledge Management.
The idea is to explore, to develop and to integrate perspectives on KM Research coming from the broad areas of human and social sciences - namely from Anthropology, History of Ideas, Philosophy of Science, Cultural Studies, Political Science and, finaly, Organisational Semiotics.
The second is the EdBlogging - blogs in education - community, which is taking shape thanks to Al Delgado and others' efforts. They've got a forum, an official-looking blog, and a wiki up and running. (Where's the front page?) And they'll be convening in San Francisco in November. Here are some of the members, and a few personal introductions.
6:36:14 PM
|
|
Are doctorates worthwhile?
asks Brian Martin in his review of Canadian literary scholar Wilfred Cude's The Ph.D. Trap Revisited.
The PhD is the accepted apprenticeship into research and has become a prerequisite for academic jobs in most fields. But is it a good idea? The negative view is that studying for doctorates wastes vast amounts of time and effort, produces narrow-minded scholars and discourages recognition of good teaching. Far from promoting research, according to this critical view the doctorate is a serious brake on intellectual creativity.
I believe that the Ph.D. may globally be an institution that selects against originality, but there might be pockets of oxygen here and there with open minds where one could come up with a fresh approach and survive. However, things can get difficult afterwards, as Ph.D. hiring practices can also be conservative in most places. It's hard to be taken seriously when you stand out too much.
Martin also reviewed Jeff Schmidt's Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. Jeff Schmidt was an editor at Physics Today magazine for 19 years, until he was fired for writing this provocative book. From the review:
Jeff Schmidt argues that training professionals is a process of fostering political and intellectual subordination. On the surface, this is a startling claim, since the often-stated aim of educators is to promote independent thinking. [...]
There are two key ideological processes in professional education, according to Schmidt. One is favoring students who pick up the point of view of their superiors, behavior Schmidt calls "ideological discipline." The other is favoring students who direct their curiosity as requested by others, a trait Schmidt delightfully dubs "assignable curiosity."
Hm. If there's one thing I've been sorely lacking all my life, it is indeed assignable curiosity. Guess I'm an amateur professional.
Schmidt also draws an interesting parallel between indoctrination as practiced in cults and professional training. But I think there are cult-like aspects in almost all social structures, not just the professional ones. Perhaps they are more important where there is a lot of power to be gained by working one's way up, though.
Brian Martin's writings on higher education systems are among the most thought-provoking ones that I've come across, by the way.
6:09:18 PM
|
|
|
|
Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:29 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
|
|
