h a l f b a k e r yThe embarrassing drunkard uncle of invention.
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It seems to me that a lot of academic disciplines nowadays don‘t actually create or discover new knowledge or information, they merely recycle stuff that's already known. Also we were listening to the audio recording of Virginia Woolf's radio broadcast on “Words”, and she was complaining the same thing
in the 1930s.
So, there should be an international list of the things that are newly known each year.
Because people disagree about what is real penguin knowledge and what is not, I suggest having a two-stage system for producing such a list. I think this system would be useful for other such lists as well but that’s by the bye.
One stage would be a big committee of scientists and academics drawn from the world’s top universities, who would do their peer-reviewed committee thing and produce a ranked list of items.
The other stage would be a collaborative wikipedia-style setup open to all comers equally, which would do its chaotic evolutionalry algorithm consensus thing and would also produce a ranked list of items.
These lists would be combined by adding scores for items on both list, and then ranking the combined list. This would be published as this year's official list of new knowledge.
Words
http://shop.bl.uk/m.../isbn_9780712305419
Woolf‘s “Words”, no longer free to listen to though... [pocmloc, Feb 20 2011]
An Inconvenient Truth
http://en.wikipedia..._inconvenient_truth
.... or just a matter of opinion ? [8th of 7, Feb 20 2011]
Harvie Krumpet
http://www.youtube....watch?v=ouyVS6HOFeo
About a man who accumulated facts. [mouseposture, Feb 21 2011]
[link]
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//One stage would be a big committee of scientists and
academics drawn from the world’s top universities, // |
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I think they might be busy. If they're not, then they're
probably not very good. |
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// drawn from the world’s top universities, // |
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They could be drawn from a photograph, if you had a competent artist, shirley ? |
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Df. "knowledge" = "justified true belief". |
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|- (x)(x is a year) (^(knowledge)=0) |
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//Df. "knowledge" = "justified true belief". // |
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A relativist might argue that there was no such thing as
"truth", and it would be difficult to persuade him otherwise
(although I would try my best, using heavy implements and
reason). However, if you admit the phrase "true" as a valid
concept, then it's not a belief. |
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That rather depends on the observer's view of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Since there is no deep reality, and "reality" is merely an artefact of observation, the notional value of "true" is only valid for the individual observer. Since the wave function can only be collapsed once, no subsequent observation is possible (Wigner's Friend), and therefore another observer can never have direct access to the information contained in the original wave function. |
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Thus any subsequent observer must of necessity accept the True/False data of the Primary Observer as a matter of "faith" since it can never be rigorously proved. |
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Yeah, that. However, your discussion appears to refer to
instance, rather than truth. |
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It may appear like that to you, but to a different observer it may appear as something else. There is no way of knowing. |
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Which kind of proves the point. |
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//"reality" is merely an artefact of observation, the
notional value of "true" is only valid for the
individual observer// - except in mathematics,
which is either true or not and doesn't care about
'observers'. |
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To create it, or to learn or understand it? |
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What's needed is a paper-based bit-bucket system. Every
time something is learned, however elementary, you write it
on a standardised card. Complex things like genome
sequences would need lots of cards. Throw them all into a
big bucket, and weigh it annually. |
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Can we just stop all this? Honestly. For goodness' sake. |
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[MaxwellBuchannan] //here we go again// You said it, bub. |
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[8th] is that still canon? I had a notion quantum
decoherance did away with the special status of the
Observer. Even under the Copenhagen interpretation, isn't
the description of the system pre-collapse, by the wave
function "true" in an observer-independent way? |
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[pocmloc] a good idea, but short on implementation
details. The peer-reviewed committee thing, unlike the
chaotic evolutionary algorithm consensus thing is laborious
and time consuming. How would you induce the scientists
and academics to participate? (This idea already
exists within academic disciplines, and, in that
case, the inducement is prestige, and a chance to
influence the direction of one's field.) |
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// How would you induce the scientists and academics to participate? // |
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Offering them money seems to work just as well as with other humans. |
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Ah, but scientists and academics are motivated only by lofty
ideals. They're unworldly and care nothing for material gain. |
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We'll get Watson working on it right away. |
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One journal to rule them all
One journal to find them all.
One journal to bring them all,
and in the darkness, bind them. |
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//How would you induce the scientists and academics to participate?// |
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Here's how you could try to get this idea to work: you make it beneficial for the research community to get published in it. In other words - Will it publicise the work? Will the content truly be top work? Will it provide lots of citations from the work? Will it have high "Impact"? |
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So - this would only have to supplant the top journals in every field. Not much to ask. |
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{Never mind that this 'publication' would have to cast the net so wide that the review process would be unfeasible and that the ultimate product would be so general that it would be of no collective use to any specialist - like a researcher - who would be the type to cite it} |
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[Jinbish]//Here's how you could try to get this idea to
work...// Good point. In fact if you cast the net about
this wide: "All of the physical sciences" then you could say
that system actually already operates, for the journals
_Science_ and _Nature_ They sort of supplant the top
journals in every sub-field, so maybe not so much to ask
after all. |
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But re: //one journal to rule them all// I disagree. A good
journal
differs from this idea in two ways (if I understand the idea
correctly). First, to be published in a good journal, the
work must be not only new, but also interesting and
important. Second, there is competition for space in a
journal, whereas this idea would publish anything really
new -- however trivial or boring -- and it would aim to be
comprehensive, publishing everything that satisfied that
criterion. |
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There was an amazing book that I used to buy when I
was a kid called something like "Science Year In
Review". It was about an inch + thick, had glossy
beautifully illustrated pages and was very well
written. I think I managed to get maybe 3 or 4 yearly
issues before it was discontinued or I discovered
girls or something. |
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I've been wrestling with a problem here for a long, long time. There's
knowledge in the sense of a body of information which people believe and
may be true, e.g. how to make papier mache or connections between
nitrosamine exposure and the development of co-called "Type I Diabetes",
and there's knowledge in the sense of certainty. I wonder if certainty might
increase in fact because of new discoveries in mathematics, for example.
However, the first sense of the word "knowledge" seems to be intended
here, but are there connections between the two? Increase in knowledge of
the first type seems to be a kind of unfolding, but if increase of knowledge is
like reverse origami, how can you tell when you've gotten to the flat sheet of
paper? Are you allowed to tear the paper? Can you turn it into papier
mache? So, what i'm saying is, it's all provisional so you could only measure
it at best with hindsight. |
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//It seems to me that a lot of academic disciplines nowadays don‘t actually create or discover new knowledge or information, they merely recycle stuff that's already known. Also we were listening to the audio recording of Virginia Woolf's radio broadcast on “Words”, and she was complaining the same thing in the 1930s.// |
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It seems, in fact, that you did not create this idea but you recycled what Virginia Woolf had said about this very matter, which is somehow appropriate enough for a bun. |
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//I discovered girls or something.//
I too have discovered the distracting and arousing powers of somethings. |
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I would say that knowledge of how to make papier maché is
undeniably true, since you end up with paper maché. Of
course, paper maché may, itself, be untrue, but that is more
of an eintscheülling-gechkt problem, is it not? |
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//the process of acquiring knowledge is successive and
better approximations to the equations that define the
universe in an exact manner i.e. better approximations to
the truth.// |
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You've never had much contact with administration, have
you, [bigsleep]? |
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If you incrementally accumulate new facts, you
eventually approach Truth? <link> |
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//In fact if you cast the net about this wide:// |
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All of physical sciences, huh? Not wide enough. I was actually thinking of Nature as one of the journals to 'beat' when I wrote the anno. {Up until recently, I didn't know that it was a publication that researchers actively aim for - I had aways thought that it had a more 'journalistic' approach, if that makes sense} |
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I actually agree with you - the idea isn't a journal. I don't think it can be. It is "an international list"... {which I am struggling to visualise}. |
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//So, there should be an international list of the things that are newly known each year.// |
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The Nobel Prize is supposed to do this in the sciences, though is generally awarded years after the fact. As there's no way to know real time what is truly new (and important), not until it is tested and verified. |
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Isn't this only half of the equation though, pocmloc? What about knowledge that is lost? Worse, what if there is an overall net loss of knowledge? How would we know? Is it possible to publish a list of things that have been forgotten? And anyway, how long do you wait until you declare something as being 'new' knowledge? (I notice that there's a sudden spate of doubt going on in the media about the Higgs Boson; must be a slow news week in Western Europe now that Berlusconi's gone to ground - North Africa seems to be a much more exciting place).
[Notes that ldischler's more concise style meant he got to slip his anno in first whilst I was still typing. Must be a life lesson in that somewhere.] |
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[pocmloc], how close to realising this idea is the possibility of listing all the papers in the top journals? Of course, this doesn't necessarily give us the delta (amount of advancement) from last year, but it would give an at-a-glance in state of the art. |
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"Global Literature Review"
{inc. abstracts from the papers of Nature, Science, Proceedings of the IEEE, Electronics Letters, the Lancet,... |
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I'd be guessing if I started to name-check other fields' journals but you get the idea. |
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Well the peer-reviewed part was only one half of the proposed mechanism; the wiki half was the other. I thought the possibility of competitive ranking between these two colleges would provide for some amusement. |
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As regards the loss of knowledge, this would obviously become apparent after a few years of publishing this index, when people could look back and see things listed that would now be mysteries. For completeness you would also want a complete list of everything that is known at the start of this annual project, but that might unduly delay the launch of this programme. |
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We really need a halfbakery philosophy page, somewhere else far, far away, preferrably. |
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Can you mark up leather binding with HTML? |
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HTML5 will have <leatherbound>, <vellum>, <goldembossing> and <handwrittenmanuscript> tags. |
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As it happens, oh never mind, i'll post it as an idea but it's not terribly new. |
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If it's the one about printing lists of endangered species on
human-derived vellum as an ironic comment on post-
modernist theories of climate change, I think it's been done
<link>. |
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I'll vote for holding steady. How many of us know the
proper knot to tie a bowstring, or the tracks a
jackelope make during mating season? |
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[+] bun for inducing the above awfully loud collapse of the philosophical wave function. |
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Hmm, have you been reading my Y!A questions, [qeak]? |
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// Actually, human knowledge is probably annually decreasing, if anything. // |
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Is it dumbing down or overspecialisation? Or, is it just "hell in a handcart" curmudgeonliness? |
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I'm still reading annos here, but quite like the intent of the idea. [+] |
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