Stupid Omniscence and Novelty.

[Kai]

When we bring people from out of university for departmental seminars, we usually have a grad student lunch with the speaker before the talk. This generally starts out with everyone going round table introducing themselves and their research, after which we talk about various things, often relating to research or grad school.

Last week's grad lunch was atypical. The enthusiastic speaker lead a discussion/lecture from the whiteboard (pausing only for a bite of sandwich), and it was by far the most stimulating grad lunch we've ever had, and also simultaneously the most interesting and most infuriating. This wasn't even the seminar, this was just him holding court in grad lunch. Topics covered everything from Mendel to Memeology, but the focus was these three questions:

What is novelty?
What is an idea?
What is chance?

Now, I'm not going to try to cover the whole talk right now because it was a long, rambling, and dense, but one of the things he mentioned was technological omniscience.

30 years ago, and for the majority of time that there has been universities, the academics have acted as a repository for knowledge. We needed them because it was much faster to ask them than to try to find the information for ourselves. Hundreds of years ago it was sometimes the /only/ way to get this information, because it was either not written down or only written in very rare books only a few people possessed.

But now, he said, pointing to a smart phone on the table, we all carry a second brain along with us. We are essentially omniscent with the rest of humanity. So academics can't rely on their job as knowledge repository anymore, they have to find something else to do.

And his answer was the generation of novelty, which comes from the "remixing" of ideas in the brain. He said it was like natural selection in practice. And I generally agreed with his assessment of novelty, that it takes a great many ideas remixed in the brain to actually generate novelty.

But I had a big problem with his idea of technological omniscience. Never mind he had already peeved me a bit with his statements about genetics being "dead" and essentially "engineering" at this point (since only work at the bleeding edge is science, I guess). His sort of omniscience with the tricorder reference we carry around with us seems to be a very stupid sort of omniscience. It doesn't generate novelty, it doesn't communicate new ideas, PEOPLE do that. If intelligence is the ability to absorb, integrate, and communicate information, then technological omniscience is only the absorb portion of that, and the really interesting stuff happens in the integrate and communicate portions. It's in those parts that novelty is generated.

So, you can be walking around with the sum of all knowledge in your hands, but if you don't actually /have any of it in your brain/, that knowledge is not generating novelty. Cain has said as much here before, and I'm pretty sure that Yudkowsky has as well. Which means that despite professors being no longer necessary as a repository for language /for everyone else/, that repository of language is necessary /for their own work/.

I hear undergrads bemoan having to remember things, why do we have to remember this if we can just look it up? Because that sort of all knowing "power" is about as dumb as an automaton. Technological omniscience is about as stupid as people who think intelligence is all about how many digits of pi you can remember. I'm not reducing the significance of having humanity's amassed knowledge at my fingertips, I'm saying that complete reliance upon such things eliminates novelty. Like the person with no short term memory, technological omniscience only supplies that which was known years ago, and that which is right in front of me. It doesn't give novel solutions, and if used too often it becomes a brain crutch.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Nice piece, Kai. Guy sounds a bit overcaffeinated. I also kinda feel like if you learn something by communicating with a person, rather than merely googling something and reading it, you're better at retaining the answer. Sure, google is awesome for trying to find a thing, but I seem to recall some sort of study that showed that googling something is better at having you learn where you found the answer to your question rather than remembering what that answer was.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I agree with you completely, Kai. The vast electronic database network is simply a mobile, highly-accessible library. It stores knowledge, but does not manipulate or connect or interpret knowledge, nor does it add new knowledge. Even in very recent conversations on this board, we have seen the difficulty non-academics often have in understanding the available store of knowledge, simply because they lack the training to interpret the meaning that is encoded therein.

People who devote their careers to understanding the existing body of knowledge are still a vital part of the process, as are people who create or discover new knowledge. 

[Kai]

Nice piece, Kai. Guy sounds a bit overcaffeinated. I also kinda feel like if you learn something by communicating with a person, rather than merely googling something and reading it, you're better at retaining the answer. Sure, google is awesome for trying to find a thing, but I seem to recall some sort of study that showed that googling something is better at having you learn where you found the answer to your question rather than remembering what that answer was.

You're thinking of this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/olgakhazan/2011/07/20/in-the-era-of-google-effects-why-memory-matters/

I agree with you completely, Kai. The vast electronic database network is simply a mobile, highly-accessible library. It stores knowledge, but does not manipulate or connect or interpret knowledge, nor does it add new knowledge. Even in very recent conversations on this board, we have seen the difficulty non-academics often have in understanding the available store of knowledge, simply because they lack the training to interpret the meaning that is encoded therein.

People who devote their careers to understanding the existing body of knowledge are still a vital part of the process, as are people who create or discover new knowledge. 

I hope so. This guy's expectation is that such people are obsolete.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nice piece, Kai. Guy sounds a bit overcaffeinated. I also kinda feel like if you learn something by communicating with a person, rather than merely googling something and reading it, you're better at retaining the answer. Sure, google is awesome for trying to find a thing, but I seem to recall some sort of study that showed that googling something is better at having you learn where you found the answer to your question rather than remembering what that answer was.

You're thinking of this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/olgakhazan/2011/07/20/in-the-era-of-google-effects-why-memory-matters/

I agree with you completely, Kai. The vast electronic database network is simply a mobile, highly-accessible library. It stores knowledge, but does not manipulate or connect or interpret knowledge, nor does it add new knowledge. Even in very recent conversations on this board, we have seen the difficulty non-academics often have in understanding the available store of knowledge, simply because they lack the training to interpret the meaning that is encoded therein.

People who devote their careers to understanding the existing body of knowledge are still a vital part of the process, as are people who create or discover new knowledge. 

I hope so. This guy's expectation is that such people are obsolete.

I'm just gonna unequivocally state that he's wrong. Knowledge without people who understand it and know how to use it is an unused library.

[Kai]

Nice piece, Kai. Guy sounds a bit overcaffeinated. I also kinda feel like if you learn something by communicating with a person, rather than merely googling something and reading it, you're better at retaining the answer. Sure, google is awesome for trying to find a thing, but I seem to recall some sort of study that showed that googling something is better at having you learn where you found the answer to your question rather than remembering what that answer was.

You're thinking of this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/olgakhazan/2011/07/20/in-the-era-of-google-effects-why-memory-matters/

I agree with you completely, Kai. The vast electronic database network is simply a mobile, highly-accessible library. It stores knowledge, but does not manipulate or connect or interpret knowledge, nor does it add new knowledge. Even in very recent conversations on this board, we have seen the difficulty non-academics often have in understanding the available store of knowledge, simply because they lack the training to interpret the meaning that is encoded therein.

People who devote their careers to understanding the existing body of knowledge are still a vital part of the process, as are people who create or discover new knowledge. 

I hope so. This guy's expectation is that such people are obsolete.

I'm just gonna unequivocally state that he's wrong. Knowledge without people who understand it and know how to use it is an unused library.

Or at least, it's not the job of academics/scientists to be such people, to be interpreters. If I understand what he was saying. But I don't understand how I can generate novelty without a rich and diverse /internal/ knowledge base and diversity of experience.

ETA: I mean, isn't this why young artists are told to go out into the world and experience everything (or as much as possible)? It seems the same for scientists.

[Kai]

This reminds me of a Feynman letter. http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/problems

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You
will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their
simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me.
Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. now your place
in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of
your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's
ideals are.

[Pæs]

I'm working through Khan Academy at the moment because I'm sick of stupid omniscience. I haven't had to manipulate numbers in any remotely complex way since I left school and now, sure, I can get the RESULTS of manipulating numbers but I still have NO IDEA what's happening in that process and in many cases, because of this lack of visibility of the process, can't know exactly what question to ask Google.

[Cramulus]

Google on your phone is kind of like having the map to a theme park.

that's all, just a map.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Google is part of you. It hasn't replaced anything and it's missing a trick to think of it as something external. Consider it an upgrade - a third limb or a second brain. It's now possible for an upgraded human to learn something quicker and more easily than before.

I rarely read reference books anymore. The internet has totally replaced that for me. I'm not interested in wading through piles of spurious bullshit to learn all there is to know about something, from the ground up, often in the order it was discovered, just to accomplish whatever objective it was that drove me to pick up the book in the first place.

It's more efficient for me not to have to memorise shit I'm not interested in learning. That's the key to the internet - it's already been learned. All you need to do is access your second brain, where the learning was recorded and, bingo - you have the information. I don't have to remember it - it's in my browser history. It sounds like cheating unless you're running with the upgrade philosophy at which point you realise - it isn't cheating, it's just more efficient. Like it or lump it, it's how we roll nowadays.

Who knows, maybe as it develops, our original memory - the useless, inefficient one with dodgy retrieval algorithms, will atrophy completely from lack of use. As our technology becomes less and less intrusive, integrated in the clothing we wear, wired into our meat brains. Will we even miss it?

As for what this means for academia? Same as it means for civilians, I would expect. The same shit that's always been happening but much more efficiently now. Much more effective.  Faster progress. Do not forget the old SEO adage, tho - "Content is king"

Google doesn't make content, it merely indexes it, better than we do.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Google on your phone is kind of like having the map to a theme park.

that's all, just a map.

I love this.