“Eschew obfuscation”

By Dick Swart on 31 October 2010

It is not often that I read something that enlightens me in a way that I feel that a much deeper truth has opened up to me. I read an essay that I can recommend to everybody. Its in the Cloud so you won’t have any problems finding it. Let me quote a few paragraphs. They speak for them selves:

“There is a hidden information process between you and the knowledge. The information that is added by algorithms is by definition not knowledge, though it is consumed by humans that are unaware of the ubiquitious interface and hidden processes as such.”

Even more clear is of course:
“Our information passes through our filters, we convert the information into knowledge. Asynchronously and sometimes from different sources, this may create feedback for the criteria of our filters; either loosening them up or tightening them.”

Not to mention of course the deep insight I received from the following:
“A digital ecosystem is any network where nodes can be added or removed to change the size and reach allowing for games, music, video, documents, money transactions and everything else to move within the boundaries of the network.”

It clearly refers to “A thousand plateaus’ by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:
“The principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken shattered at a given spot but it will start up again on one of its old lines or on new lines, You an never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome.”

These truths are so obvious that I find it annoying that a scientist like Noam Chomsky fails to see the deeper truth in this. He says:
“There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc.—- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest—- write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of ``theory`` that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won’t spell it out.’’

As if not every noun in combination with an adjective is a viable concept and an intrinsic truth!

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