Simulation Software
While it has taken me an exceptionally long time to accept this, I have to admit: most of the material below is dense to the point of incomprehensible, and while the "why" does take up a lot of space, the "what" can be summed up pretty quickly. To whit: a few of the central conclusions of all of my research are that
1) We all need as much information as we can get, about everything.
2) A completely vital and irreplaceable part of getting this information is having personal, face-to-face conversations.
3) How much people talk to one another (at all, but particularly in person) is profoundly affected by their physical environment---in particular, who they're physically close to, and who they can see. I.e. very simple, physical, measurable things.
WHAT THIS MEANS THOUGH is that the amount of information exchanged within a building/block/city/society (and thus the success with which the people in this society are able to lead healthy, fulfilling lives) is strongly dependent upon its physical layout. This has been known and studied for years, but---ASTOUNDINGLY, PRACTICALLY NEVER QUANTITATIVELY. And without question, the relationship between physical environment and basic statistics such as the number, length, and variety of personal interactions that happen within that space has never been studied with the full force of the tools that now exist.
Now: I plan on doing a good deal of this work in a PhD/the future/the time before I die, BUT! others will always be more than welcome to contribute what they can to this vast question, and to help them do so, I would like to share what I have produced so far---to my knowledge, the very first simulation program that is intended to be able to probe this environment/interactions relationship.
Since I don't know how to upload files at the moment, simply email me if you want the code, and a description of how to use it.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
What You Will Find Here
On this page, and throughout these writings, I propose, and summarize an argument for, what is foremost intended as an approach to the world, and a way to best confront the problems we are all trying to solve. Due to the complexity of the questions this approach would face, the most productive form it could take is of a novel academic discipline. The field would be called "sophology"- the study of information. It is not communication, or epistemology, or library science, but a comprehensive and ongoing examination of where we get all of the information on which we base our actions- not only in a general or theoretical sense, but in a personal way that has immediacy to our individual, and eventually collective, lives. It starts with the acknowledgment that an immensely influential source is our personal interactions with other people. The urgent need for this field is a conclusion reached over the course of several years of research, conducted across forty existing academic fields, in which too many serious problems persisted because of simple, easily rectifiable ignorance, and no more complicated things than the length, type, number, and variety of personal interactions could be seen to have profound repercussions throughout politics, education, economics, and an uncountable number of other areas. Information as its own quantity must, and can be, given the same level and care of constant attention with which we now treat any of these things.
In the documents below are first a stand-alone more heartfelt introduction and argument, and then a more detailed summary in five parts, which follows closely the structure and logic of the book now being completed that lays out the argument in full, supported extensively by existing scholarship. The individual pieces of writing can all be reached by the links above- The Story, In Anticipation, Information, Learning, Searching, Sophology.
I want you to know about sophology, because I believe that you and the rest of the world will benefit deeply from it. I have done the work, because I believe that you and the rest of the world will benefit deeply from it. I want those who are young and eager and going out to shape the world to know about it, and I want those who have been shaping it for years, and know the most about it, to know about it.
Read it when you have time. If you see value in it- please- PLEASE- tell others about it. Your friends. Your colleagues. The people with whom you fall unexpectedly into pleasant conversation. The ideas will take millions- millions of people- before they will begin to approach their full potential. I, am only one.
In the documents below are first a stand-alone more heartfelt introduction and argument, and then a more detailed summary in five parts, which follows closely the structure and logic of the book now being completed that lays out the argument in full, supported extensively by existing scholarship. The individual pieces of writing can all be reached by the links above- The Story, In Anticipation, Information, Learning, Searching, Sophology.
I want you to know about sophology, because I believe that you and the rest of the world will benefit deeply from it. I have done the work, because I believe that you and the rest of the world will benefit deeply from it. I want those who are young and eager and going out to shape the world to know about it, and I want those who have been shaping it for years, and know the most about it, to know about it.
Read it when you have time. If you see value in it- please- PLEASE- tell others about it. Your friends. Your colleagues. The people with whom you fall unexpectedly into pleasant conversation. The ideas will take millions- millions of people- before they will begin to approach their full potential. I, am only one.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
The Story
THIS IS
THE STORY OF THE THINGS WE KNOW THAT ARE
TOO FUNDAMENTAL TO CONSTANTLY NOTICE BUT
TOO IMPORTANT
TO CONTINUE TO FORGET
AS IT WAS REDISCOVERED
BY
A. M. LOEWI
Creative Commons
The Story by Alexander Martin Loewi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 2009
It is free for distribution and reproduction, but not licensed for commercial purposes.
This is the story of the things we know too well to remember. There is no one for whom it is not meant.
This is the story of the things that we could not possibly give all of the attention they deserve, because they drench every second of our lives; and how in their overwhelming presence, we have repeatedly overlooked their depths. But it is also the story of how some people began to look systematically at what we must most take for granted, and the world changed. How it became better, because of what they saw. And how, finally, it is our turn to look, and not look away again.
A professor excavates layers of data that have been building for a hundred years, and as familiar a thing as community becomes a profound, and urgent, focus of study for fields from sociology to economics. Another gathers decades of her own experience, probes decades more of other people's with exhaustive interviews, and with it all, shows us how well we understand the people we talk to. She is awarded a MacArthur fellowship, the “genius” grant. A scholar describes with meticulous detail the architecture and arrangement of our most mundane routines, and her insights become "the most influential book written on urban planning in the 20th century." Every one of us has known community, of some kind. We have talked to people since we could talk, and, billions of us, lived in cities since we were born. That we might have missed a single one of their subtleties seems absurd, but then when someone forgoes this assumption, the scale of their power over everything we do is unveiled, and takes us forcefully by surprise. So look closely- these ideas were unexpected because they are all facets of one, even subtler idea, that describes a thing more pervasive than sidewalks, than community, than people.
Information- is the only thing that is actually everywhere. Voluminous, complicated, information, by which we live every moment of our lives: what things look like, how to be a doctor, what the person you didn't understand before actually means. They are pieces we have in front of us, or pieces we learned years ago. And this is the reason we can not remember all of it! We know too many things to remember how we ever learned them, that we ever learned them, how someone else could possibly not know them, and so we forsake the ways in which we learned, and then we are confused when the world is not the way we expect it. Look again at the scholarship: what these studies tell us is not about community, but how much we need many people to share the information with us that we are welcome among them, before we can share all of the other information we need. They show how different the information that two people have can be, and how we must have the same information to understand one another. They show how hard it is to get the information we need when we live in places whose design isolates us from one another, and from it. They show us that not all information can be written down, or drawn, or even said, so we must exchange it in person to get all of it. That if we do not exchange it, we do not have it. That if we do not have it, we do not understand. And then what can we do? Things we know, and so can only have forgotten.
The too-long time our recollection has languished is exacerbated by the fact that we hesitate to accept how something that affects us deeply is both simple, and easily mutable. We do not want it to seem insufficient in measure to the emotions it has inspired. We feel there must be a deeper reason for a deeper hurt, or have the greed to want our happiness to not only be happiness, but also be unique, and look for majestic mechanisms where they may not be. So we tilt, errant, at windmills, while the true causes of our joys and pains look on bewildered, and beg for our attention. We have no reason to be reluctant to listen to them, because what they say, despite the few words in which it can be put, are the unabridged origins of things that are as powerful, and beautiful, as anything we can imagine. And there is nothing so sadly infuriating to watch go neglected, at the cost of fulfillment, and health, and lives.
In the past, even those who did see the pattern may have forsaken it for its complexity. But now, the world is different. Now- we have tools, that do not forget. Tiny, crude, ubiquitous, marvelous, electronic, memories. They are the very last piece of this vast, vital, puzzle. If we, with them, were to take the thorough, scrupulous approach of science: of tables and statistics, of computers and sensors, of interviews and ethnographies, of maps and timers- we would gain knowledge of historically unparalleled acuity, and necessity. With our mathematics and our literature and our GPS, we must look at the whole, and let ourselves be awed by the full pattern of what at the individual, anecdotal level, is obvious. There are too many of us, and we are too important, and too dangerous, and too prone to forget, to not examine who among us knows what we are doing, and who is being given even the chance to know. Let us record what we will never remember: What we know. Who we talk to: only our friends? How much we talk to them. What we talk about: only ourselves? Who they talk to. How deeply we truly understand the effects of the problems faced by the people whose lives we are unquestionably able to improve. What the informal glances reveal is already clear, and dire, but without the strength of detail to change what they nervously apprehend. As we do this, we will tie tightly together, and shed bright light on, business networks- and governments- human rights successes, and human rights atrocities- and works in more disciplines than political science education economics biology philosophy anthropology history, and peer beneath the first layers of hatred, and love. From “sophia”- knowledge- let sophology be the science of the study of information.
These are the words of a person who has, through literally hundreds of books and years of research, come to the one realization that arrests ones thoughts so completely as to trump whatever else they have believed they knew, overturning it with as little difficulty or emotion as a strolling foot does dead leaves- that they recognize what they know in the world that they see. With this, in my desire to accurately describe reality I could yet only fall short by failing to marshal the vehemence that does the magnitude of its importance justice. So this is my foul, swearing, demand, indifferent to your comfort, my exhortation, of whose force I refuse to be ashamed; this is my calm, assured, statement of objective fact; this is my pitiful, desperate, plea: The information that we have, and give to one another- this familiar, mechanical, mesh- is still as raw, and basic a structure as anything there is for what lives we have, and those that we could ever hope to achieve. We- all, globally, for ever more- must have the humility and courage to accept that what we do not know, about one another, and the world, is huge, uncharted, and the limit of our hopes to survive what disasters we face, and foment- before we cause the whole fragile buckling frame to collapse unredeemably under our collective, groaning, weight.
In Anticipation of Sophology
IN ANTICIPATION OF AN ARGUMENT FOR
SOPHOLOGY
SOPHOLOGY
: WHAT WAS DISCOVERED IN THE COURSE OF A SEARCH FOR
THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM IN THE WORLD
In Anticipation of Sophology by Alexander Martin Loewi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 2009
It is free for distribution and reproduction, but not licenensed for commercial purposes.
This license covers the material in the posts "In Anticipation of Sophology," "Information," "Learning," "Searching," "Sophology," and "Bibliography of the Summary."
THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM IN THE WORLD
In Anticipation of Sophology by Alexander Martin Loewi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 2009
It is free for distribution and reproduction, but not licenensed for commercial purposes.
This license covers the material in the posts "In Anticipation of Sophology," "Information," "Learning," "Searching," "Sophology," and "Bibliography of the Summary."
This began as a search for the most important problem in the world. In its place, I have found the argument that is well summarized, although not fully explained, by what follows. I do not claim that it is the solution to the most important problem in the world, and no longer believe that this phrase has much, if any, meaning. However that is what I started out looking for, and even with that initial desire, I am profoundly excited by what I have found. I hope that by the end of this description, you will be as well.
At the core of everything I describe is a thing that I will call information. When this word is considered carefully, and defined correctly, a staggering swath of what we know slides sublimely into clarity with a breathtaking ease, from the most intensively reviewed academic studies, to the most mundane quotidian routines. In these pages, I have struggled to explain convincingly to you the uniquely profound importance of looking at the world in terms of it. The way of looking through this lens of information, I call sophology- “the study of knowledge,” or “the study of information.”
A fact of almost as great importance as the explanatory power of sophology is that its most important points are profoundly simple to explain, understand, and apply. Those who could benefit from it are likely to need very little if any preparation, before they are able to grasp its arguments.
This brief argument for sophology can be generally considered in three parts, although these parts are most meaningful when taken together. They are the properties of information, the way in which information is learned, and the way in which information is found.
Information
Information is anything that the brain can use to make a decision, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary. It can be gotten from anything to which the brain can have a reaction. This means that information includes emotions, unconscious tendencies, and many other things not usually described with that word. As it also influenced by the physical form of an individual's brain and their genes, it means that there is information that cannot be learned entirely identically by two people, although it is clear that an enormous amount can, for all intents and purposes. Information exists in pieces that can be considered separately. This definition for information was inspired by the work of the mathematician Claude Shannon, founder of the field of information theory, the theoretical underpinning of all computing, and the work of the biologist Richard Dawkins, who defined the concept of a “meme” as a transmittable unit of culture (which is information by this definition) and founded the field of memetics.
An individual's information, which is to say what they know, feel, and remember, as well as how they think and react, is the only thing on which they are able to base any and all of their decisions. This is inherent in the definition used. This is perhaps best expressed by the second tenet of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by the important 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world is the totality of facts, not things.”
A situation that is not desirable to a person can be considered a problem to them. Changing the situation, which includes the person's perception of the situation, can be considered solving the problem. If a situation is undesirable, but it cannot be possibly changed in a way that the person to whom it is a problem would find desirable, that problem can be considered resolved. As every action of a person can be assumed to be intended to change a situation in a certain way, then everything that we do is solving problems.
Together, all of the information that a person has that is relevant to a problem dictates all of the decisions that they can possibly make in regard to it. This information includes what physical things are available to bring to the problem, and how to use them. If a person's information encompasses everything that is relevant to a problem, it allows them to solve, or recognize as impossible to solve, any imaginable problem. (This does not assume that a single problem can be entirely understood by a single person. What a person knows is simply a limit of what they can possibly do.)
The ability to ask the questions "What information will solve this problem?" and "What information will tell me what information will solve this problem?" etc. means that there is always a way for any person to move closer to the solution or resolution of any problem.
The number of things that can be expressed with even a very small amount of information is extraordinarily large, and grows at an enormous speed, the more information that is used. This is because information consists of individual pieces, and these pieces can be combined in virtually limitless ways. If a problem is considered as the absence of the information that will solve it, then it can be seen that they are equally complex.
Due to this complexity, and so the number of possibilities that must be examined, it may require an enormous amount of time to create a new combination of pieces that as a whole is a useful piece of information. As a result of this, a very large amount of the information that someone has was gotten from, and created by, other people. It is simply not possible for a person to independently discover all of the combinations of information (i.e. ideas) that they use in their life. This includes an enormous amount of information that may be considered “obvious.” Besides being able to see the re-use of ideas everywhere in the world, particularly in every school and bibliography, Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Annalee Saxenian documents this convincingly in a comparison of two centers of computer technology development. One of them shares all of the information that the companies develop independently, and strongly outstrips the one that keeps all of its research secret.
All interaction between people involves the exchange of information, even if nothing is said, and the information is no more than what the people can see of each other. The information that is exchanged, and the emotion that the people attach to that information, is the entire basis for the relationship between them, although it is considered with all of the other information that they both have.
Community is based on a large number of people all sharing information to which they attach emotion, which can be called personal information. This information is often unique to that person. A formal study of the importance of community, and the information that people exchange even informally, can be found in the work of Harvard professor of public policy Robert Putnam. Putnam has done a large amount of foundational work on social capital, which is roughly defined as the strength of social networks in an area. More intuitively, it can be thought of as a measure of community. His work correlates social capital to participation in government, how much people vote, life spans, children's grades in school, and more. Social capital can be entirely explained, and the trends that accompany it better understood and measured, as the exchange of information.
Empathy results from two people having the same information in regard to a certain situation. Because they have the same information, they would perform the same actions, and thus have empathy for the actions of one another. This idea is very similar to the idea that people will make similar decisions if they have similar information, which is developed by the the renowned political philosopher John Rawls, in his thought experiment the “veil of ignorance.” The idea here has greater potential for practical use, as it is easier to give people information than take it away.
The information that is most important for empathy is the information that allows a person to see themselves in someone else. The information that will do accomplish this most often is information that displays a quality that is common to being valued by all humans, which in turn is often personal information. This leads to trust of a person, and empathy with them, also because you have more faith that what they say is true, even without having their information yourself. The importance of the exchange of personal information to trust is seen in the work of SUNY Stony Brook professor of psychology Art Aron.
The effective exchange of information, which is a mechanism that can lead to empathy, is thus crucial to interesting someone in a problem, and so solving problems that do not have a sufficient number of people working on those problems to solve them by themselves.
An individual's information, which is to say what they know, feel, and remember, as well as how they think and react, is the only thing on which they are able to base any and all of their decisions. This is inherent in the definition used. This is perhaps best expressed by the second tenet of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by the important 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world is the totality of facts, not things.”
A situation that is not desirable to a person can be considered a problem to them. Changing the situation, which includes the person's perception of the situation, can be considered solving the problem. If a situation is undesirable, but it cannot be possibly changed in a way that the person to whom it is a problem would find desirable, that problem can be considered resolved. As every action of a person can be assumed to be intended to change a situation in a certain way, then everything that we do is solving problems.
Together, all of the information that a person has that is relevant to a problem dictates all of the decisions that they can possibly make in regard to it. This information includes what physical things are available to bring to the problem, and how to use them. If a person's information encompasses everything that is relevant to a problem, it allows them to solve, or recognize as impossible to solve, any imaginable problem. (This does not assume that a single problem can be entirely understood by a single person. What a person knows is simply a limit of what they can possibly do.)
The ability to ask the questions "What information will solve this problem?" and "What information will tell me what information will solve this problem?" etc. means that there is always a way for any person to move closer to the solution or resolution of any problem.
The number of things that can be expressed with even a very small amount of information is extraordinarily large, and grows at an enormous speed, the more information that is used. This is because information consists of individual pieces, and these pieces can be combined in virtually limitless ways. If a problem is considered as the absence of the information that will solve it, then it can be seen that they are equally complex.
Due to this complexity, and so the number of possibilities that must be examined, it may require an enormous amount of time to create a new combination of pieces that as a whole is a useful piece of information. As a result of this, a very large amount of the information that someone has was gotten from, and created by, other people. It is simply not possible for a person to independently discover all of the combinations of information (i.e. ideas) that they use in their life. This includes an enormous amount of information that may be considered “obvious.” Besides being able to see the re-use of ideas everywhere in the world, particularly in every school and bibliography, Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Annalee Saxenian documents this convincingly in a comparison of two centers of computer technology development. One of them shares all of the information that the companies develop independently, and strongly outstrips the one that keeps all of its research secret.
All interaction between people involves the exchange of information, even if nothing is said, and the information is no more than what the people can see of each other. The information that is exchanged, and the emotion that the people attach to that information, is the entire basis for the relationship between them, although it is considered with all of the other information that they both have.
Community is based on a large number of people all sharing information to which they attach emotion, which can be called personal information. This information is often unique to that person. A formal study of the importance of community, and the information that people exchange even informally, can be found in the work of Harvard professor of public policy Robert Putnam. Putnam has done a large amount of foundational work on social capital, which is roughly defined as the strength of social networks in an area. More intuitively, it can be thought of as a measure of community. His work correlates social capital to participation in government, how much people vote, life spans, children's grades in school, and more. Social capital can be entirely explained, and the trends that accompany it better understood and measured, as the exchange of information.
Empathy results from two people having the same information in regard to a certain situation. Because they have the same information, they would perform the same actions, and thus have empathy for the actions of one another. This idea is very similar to the idea that people will make similar decisions if they have similar information, which is developed by the the renowned political philosopher John Rawls, in his thought experiment the “veil of ignorance.” The idea here has greater potential for practical use, as it is easier to give people information than take it away.
The information that is most important for empathy is the information that allows a person to see themselves in someone else. The information that will do accomplish this most often is information that displays a quality that is common to being valued by all humans, which in turn is often personal information. This leads to trust of a person, and empathy with them, also because you have more faith that what they say is true, even without having their information yourself. The importance of the exchange of personal information to trust is seen in the work of SUNY Stony Brook professor of psychology Art Aron.
The effective exchange of information, which is a mechanism that can lead to empathy, is thus crucial to interesting someone in a problem, and so solving problems that do not have a sufficient number of people working on those problems to solve them by themselves.
Learning
Information must be learned before it can be acted on. By “learn” I mean it must go in the brain of a person. If something appears to be learned, but the resulting understanding does not allow action the specific action you had in mind, it only means that some of the pieces that would allow that action were not learned. This is common, and hard to quantify, because information has so many pieces.
Learning takes place when a person is able to recognize the individual pieces of information that something can be described with as pieces of information that they already possess. A specific example of the broader phenomenon is that every word in a sentence must already be known before the meaning of the sentence can be understood. The best documentation for this I found, aside from my own experiences, is in the work of influential educator John Holt, and his descriptions of the difficulty of teaching elementary school students to accomplish what one might assume were very simple tasks.
Recognizing which pieces of information are relevant is not necessarily easy, or clear. Leaps of intuition still rely on pieces of information that were learned in other contexts. Learning something entirely new can be considered as recognizing a new word or image with the brain's ability to understand sounds and sights inherently, before they have meaning.
That so much new information can be made without learning new individual pieces is a result of the vast combinatoric complexity in which individual pieces of information can be combined.
A person's information can be thought of as the information itself, and the way in which they describe that information. This concept is clearest when considered as a list of words and their definitions. These "words" do not have to be words in the traditional sense. They can be anything to which a person attaches a distinct meaning, such as series of words, or non-verbal signs such as gestures, or feelings, or entire situations, as well as everything that is commonly defined as “culture,” which is when many people have a shared definition for a “word.” The definitions include all of the associations that a person has with each of their “words.” Together, these "words" and their definitions form the "complete language" of a person.
When communicating, people use their complete languages. Misunderstandings and conflicts, of eventually enormous scale, can occur any time two people have different definitions for a complete language "word" that one of them uses, or when one person does not have a definition for a "word" that another person uses. Many of these possibilities are often overlooked, because it is not obvious when the same complete language "word" in two people's complete language has different definitions to the two people. It can also be unexpected, if two people assume they are speaking the same language, or assume they have the culture. This formulation emphasizes that such statements are much more tenuous than commonly assumed, and not capable of being true for every conversation, even between the same two people. These claims are supported by the work of Stanford professor of linguistics John Rickford, and MacArthur fellow, Georgia state professor Lisa Delpit. Their work is essential for arguments regarding the origins of unexpected misunderstandings in different aspects of complete language. The context they use for their work is education, showing how crucial it is for teachers and students to speak the same complete language for effective learning at every level of education.
Because there are so many "words" in a complete language, and their definitions can be so complex, and are developed independently by every individual, everyone's complete language is unique. Learning to speak someone's complete language well requires a very large amount of time and exposure to that person, just like any other, traditionally defined language. To have different definitions simply means to have different information. While not all, an enormous amount of the information that any one person has can be learned by another person. All of these facts are visible when considering the very large differences in descriptions of gangs and gang members by journalists Kerrie Droban, Hunter Thompson, Alex Kotlowitz, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Luis J. Rodriguez, who have very different levels of familiarities with their subjects, and have spent very different amounts of time with them.
The degree to which information can be said to be personalized for someone is the degree to which it uses the complete language words and definitions of that person, which is also closely related to the emotion they attach to it. Inherent in this idea is that people's definitions include relations to themselves, in a degree correlated to how well they understand that definition. Personalization is deeply important to a person's ability to understand a given piece of information, as well as how likely they will be to act on it. Besides being inherent in the definition of complete language, this phenomenon can be seen in the many cases where people devote their lives to problems of which they were once victims.
A person who knows a lot of another person's information, which can be said also as a person who knows another person very well, is best able to personalize a given piece of information for that person.
Prejudice, be it based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other factor, can be thought of as the incorrect belief that the information of the person subject to that prejudice is not valuable. Historically, the presence of this information, or the absence of the information that these people's information is valuable, has lead to atrocities that range from social exclusion to genocide. The information that would prevent these horrific casualties can be learned as much as any other information can be learned. This theme is clearly and most famously described in the work of many black American intellectuals, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. DuBois. It can be seen in the frustration of the authors to convince people of what they truly are, which is highly intelligent, fully feeling, completely human beings. These facts are simply information. No matter how difficult a task teaching them to some people has proved in the past, they are subject to the same, often easily understood, rules that govern all information. This formulation also sheds light on why the segregation of populations can easily exacerbate a problem, as the populations can not exchange information.
Learning takes place when a person is able to recognize the individual pieces of information that something can be described with as pieces of information that they already possess. A specific example of the broader phenomenon is that every word in a sentence must already be known before the meaning of the sentence can be understood. The best documentation for this I found, aside from my own experiences, is in the work of influential educator John Holt, and his descriptions of the difficulty of teaching elementary school students to accomplish what one might assume were very simple tasks.
Recognizing which pieces of information are relevant is not necessarily easy, or clear. Leaps of intuition still rely on pieces of information that were learned in other contexts. Learning something entirely new can be considered as recognizing a new word or image with the brain's ability to understand sounds and sights inherently, before they have meaning.
That so much new information can be made without learning new individual pieces is a result of the vast combinatoric complexity in which individual pieces of information can be combined.
A person's information can be thought of as the information itself, and the way in which they describe that information. This concept is clearest when considered as a list of words and their definitions. These "words" do not have to be words in the traditional sense. They can be anything to which a person attaches a distinct meaning, such as series of words, or non-verbal signs such as gestures, or feelings, or entire situations, as well as everything that is commonly defined as “culture,” which is when many people have a shared definition for a “word.” The definitions include all of the associations that a person has with each of their “words.” Together, these "words" and their definitions form the "complete language" of a person.
When communicating, people use their complete languages. Misunderstandings and conflicts, of eventually enormous scale, can occur any time two people have different definitions for a complete language "word" that one of them uses, or when one person does not have a definition for a "word" that another person uses. Many of these possibilities are often overlooked, because it is not obvious when the same complete language "word" in two people's complete language has different definitions to the two people. It can also be unexpected, if two people assume they are speaking the same language, or assume they have the culture. This formulation emphasizes that such statements are much more tenuous than commonly assumed, and not capable of being true for every conversation, even between the same two people. These claims are supported by the work of Stanford professor of linguistics John Rickford, and MacArthur fellow, Georgia state professor Lisa Delpit. Their work is essential for arguments regarding the origins of unexpected misunderstandings in different aspects of complete language. The context they use for their work is education, showing how crucial it is for teachers and students to speak the same complete language for effective learning at every level of education.
Because there are so many "words" in a complete language, and their definitions can be so complex, and are developed independently by every individual, everyone's complete language is unique. Learning to speak someone's complete language well requires a very large amount of time and exposure to that person, just like any other, traditionally defined language. To have different definitions simply means to have different information. While not all, an enormous amount of the information that any one person has can be learned by another person. All of these facts are visible when considering the very large differences in descriptions of gangs and gang members by journalists Kerrie Droban, Hunter Thompson, Alex Kotlowitz, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Luis J. Rodriguez, who have very different levels of familiarities with their subjects, and have spent very different amounts of time with them.
The degree to which information can be said to be personalized for someone is the degree to which it uses the complete language words and definitions of that person, which is also closely related to the emotion they attach to it. Inherent in this idea is that people's definitions include relations to themselves, in a degree correlated to how well they understand that definition. Personalization is deeply important to a person's ability to understand a given piece of information, as well as how likely they will be to act on it. Besides being inherent in the definition of complete language, this phenomenon can be seen in the many cases where people devote their lives to problems of which they were once victims.
A person who knows a lot of another person's information, which can be said also as a person who knows another person very well, is best able to personalize a given piece of information for that person.
Prejudice, be it based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other factor, can be thought of as the incorrect belief that the information of the person subject to that prejudice is not valuable. Historically, the presence of this information, or the absence of the information that these people's information is valuable, has lead to atrocities that range from social exclusion to genocide. The information that would prevent these horrific casualties can be learned as much as any other information can be learned. This theme is clearly and most famously described in the work of many black American intellectuals, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. DuBois. It can be seen in the frustration of the authors to convince people of what they truly are, which is highly intelligent, fully feeling, completely human beings. These facts are simply information. No matter how difficult a task teaching them to some people has proved in the past, they are subject to the same, often easily understood, rules that govern all information. This formulation also sheds light on why the segregation of populations can easily exacerbate a problem, as the populations can not exchange information.
Searching
Information must be found before it can be learned and acted on. To “find” something it must both be recognized as the information that a person is looking for, and it must exist in a way that allows them to learn it. Given the limits of human perception, that means that it must be very close to them. Information is easiest to find if it has been organized in a way that makes it easy to find, and the method of organization is understood, such as in a card catalogue or internet search engine.
There is too much information in the world for all of it to ever be fully organized in a way that allows every individual piece, or set of pieces, to be found quickly and easily. A huge amount of this information is of importance to people.
People are able to organize the information that they have in their brains in a far greater variety of ways than can be achieved with methods such as card catalogues or internet search engines, because they can organize it according to any or all of the types of information that they are able to have about it. This makes it very easy to search the information that a person knows. People are thus often integral to finding information, particularly when it is not organized.
The ability to successfully search the information that a person knows is related to how well they are known by the person searching. Knowing someone's personal information in particular can be highly important to searching their information because it allows a person to better personalize the information communicated, i.e. allows the two people to have the clearest understanding of what is being searched for, why, and how important that search is.
There is a close connection between two people knowing large amounts of information, including personal information, about one another, being able to search one another's information, and having a social relationship. Social relationships are thus vital to understanding, and searching for, and solving problems with, information. Support for this claim is found in the fascinating work of Robert Putnam, and co-author Lewis Feldstein. It is summarized in breathtaking power and completeness with the discovery that a person's participation in a social movement is more closely linked friendship with other people in the movement, than it is with how much the movement would effect their own life.
When two people are using a single, given form of communication, their rate of information exchange is essentially fixed at an upper limit. The only way for them to exchange more information is to spend more time together.
By far the most and the most personalized information can be passed when it is communicated in person. This is due to the inherent human ability to get information from all of the many complex parts of complete language, such as body language, tone of voice, and meaning based on physical context, and the importance of these to the trust of unfamiliar information.
Face to face communication is only possible when people are very close together. Due to the time and energy required to come close to someone far away, an increase in the average distance between two people, or the difficulty with which they can come close to one another, is almost always accompanied by a very large decline in the amount of information that they learn from one another. This applies equally to the likelihood that someone will learn any given piece of information, not only the pieces that are learned from a person. Distance has an impact even at the level of feet or inches, if that is the distance that impedes the passage of information. This fact was drilled repeatedly and forcefully home in a vast amount of very famous work. Robert Putnam describes the loss of community in the United States due to people living farther apart. The celebrated author Jane Jacobs relates the vibrancy of entire neighborhoods to factors of its design that impede or abet the exchange of information between its residents. While not written from that perspective, her magnum opus on urban planning can be entirely understood, and again, now better quantified, and acted on, in terms of information. UCLA professor of anthropology Jared Diamond documents the spread of technologies (i.e. ideas i.e. information) being dictated by geographic features, and Columbia professor of economics Jeffrey Sachs points out that a river or ocean border is vital to economic success for a country because of the importance of shipping to travel and trade, which is to say exchanging ideas, that come with them.
The most powerful method of searching for information is a large group of people who know large amounts of different kinds of information, who know one another well, and who are close together. The most powerful method of learning information is to be part of that network. This is buried deep or displayed prominently in every example I have given, and millions more that I have not.
And once more- together, all of the information that is relevant to a problem, and the way in which someone wants it solved, allows any problem to be either solved or resolved.
There is too much information in the world for all of it to ever be fully organized in a way that allows every individual piece, or set of pieces, to be found quickly and easily. A huge amount of this information is of importance to people.
People are able to organize the information that they have in their brains in a far greater variety of ways than can be achieved with methods such as card catalogues or internet search engines, because they can organize it according to any or all of the types of information that they are able to have about it. This makes it very easy to search the information that a person knows. People are thus often integral to finding information, particularly when it is not organized.
The ability to successfully search the information that a person knows is related to how well they are known by the person searching. Knowing someone's personal information in particular can be highly important to searching their information because it allows a person to better personalize the information communicated, i.e. allows the two people to have the clearest understanding of what is being searched for, why, and how important that search is.
There is a close connection between two people knowing large amounts of information, including personal information, about one another, being able to search one another's information, and having a social relationship. Social relationships are thus vital to understanding, and searching for, and solving problems with, information. Support for this claim is found in the fascinating work of Robert Putnam, and co-author Lewis Feldstein. It is summarized in breathtaking power and completeness with the discovery that a person's participation in a social movement is more closely linked friendship with other people in the movement, than it is with how much the movement would effect their own life.
When two people are using a single, given form of communication, their rate of information exchange is essentially fixed at an upper limit. The only way for them to exchange more information is to spend more time together.
By far the most and the most personalized information can be passed when it is communicated in person. This is due to the inherent human ability to get information from all of the many complex parts of complete language, such as body language, tone of voice, and meaning based on physical context, and the importance of these to the trust of unfamiliar information.
Face to face communication is only possible when people are very close together. Due to the time and energy required to come close to someone far away, an increase in the average distance between two people, or the difficulty with which they can come close to one another, is almost always accompanied by a very large decline in the amount of information that they learn from one another. This applies equally to the likelihood that someone will learn any given piece of information, not only the pieces that are learned from a person. Distance has an impact even at the level of feet or inches, if that is the distance that impedes the passage of information. This fact was drilled repeatedly and forcefully home in a vast amount of very famous work. Robert Putnam describes the loss of community in the United States due to people living farther apart. The celebrated author Jane Jacobs relates the vibrancy of entire neighborhoods to factors of its design that impede or abet the exchange of information between its residents. While not written from that perspective, her magnum opus on urban planning can be entirely understood, and again, now better quantified, and acted on, in terms of information. UCLA professor of anthropology Jared Diamond documents the spread of technologies (i.e. ideas i.e. information) being dictated by geographic features, and Columbia professor of economics Jeffrey Sachs points out that a river or ocean border is vital to economic success for a country because of the importance of shipping to travel and trade, which is to say exchanging ideas, that come with them.
The most powerful method of searching for information is a large group of people who know large amounts of different kinds of information, who know one another well, and who are close together. The most powerful method of learning information is to be part of that network. This is buried deep or displayed prominently in every example I have given, and millions more that I have not.
And once more- together, all of the information that is relevant to a problem, and the way in which someone wants it solved, allows any problem to be either solved or resolved.
Sophology
Sophology was developed first with the purpose of solving the most serious problems we face, those that put the greatest numbers of human lives and greatest amount of human happiness at risk. That is what I believe it has the greatest potential for, and it is what I most hope it will be put towards. While it has the full potential to be used by individuals as a philosophy, the complexity of so many problems means that the formal, thorough, and systematic application of sophology as its own academic discipline will be essential. The results of that study will be extraordinarily fruitful.
Possibilities for research in this field have become historically unparalleled with the recent advent of digital mapping and easily portable computers with spatial location capabilities. At the core of sophology lies the idea that of the information we can receive, we get much of the most influential from other people. These technologies allow the questions “who's talking,” “where,” “about what,” and “for how long” to be measured with incredible precision and ease for enormous numbers of individuals at once.
It MUST be remembered however, in the course of these studies, the depth of the potential for abuse of this information. Information is what people use to act. If you control it, you control their actions. The reason I believe that this study will still do far more good than harm is that I believe ignorance is a greater factor than malevolence in a large number of truly horrific situations. If we use these tools to highlight for ourselves what and who we are ignoring, whether we think we are or not, our inclination will be to pay more attention- not less. Information is not necessarily dangerous by itself. It can be extremely dangerous when some people have it, and others do not. Even with this belief, extreme care must be taken when pursuing these goals, and in particular, the content of conversations is not the desired answer to the question "about what." This is not meant to be surveillance. This question can be answered in extremely vague terms, even including only whether or not the people in the conversation themselves were the subject of their discussion, and still tell allow us to infer deeply important things, without putting anyone under unnecessary scrutiny.
It is so important to study information comprehensively at the level of the individual because the individual is the fundamental unit of society. That is thus where we should study it if, in our studies, we want to see reality reflected most clearly. It is time to make as much of a science as can be made out of this singularly important phenomenon.
To this end, a piece of software is in the final stages of being written for the iPhone platform that records the answers to these questions. It is intended to be used in conjunction with geographic information systems (GIS) and and graph analysis software such as NetworkX, to understand interaction patterns in time and space.
In addition to the findings that will come from new scholarship, the existing number of disciplines that have done work relevant to sophology, and their accompanying body of knowledge that can be drawn on to inform and supplement them, is enormous. However I will maintain the importance of devoting an entire discipline to sophology, rather than dividing the relevant studies between the many places they are now. To consider them together with the framework I have endeavored to develop will allow a conceptual unification of the work that has been done, with all of the benefits that come from such a unification. Not only could this extraordinary work now be looked at in a way that would allow the once separate studies to inform one another, it would allow many important, and very different questions, to be asked of the new field directly.
A full length work that is in the final stages of editing is still necessary for a thorough treatment of both the theory and evidence I have so far described only briefly, but this is a good place to start.
Possibilities for research in this field have become historically unparalleled with the recent advent of digital mapping and easily portable computers with spatial location capabilities. At the core of sophology lies the idea that of the information we can receive, we get much of the most influential from other people. These technologies allow the questions “who's talking,” “where,” “about what,” and “for how long” to be measured with incredible precision and ease for enormous numbers of individuals at once.
It MUST be remembered however, in the course of these studies, the depth of the potential for abuse of this information. Information is what people use to act. If you control it, you control their actions. The reason I believe that this study will still do far more good than harm is that I believe ignorance is a greater factor than malevolence in a large number of truly horrific situations. If we use these tools to highlight for ourselves what and who we are ignoring, whether we think we are or not, our inclination will be to pay more attention- not less. Information is not necessarily dangerous by itself. It can be extremely dangerous when some people have it, and others do not. Even with this belief, extreme care must be taken when pursuing these goals, and in particular, the content of conversations is not the desired answer to the question "about what." This is not meant to be surveillance. This question can be answered in extremely vague terms, even including only whether or not the people in the conversation themselves were the subject of their discussion, and still tell allow us to infer deeply important things, without putting anyone under unnecessary scrutiny.
It is so important to study information comprehensively at the level of the individual because the individual is the fundamental unit of society. That is thus where we should study it if, in our studies, we want to see reality reflected most clearly. It is time to make as much of a science as can be made out of this singularly important phenomenon.
To this end, a piece of software is in the final stages of being written for the iPhone platform that records the answers to these questions. It is intended to be used in conjunction with geographic information systems (GIS) and and graph analysis software such as NetworkX, to understand interaction patterns in time and space.
In addition to the findings that will come from new scholarship, the existing number of disciplines that have done work relevant to sophology, and their accompanying body of knowledge that can be drawn on to inform and supplement them, is enormous. However I will maintain the importance of devoting an entire discipline to sophology, rather than dividing the relevant studies between the many places they are now. To consider them together with the framework I have endeavored to develop will allow a conceptual unification of the work that has been done, with all of the benefits that come from such a unification. Not only could this extraordinary work now be looked at in a way that would allow the once separate studies to inform one another, it would allow many important, and very different questions, to be asked of the new field directly.
A full length work that is in the final stages of editing is still necessary for a thorough treatment of both the theory and evidence I have so far described only briefly, but this is a good place to start.
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