How much of available information is true, and good?
Historical Crisis, a science fiction novelette by Donald Kingsbury, is about how psycho-historian “Pscholars” rule worlds far into the future. Pscholars have the corner on statistical esoterica of probable behaviors and historical outcomes. They are forbidden to publish their findings as knowledge of behavioral probabilities will alter outcomes, but control others by secret understandings. They foster sociopolitical systems that can last thousands of years punctuated by revolutionary periods of rapid change. Having recently visited Yosemite, I favor Kingsbury’s metaphor of pscholars as fireman quelling little burns. The resulting buildup of tinder will explode into revolutionary conflagration bringing down civilizations. History thus conceived is a series of fits and starts, long periods of stability (“stasis”) alternating with revolutionary discord, that I suppose to derive from biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium.
We in the real world live in the age where knowledge is available to everyone. So-called democratization of knowledge is the common apperception. Google is its archetype whose mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The known is there for all to see in Google Earth and Sky a most beautiful feast for the eye. I think of the long history of ignorance, then imagine the world’s books in every language, all art and music available to everyone in their devices. Here I will argue that this particular Googley view is naive. The opposite of knowledge for all is the gated community, which I couldn’t help but notice flying from Pennsylvania to Florida. In Pennsylvania you are free to travel almost anywhere. Much of Florida is closed to outsiders, especially near the water. Florida is an archetype opposite of Google.
Everybody needs some privacy, and with it concealment, cousin to deception. Most of our thoughts are private and have to be. All of us would be in trouble if our neighbors knew one tenth of our thoughts. We all accept that some information must remain private. A deep view of history is that the vast mass of humankind either lived in darkness and ignorance, or was deliberately deceived. How many armies of young men marched into death for the sinister benefit of others? It’s easy to find examples in Soviet Russia, make that all Russian history over the last thousand years, considering the conspiracy or tzars and the Orthodox church. Lenin/ Stalin were simply extensions in history of dominance of a privileged few over everybody else. Under the Communists and even today, Putin’s Russia strives to maintain tsarist hegemony over adjacent territories, Ukraine, Poland and other remains of the former Warsaw Pact. While you’re at it put North Korea its dynasty of Kims, in that same category. Amazingly this was not obvious to many intellectuals before the collapse of many regimes, but there is wide agreement of the obvious, that communism is pseudo-egalitarian all about domination and slavery. All political systems function to some extent by monopolizing knowledge. George Orwell long ago observed knowledge monopolists tend to call things by their opposites, as in “Peoole’s Republic” shorthand for the opposite, that Orwell called double speak. Autocrats either encourage illiteracy by failing to educate at all, as the tsars did, where just about everyone was illiterate, or, even better, misinforming or brainwashing. You can have a nominally reading literate proletariat closed off to the knowledge of the outside world, a staple in formerly communist regimes like Rumania under Ceasescu of the past, and North Korea today, but common to all dictatorships. Everyone in these societies must at least feign belief in propaganda, the big lie and fealty to the great leader. Disagreement is met by imprisonment, ostracism and death. In large swaths of our planet today we have nice synergy of both high levels of illiteracy, particularly among women, plus a monopoly in the name of religion, on thought to exclusion of everything else.
These extreme examples are the rule even today, begging the question about what proportion of knowledge is privatized. How much of what we know is available to all? Some people rail at natural proteins and DNA, invented and discovered, that are inaccessible by virtue of copyright. The benefit of copyrighting proteins and DNA, even if they occur naturally, is that people won’t be incented to discover things if they are prevented from making a financial killing before they are released for others to benefit from. One example is the BRCA gene test that could only be performed at high price by proprietary company. Does a gene belong to ovarian cancer victims who harbor it, or persons who first discover it? When should knowledge be available for popular consumption? Proprietary drugs, many of them natural products, applied in specific ways, fall into the same category. Copyright is similar to The old Napster v. the music industry and countless other examples, US-China relations raise considerations of copyright. Once an effective treatment is discovered, it is ordinarily easily produced, it isn’t thought to be fair to let just anybody profit from it so this information is protected.
When you delve into it you can find subsets of knowledge throughout history that for many reasons need to be quarantined . This problem of the closing of knowledge to all but the very few, is, if anything, much magnified today because of the veritable explosion of knowledge in the 21st century. When you consider it, the majority of relevant up to date information is proprietary. I will enumerate examples. You will undoubtedly know many more. Knowledge is far less available than we are lead to believe.
We sit with our devices consuming information. I saw a nice dichotomy In the Wall Street Journal in a review by Ian Leslie of Curious a book by Philip Delves Boughton. The majority of content consumers are diversive, bouncing from one novel thing to another, paying little mind. Flipping through the channels you may come to a TV show called Extra which I have trouble watching for even a few minutes, Different stories flash on and just as I might latch onto something, they are onto something else. That sort of thing almost drives me crazy, and I can’t abide it for long. The second type of focus is epistemic, the desire to want to know one thing from top to bottom. All of us are a mix, but I’d say I am most satisfied in the second category. Many have made the observation that knowing one thing generalizes to other bodies of knowledge, like Whitman’s observation of a blade of grass.
Some topics are so extensively covered as to become a vague cloud. One iconic example is the OJ Simpson trial. So many participants had axes to grind, each competing for riches and 5 minutes of fame, on TV or the press, that we can never know what actually happened. OK we all had our surmises. So there is one example where everyone involved seemed to be out there with a megaphone. People say what furthers their own interests. Most everyone who followed the situation at the time didn’t realize that none if mattered at all. I get to thinking the public must be duped deliberately into following items of no consequence as a sleight of hand to draw attention from what is important. This is not unusual at all. Every day in following popular media, we witness extensive paroxysms of coverage of similar issues emanating from independent media outlets, such as to raise the question of who wanted it publicized? The answer is often a government body. Governments often divert attention to an invented enemy to divert wrath from the real villains, namely them. Global warming has been exhaustively covered shedding more heat than light. Everything you read expresses strong opinions and the issue is hopelessly clouded. Is human induced climate change an important issue or are we being distracted from something else? I have found anything that I have read, unconvincing. I have personally seen a good number of glaciers around the world and they are all shrinking, something that I find more convincing than anything I have read. Of course glaciation and world temperatures cycled before the industrial revolution so that does not prove human causation. Nor has anyone suggested an effective means to reverse climate change. With anything that vast, it is easy to think of both good and bad consequences. But the point is there is so much opinion people get confused.
During the dark ages the average person was expected to follow the opinions of the clergy. Even if you could read, you were forbidden to read and interpret the Bible for yourself. You had to agree with the dictates of the infallible Holy Father. It’s funny to consider how seriously everyone felt it was for only an elite few to interpret illogic and superstition for the consumption of the rest of lowly humanity. No doubt people in the know in those times were well aware of the hypocrisy of the whole system and able to capitalize on it.
That changed in the reformation, at least for some, when Bibles were translated and printed in spoken languages rather than Latin. More widespread knowledge and appreciation of holy books brought about a healthy distrust for authority and religious doctrine. Incidentally, we moderns take for granted writing and speaking the same language, but that was not the case until recently. Written and spoken languages were often distinct. This dichotomy of written and spoken words aided persons who sought to dominate thought and behavior. In previous posts I wrote of Dante’s “Comedy.” Dante heroically produced his masterpiece for the average literate person to read, in Italian, not Latin. In doing so he helped codify a spoken Italian language. Ancients around the Levant spoke Canaanite or Aramaic, starting to be written phonetically, first on the basis of an originally pictographic alphabet, probably popularized by the Phoenicians, only around 2800-3000 years ago. The Israelites spoke Aramaic variant of Canaanite tongues, but their ancient texts were written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Hebrew maintained itself primarily in its written only form, not spoken form, until the late 19th century. But Hebrew script transliterated languages actually spoken up until most of the twentieth century in Yiddish and Ladino. The Hebrew Bible existed in some diffuse form, largely memorized and recited probably with the aid of written mnemonics, before the books were officially codified in script. This required feats of memory that we moderns lack. Religious books not explicitly written were a form of esoterica, passed down in secret society to young initiates. In that sense the Bible and other texts share ancient lineage with the the Iliad before Homer, the Upanishads and countless other revered texts before they were set down. Hindi is widely spoken today but the written language is Sanskrit rarely spoken today. Latin of course ceases to be spoken and has been replaced locally by Romance languages, Rumanian, French, Italian, Spanish. In some cases the spoken form of language is written in script brought in by a foreigners as modern phonetic Mandarin is today. Urdu and Farsi are written in Arabic letters. There could be a different crowd speaking a language from the elite group reading it. Often the speakers were conquered by the readers. Since cultural knowledge increases and accumulates in written form, some minority of literate persons is bound to dominate illiterates.
The pivotal events of history revolve about the known: techniques of storing, modifying, and making content available. For those ethnic groups that never learned to write, we have such limited historical data as to refer to them as pre-historic. To review these pivotal events, they are the invention of wedge or cuneiform scripts of clay or stone such as in Mesopotamia, Pictographs such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs and cave art might be included here, though this was invented 10s of thousands of years before pictographs. Later came the real tour de force, phonetic writing of alphabets with as little as 22 characters to cover the gamut of verbal expression. Next came technologies of reproduction of verbal ideas, scribal scrolls, papyrus, and manuscripts then the printing press which came after Dante by the way. What survives today from the era before the printing press, must be the smallest proportion of what was written down and rarely reproduced in those days. The scribes reproduced what they were told to write. It seems long before there was actual writing there was never a shortage of content providers. Still later humankind benefitted from the storage and wide distribution of vast volumes of text and images that we take for granted today.
As verbal knowledge is, for us, so easy to generate and disseminate, it is available cheaply and in larger quantities than ever before, but for whose benefit? I love those folks who right away have to tell you that they are news junkies, consumers of information. These are mostly browsers, diversives by the parlance above, And then we have the patrons of the arts, and all the youngsters who cannot go into a supermarket for 5 minutes not listening to something. Having few ideas of their own, they are giving over to others direct access to their sensory organs, beating a direct path to their brains. It seems obvious to me that the huge quantity of opinion, literature, music, art, culture, benefits mostly the generators and purveyors of content. OK some information is vital and may be lifesaving, particularly in my own field of medicine, but those who generate and purvey information are gaining far more than recipients or consumers. Content providers are the profiteers.
And consumers pay for this! Some desired content can be had for nothing but the time spent in watching advertisement, now specially geared to the observer, that pays for it. Whatever form content takes, vast amounts are ignored and for good reason The content we want resonates, strikes some chord of recognition or capitalizes on emotional vulnerabilities. Content is generated by providers wishing to improve their own image or generate followers. They crave fame or financial power. Recipients and consumers have something to gain, not all that much, that is unless your aim is truly to learn and know and generate more knowledge. It is human to strive to be in an in-group. Should you like the same performer, tens of thousands at a time may gather at a venue, becoming one with the crowd. For those who seek to experience and know more books and literature and music and pictures can take them to inaccessible places particularly if physically disabled. Yet too much of our information is doctored and homogenized. It is not possible to determine what is true and good.
But as a content provider you have an opportunity to misinform, not only with political propaganda, but if your ideas resonate, untold profits await. An immense news media follows the stock market. If you could just figure out how to forecast rises and falls in the Market you’d be rich. Of course only few persons even know about or have access to advanced techniques such as trading options, and derivatives, multipliers of financial gains. If you invest in stocks at all, you want to be informed and follow the latest news. It took me a long time to get it through my thick skull, not being a professional investor, that nearly everything we hear and read about the Market is not news but noise. Experts blaring about market moves, or yelling over our television monitors aren’t leading indicators but trailing indicators, even if honest and above-board. If the market is going up they report it. That is calculated to make you optimistic. They tell you to buy most of the time. If stocks decline they will despiritedly tell you to sell. You might think of doing the opposite of what they say, but the truth is, no one can predict the market. The best experts will register slightly less losses than gains on a statistical basis with lots of assets over long stretches of time, than the rest of us. Of course, there are those who have been extensively reported on and studied in the past, who seek to manipulate markets by spreading rumors and innuendos, some controlling large blocks of the herd of opinion and creating waves of buying and selling for their own benefit, but surely not for yours. George Soros, the brilliant financier who has made billions on currency fluctuations and other investments, has famously predicted 2 financial cataclysms and broadcast these predictions to the general public in his books. These collapses curiously failed to occur, and I read where Soros talked about the boy who cried wolf twice and finally got it right the third time, only nobody believed him. I don’t know if a single famous person might be able to cause a rise of fall in the market with his predictions, or option buying but have heard of how even our senators capitalize on private information before the rest of us. These observations on the Market definitely generalize to the news as well. News is noise for the most part, and overall is not worth knowing or opinionating about. Someone seeking to inform or influence you is doing so not on your behalf, but for his own gain.
Not to minimize this, there are some organizations which persist over time by providing quality information obtained at great expense and risk. Like everyone I have my own sources that I feel I can trust. But you can’t rely on body language or hunches only a track record. He who is most emotional may cry or raise his voice in an active lie. That is like the criminal who professes his innocence or the District Attorney who wishes to convict. It is true for most of the countries of the world who still have heads of state, not working for the benefit of their own people, but wishing to generate a following, similar to an artist or movie star. Nation ruling means generating profits and control. Matters of life and death, enter very little in equations of power and influence and appearance. So international intrigues are mostly about dissimulation, big and small lies. For the average person, and masses of persons, subject to grand swells of positive and negative emotions, it is impossible to discover what actually is true.
I have wondered for a long time if it is possible to come up with a Taxonomy of Content, Contentonomy, analogous to astronomy which is naming of the stars or bionomy naming living things. One of these days there may arise a Linnaeus of content but here I am most concerned not about simple types but mostly intent and levels of acceptance by the elite and by the masses of people who consume it. I can only include here a bare-bones starter edition, but it is worthwhile to classify and provide sub-subfolders in this endeavor so that whenever you are reading or experiencing any of it, it will increase consciousness of what category or place this information, who it comes from and what are the aims. It strikes me that as we consume content, for our own good, we should always be aware of the type of content we are consuming
In the library looking for something else, my attention was drawn to a large volume of so-called pseudepigrapha which consists of a host of books, widely copied, so thought to be important to scholars of the past, but not included in the Bible, that is rejected by higher authorities of the past, though thousands of years old, found in such places as the Dead Sea, Egypt, and north Africa, are widely available again today by the miracle of our ability to reproduce texts. There are Gnostic Gospels not included in the Christian Bible which have been popularized by Elaine Pagels and others in recent years. The learned authorities may have had good or bad reason to reject these manuscripts for inclusion into the Biblical canon, yet the acceptance of some accounts and the rejection of others has determined the course of monotheistic faiths and Eastern faiths as well. in ancient times religion was held to be the fount of true knowledge which was revealed rather than discovered as it is today in the age of science. In the ancient world revelation was the source of truth for the curious minds identical to our own today wondered about the very same things we take seriously. It is just that science for us has been found to be a much more efficient means of finding out what’s what.
Ideas that contradict those in power are heretical, widely available as never before in ancient texts that failed to be canonized. But heresy exists today in science to the same degree as with the canonization or acceptance of Biblical texts. Ancient and modern writings may be conveniently dichotomized as Canonical v. Heretical. Given the vigor with which heresies were suppressed, the supporters of religious doctrines being at the heads of armies raining down brutal slaughters and executions. firmly draws the line between these categories. Who controls what is canonical and who is heretical, is mostly determined by conflict. Among consumers of content, there are those whose tastes tend toward the heretical and those that go to the canonical. Today we commonly see young researchers who fail to get funding and publish, if their ideas depart from generally accepted doctrine, say an Alzheimer’s researcher who doesn’t believe beta amyloid causes the disease.
Related to this is the separation of the great division of what are secret things versus public knowledge. Many works are produced for secret societies and are only for the eyes of initiates. We have secret societies as the The Rose, Skull and Bones, Knights Templar, Freemasons, wiccans, magicians but today there is all manner of restricted knowledge as mentioned, corporate, copyrighted, diplomatic. Knowledge needs to be proprietary, but the great debate is how much of this knowledge should have restricted access. Occasionally someone comes along such as a spy or an Assange who seeks to convert private content into public content.
Still another line most difficult to draw is between honesty (quality) and deception. Deception is a basic part of our biological character. The very first step in the evolution of life was separation, the walling off of one organism from its fellows, the cell membrane. None of us would ever want those around us to have access to what is inside of our head. All human interactions and relationships vast mixtures of open honest expression and secret private thoughts. One of the most delicious and enjoyable parts of any relationship is being let in on proprietary secrets of an in group that are private and not available to outsiders.
It is near impossible to determine if most of information obtained in a person to person interaction is true, even more hopeless in evaluating publicly released data particularly coming from government and those persons maintaining control. Practical or empirical knowledge is all we had as biological organisms until very recently in evolution. Bio-entities survive on the basis of precise reaction to their real environments and slowly evolved practical solutions to their problems. As humans we have figured out how to derive theoretical rules based systems making it possible to function at some remove from experience and retreat into systems of imagination. In the end, most of the value is applying these constructs to a physical world, making it possible to accomplish great things, such as liberation from immediate concerns of food and shelter into the world of imagination and ideas.
Each of us has his or her own style of information consumption. More than for the content itself we all develop personal preferences for types of content. For example, for most of my life I have had a penchant for standard party line conventionally vetted information of the type deriving from respected sources such as university professors, medical journals such as the New Engl J of Medicine and specialty publications, tried and true news media such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, quality writing like the New Yorker Magazine, classics in literature, music, art, the tried and true. I’ve been downright dismissive of information from less trusted sources, having an especial dislike for demagogues with raised voices, preferring careful analytical approach to problems. In so doing I have antagonized not a few people who were true believers in what I found to be illogical, internally inconsistent, heterodox, or hypocritical. I am not so sure this is most productive approach to information. In the information world, as everywhere else, it is important to be able to feel with you gut at times and take a chance on the unconventional. Over the years I have seen the collapse of many opinions and facts thought to be true before new discoveries particularly in medicine. Many a highly touted medical therapy which seemed to be effective has been tested and found wanting during my long career, and lots of things thought to be true have been proven false. As I age I am less rigid therefore having learned from bitter experience and more apt to accept information from unconventional sources, but never uncritically. I have the largest store of data that I have ever had over my life inside my head and always intend to use it. I have come to the point of being more willing to trial ideas and therapies which in past years I would have felt duty bound to wait until studies proved definitive effect.
We function best being aware of the typology of content. Here is my first shot off the bow of an initial classification. I absolutely invite suggested modification. Any reasonable person will recognize certain types that tend to appeal to them, more or less.
Typology of Content:
Conventional, logical (science) v. Outrageous, revolutionary (art)
Deceptive v. Honest
Heredical v. Canonical
Secret v. Open
Authoritarian v. Free
Practical/Factual/Empirical v. Abstract/Mathematical