18 ms·

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)

434 points by rzk 4y ago

eruci 4y ago
Wiser words have rarely been spoken.
easybake 4y ago
> The drop in quality and rise in quantity of papers published makes keeping up with the scientific literature both expensive and inefficient in terms of time and energy, which slows down acquisition of knowledge and leaves less time for reflection and gaining experiences that are prerequisites for wisdom. So what incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to aspire to be wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for wisdom? In Chinese thought wisdom is perceived as expertise in the art of living, the ability to grasp what is happening, and to adjust to the imminent future (Simandan, 2018). All of these attributes seem to be advantageous to a career based on solving problems but you need the sagacity to realise that the rewards are indirect and often intangible.
ngoilapites 4y ago
In any case we've been always starving for insights
- fedeb95 4y ago
  that's true, but makes you wonder how much having more information helps in gaining insight. I think many hold this as a fact that's always true
  - ngoilapites 4y ago
    The quality of the sources, based on your experience with them, might be the point?
graycat 4y ago
Ah, to heck with wisdom!! We are drowning in data while starving for information!!
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I think you’re getting downvotes for the phrasing, but this is an insightful point: We have signal; which only becomes information when you successfully decode it. Which raises questions: eg, would we be better off sampling less and analyzing more — to extract a better portion of information from the already captured signal? But the confusion itself also points to a lack of wisdom — lots to think about.
  - fedeb95 4y ago
    there's also a lot of noise
    - pixl97 4y ago
      If you look at the system as a whole, at least when it comes to search engines, you would even say it demands noise. If there were no potential for monetary gains in SEO spam sites then the amount of noise groups like Google would have to filter would drop dramatically.
wellbehaved 4y ago
Wisdom has never been popular, the dynamics that led to the death of Socrates have continued from his day to our own.
- wellbehaved 4y ago
  Ergo the shadowban.
  - WJW 4y ago
    Some people get shadowbanned because they are right but too obnoxious, some people because they are too obnoxious and not even right. The second group tends to think they are in the first group.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    People who are shadowbanned don't want to hear it, but they almost always are banned for being jerks, trolls, and/or propagandists. It's not because they said "the truth" and nobody wanted to hear it; it's because nobody wanted to hear them because of the way they're acting. But of course they all think that they're martyrs for speaking the truth.
- mberning 4y ago
  I find it interesting that many different philosophical traditions all seem to discover an ascetic ideal in one way or another. Maybe "ideal" is not the right word. I think if you really examine your own life and existence one would have to admit that they would be much better off if they could learn to be happy with an sparse lifestyle. But as you point out, this is not a very popular proposition either.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  I was going to mention this exact thing. I will add not only do humans not want wisdom, but they also do not like to: learn from history (or even study it) learn from elders (or even be around them) read books etc I do realize that HN is subset of the population who do enjoy much of these things, but HN self-selects by nature of content.
theFletch 4y ago
A lot of stats or insights I see for things I often wonder how important they really are. Are they all really moving the needle?
- danuker 4y ago
  Reaching mass understanding? Innumeracy is everywhere I look. Stats are not moving the needle. On the other hand, you can use stats for personal gain. For instance, prediction markets. That might have an impact.
- DontchaKnowit 4y ago
  What drives me nuts about the usage of statistics in common discourse is that it is used prescriptively instead of descriptively. E.g. lets say 50% of gun owners accidentally shoot themselves. Now lets say Im talking to someone about how I want to buy a gun for home defense. They tell me "well 50% of gun owners accidentally shoot themselves, so you're safer if you dont have a gun" This is a gross misunderstanding if statistics. There is no way whatsoever to take the observed general trend, and apply it to a future possibioity in a single instance. What this interpretation misses is that there are variables well within your control. A gun owner who follows all safety rules will virtually never shoot themselves accidentally. Turns out 50% of gun owners are stupid as hell, and you are in control of yiur own outcomes. I see this problem CONSTANTLY in debates online, on the news, etc. It is very frustrating and contributes greatly to propogating dumb ideas.
  - avasylev 4y ago
    There's a risk of considering oneself better than average and that aggregate statistics don't apply to you. Like most drivers consider them better drivers than average. I'd bet the same with gun owners or any other activity. You don't think you can repeat the stupid mistakes, but we all can, you get stressed, sick, drunk,... life is long and full opportunities to make a mistake and get you back to the average case.
  - dreen 4y ago
    People ask each other where they're from, even though it gives you precisely zero amount of concrete information about a person, and then proceed to paint a picture going forward of that person based on assumptions about other people from there. They also do it to show interest, but it doesn't stop the painting.
kuroguro 4y ago
Marginally related (software?) rant: every time I want to learn how something specific works or I want to do something oddly specific I keep running in the same phenomenon. Google mostly returns vague abstract fluff and Stack Overflow tells me it really, really shouldn't be done because [reason]. It's like most of human written content caps out at about the level of description ChatGPT could deliver. Like there's a "knowledge event horizon". After that it always ends in hard to parse research papers, specifications, jumping around the source code of multiple libraries, debugging or reverse engineering. If I get lucky I might land on a 15 year old blog post that no man has seen since inception and it describes exactly what I wanted to know. And that's just software. Humans know exactly what parts went into it and how it works. Why must wisdom always be squeezed out of a rock? Why is only the fluff copied thousands of times making research harder each day? Why are there never indicators which way to dig for more details? T__T
- vinyl7 4y ago
  See also the Preventing the Collapse of Civilization talk by Jonathan Blow https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
- kovac 4y ago
  This is true and very unfortunate. My response to this is that when I want to learn anything in-depth, I use textbooks written by experts (e.g. professors, industry experts often from the past). It's hard to verify the expertise of blog authors and SO contributors unlike the authors, and blog posts can often be more about self-promotion than sharing deep insights. Sometimes I even write to these authors asking questions and they actually respond. To some extent, old internet is still alive and beautiful. It's just buried under a lot of noise.
  - jvans 4y ago
    Agree, textbooks are very underrated. The three blue one brown guy had one of the best tips for textbook selection that's been extremely helpful for me. He suggests that textbooks by single authors are the easiest to understand and in retrospect that matches with my experience. Multiple authors tend to refine the work to the point where it's 100% correct but explained in a way that only someone who is already an expert would understand.
thenerdhead 4y ago
> So what incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to aspire to be wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for wisdom? If everything comes down to incentives at the end of the day, it defeats any sense of morality. Perhaps that's the author's point here. The wise scientist/engineer does what they believe is right and the rest is history. In their attempt for doing what's right, they may accidentally create their best work. This overall reminds me of the search for the philosopher's stone. Where many ended up finding "philosophical gold(wisdom)" through the process of trying to find it and lead to their own individual magnum opus(great work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  "[Doing] what they believe is right" is one kind of incentive as not all incentives are monetary.
brink 4y ago
Thinking of wisdom like food is a good analogy. But there are no "hunger pangs" when we starve for wisdom and no direct dopamine release when we consume wisdom (without training). The reward of wisdom is a better and happier life, and may take weeks / months to reveal its benefits unlike the immediate pleasure of eating. So few people care about it because it takes vision and patience, and does not reveal itself immediately. More or less, people generally don't seek wisdom because they have poor vision for the future.
EGreg 4y ago
Just wait til GPT-3 bots produce the information
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  It's already underway. I run into a handful of sites every week now. Here's an example https://testfoodkitchen.com/what-is-a-top-round-roast-good-for/ https://testfoodkitchen.com/what-is-a-top-round-roast-good-f... - it seems plausible at first but the whole site is bizarre non-information.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I just want to wait when they amass more shares and likes than nytimes.com and collectively have 100x as much content as the current sites. They'll be the new Vice and Vox, but run entirely by AI https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ai-writing-is-here-and-its-worryingly-good-can-writers-and-academia-adapt/ar-AA13Sm6T https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ai-writing-is-here-and-...
  - CommieBobDole 4y ago
    From the site: "Is top round tender? Top round tender is a dish made from the top of a chicken’s head. The name comes from the fact that it is usually served at the peak of a chicken’s life, when its flesh is soft and pink. It is also called an “enormous” or “giardine” bird."
pdonis 4y ago
How is this article helping?
SPBS 4y ago
Google search results vs reddit threads
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  - Reddit threads get pulled in search results. - Reddit (and HN) are bad for "wisdom" because they are deliberately violating netiquette : once in a while, starting a new thread is wrong, and necroposting is right, and reddit prevents this by locking the thread.
crazygringo 4y ago
This article is totally ignoring the existence of academic "handbooks", which is where the wisdom lies. The whole idea is that individual papers are supposed to be exploratory, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. They're supposed to be a deluge of information. But then every decade or so a team of academics take it upon themselves to serve as editors to a handbook, which attempts to survey the field in terms of history, where the most value has been found so far (and what hasn't panned out), and current promising directions. Usually something like 20-50 chapters, each contributed by a different author. If you want to get into the wisdom of a field, the first thing you do is pull out the most recent 800-page handbook, read the first few chapters, and then drill down in your area of interest on the remaining part. To say there "are no prizes for wisdom" is absurd, when being selected to publish in a handbook (or being an editor) is prestigious, a mark that you've very much "made it" in the field. And of course there are plenty of other things that serve similar roles, such as literature review papers or similar. (In philosophy you can write a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, for instance.) If you aren't finding wisdom anywhere, it means you're simply not looking right. (And this isn't even to mention the fact that at some point somebody will popularize major progress in a field in a general-audience book, e.g. when Daniel Goleman wrote the book "Emotional Intelligence" or Stephen Hawking wrote "A Brief History of Time".)
- yamrzou 4y ago
  Maybe the article is highlighting the fact that scientific papers are more accessible to the general public than handbooks: You can easily find academic papers on Arxiv or Google Scholar, newspapers cite them, etc. While handbooks don't get much publicity.
- aiwv 4y ago
  Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I bring in.
photochemsyn 4y ago
A key part of a scientific-research education is learning how to filter the vast pool of literature and recover interesting and meaningful books, reviews and primary publications. It's not that trivial and is definitely a learned skill. Take the author's example, 'entropy'. Well, a one-word search is of course going to generate a massive pile of unsorted material. Internet Archive Scholar gives ~873,000 hits. Nice resource by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919823 If you knew nothing about entropy, but knew how to research, you might start with, "okay, when is the first appearance of the word 'entropy' in the literature" and you quickly discover it's Ludwig Boltzmann, 1872. Seems to have something to do with energy and information, and if we add in those terms, we're down to 284K hits. At this point, you might think "I bet someone has written a good book on this broad topic, maybe I shouldn't be looking at the primary literature until later." Notice that adding search terms narrows results? Keep doing that until you get a smaller number of hits. Now, you can grab the top dozen or so papers, and flip to the bibliography, and look to see if they all reference a landmark paper (this is related to searching by citation count). That's probably one you want to look at. With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines, the same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get better results. If you find a site with a good article, search that site for more. For example, this gives a lot of good results, for the role of entropy in machine learning concepts at least: 'site:towardsdatascience.com entropy Shannon' It's basically mining a haystack for needles. There are lots of techniques and strategies one can use to speed up the process.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines, the same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get better results. Not anymore. For a decade or so. Nowadays adding terms on general purpose internet search engines makes your results less focused, not more.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    I don't understand your comment. Something like: 'entropy shannon machine learning differential' will give more focused results than just 'entropy', certainly. I suppose there is some limit, is that what you mean? Even there, if I add 'literature review' the results get more focused.
brightball 4y ago
Information: Here are some facts Wisdom: What facts are missing and why do these facts matter?
clarge1120 4y ago
Drowning in information... Starving for wisdom... No matter what we come up with, we still have to seek wisdom from the wise. The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise. This gives me hope for humanity, and makes me love God more.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise. Remember when everyone was all about "the wisdom of crowds," when talking about social media? Yeah, that isn't something anyone says or thinks about now. How quickly did that meme die? And if AI is built from that data, by definition, it cannot be wise. As Solomon realized, wisdom is a very powerful virtue.
jmartrican 4y ago
After playing with chatGPT, I'm thinking one solution would be to have chatGPT be trained on all these scientific papers, and then we can just ask it any questions we may have. Obviously, any answers would be thoroughly vetted, but it may be able to drastically reduce the time from paper to wisdom.
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  Facebook tried this: https://galactica.org/ https://galactica.org/ Apparently they took it offline after seeing that it generates fake information: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adyw9/facebook-pulls-its-new-ai-for-science-because-its-broken-and-terrible https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adyw9/facebook-pulls-its-ne...
  - jmartrican 4y ago
    Very interesting. Did they use GPT-3?
civopsec 4y ago
The problem with this is that it’s hard to blog about it without making yourself a hypocrite.
dimal 4y ago
I’ve been thinking of creating a startup founded with the mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since there isn’t any other company doing this, I think it could really take off.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  ... How would you monetize it? Wikipedia is the closest thing to what you describe, and they have to petition for donations yearly.
LunarAurora 4y ago
IMO there is a missing middle level here : Between Information overload and (real) wisdom, there is synthesised knowledge. I don't believe AI will be "wise", But AI will definitely solve/assist synthesis, which is a big part of the issue discussed here. This of course does not solve any of the underlying causes (incentives structure..) or the "real" wisdom scarcity itself. How do you solve these in a society where quantity reigns supreme? You can't.
wnolens 4y ago
I don't know this article grasps what wisdom is, except for being able to shallowly write out a definition. There's tons of wisdom out there, but the more widely applicable it is (across different people/experiences), the more abstract or general it must to be and is thus not directly applicable. Specific wisdom (like for a highly constrained problem) is awesome, but you and your life are quite unique so this is very hard to find or probably doesn't exist. (Should I move away from home for a job? Well.. that depends on a thousand factors AND your unique self) Trying to optimize for wisdom is a little like optimizing for meaning, I think. Adopting it from others can be counter productive.
Xeoncross 4y ago
Knowledge is memorizing information Smart is being able to absorb and process things quickly Wisdom is knowing and picking the right course of action Understanding is knowing why, and what you're trading with this choice
kraig911 4y ago
Google any recipe you want to cook to experience this phenomenon.
stratigos 4y ago
One is only starving for wisdom if one refuses to eat! Kong Fu Zi say: "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." Drowning in information? Youre gaining wisdom the bitter wa ;-) Starving for wisdom? You may be thinking it is too easy to find wisdom. Try a bit harder. Wisdom might be right behind you when you are focused on how bad something in front of you may seem.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Intelligence is what you know, and wisdom is knowing how to use what you know. It's intelligent to know how to start a fire and wisdom to know where NOT to start one. We've got enough intelligence and enough wisdom. What we also have is collective, weaponized purposeful ignorance. People who know better but believe that by banding together with other people, they can force society to abandon both their intelligence and their wisdom.
mjreacher 4y ago
This issue has been talked about quite a bit over the past few years and to me it comes down fundamentally to incentives academics have to keep churning papers because that's what they get measured on. Of course the good thing about that is that you can change the incentives, just as how science funding changed significantly post WW2, but I'm afraid just like in many problematic areas of society nowadays there is a large group of people who benefit from this situation and are hence hostile to any sort of change. As such if change does come I think it will have to be top down rather than bottom up. For an interesting perspective the physicist Murray Gell-Mann spoke on similar issues in a 1997 interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM
dchuk 4y ago
When working with our enterprise customers (we make a platform for commercial vehicles), I frequently hear "we want as much data as you can give us" Which I tend to politely respond to with "You want insights. Unless you have a means to effectively extract those from all that data we can give you, that data is just a liability for you." Most data is noise. Finding the needle in the haystacks (or the patterns that are actually the needles more likely) is. where all the value is.
fleddr 4y ago
The frustrating part is that excellent content, the type that is relevant, well researched, well written, that stands head and shoulders above anything else is out there. More than ever before. I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is so damn good. But I have to actively store them to notes or bookmarks, because you'll never find a single one in Google. Google has become completely broken for me. In general it returns low quality verbose content, which seems a variation of keyword spamming from 20 years ago. Gonna be great when those crappy pages can be generated with AI. Google promotes stale content that is outdated or simply incorrect over anything else. And not only that, this effect strengthens over time. Google increasingly dismisses your input. You type a few words and it simply drops a few. Google has no understanding of meaning. You'll type "red flower thailand" and it'll just include flowers from any other random country, including those not even red. Google indexes everything and still can't figure out an original source. It'll show you spammy Pinterest garbage over the actual high quality source. So here we are. We do have a treasure chest of wisdom. But wisdom doesn't click ads so fuck us I guess. And if this isn't depressing enough, Google will continue to get away with it. Google only has to work for the masses posing normie surface level questions. It does that. It works.
- WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago
  Which newsletter are you subscribed to?
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Please see my answer above.
- lumenwrites 4y ago
  > I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is so damn good. Can you recommend your favorite ones? I'm particularly interested in startups/tech/programming/AI topics, but if you know some great examples from other fields, please share them as well!
amelius 4y ago
If only we could apply collaborative filtering to webpages.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
This situation was posited very early on in the age of the Internet. When everyone can publish, the noise floor rises above everything else. Back in the late 90's early naughts I believed that a new "job/career" would arise which was simply "curator of good stuff related to <x>". There was a lot of discussion about that, and for a long time Google's page rank was a kind of side effect. People would bookmark pages that they found reasonable and then Google would harvest that curation signal and rank that content more highly. In 2010 the book "Building Web Reputation Systems" was published by O'Reilly and a consensus built around "algorithmic curation" based on social cues (like "reputation"). This web site is sort of the epitome of that way of thinking. It's diverse members "vote" on topics and bring them to the front page (or keep them on the front page if they are put there for reasons). And it suffices for a lot of things, but it doesn't really do the job that an editorial staff could do. There is no way to distinguish between votes up or down because the reader agrees or disagrees with the politics of a piece, or the merits. Everyone has their own internal metric for what deserves "up" votes and what deserves "down" votes. The aggregate of those metrics may rarely converge on a consistent notion of "good" or "not good." At the same time, there is no straight forward way to monetize curation in order to pay the curator(s). Historically that has been via subscriptions to publications, but the resistance to paywalls and intrusive advertising (both mechanisms in use on today's network) have reduced the effectiveness of those techniques tremendously. Worse, the term "blog spam" is a pejorative for a reason, the blog owner, wrapping something they felt was worth reading in some prose and advertisements, do not compensate the author, and for many provide insufficient value to justify their attempts at monetization. Getting back to the article's main point however, for specialized topics, finding that curation is difficult, getting paid to facilitate it more so. And that means that quality information (wisdom) is drowned in the sea of noise (hot takes). My guess is that the Overton Window for paying for the work someone has done to distill the wisdom out of the signal has to move from the "radical" to the "acceptable" before we'll see much progress here.
posharma 4y ago
Don't we all know this? I would love to see solutions than a rewording of the problems that we all are already facing :-).
skedaddle 4y ago
Low hanging wisdom: break long text into paragraphs!
nonrandomstring 4y ago
"information" is far too generous. We are drowning in data. Data is many degrees lower in the food chain than "information" (what is informative), which is a world apart from "wisdom".
lolive 4y ago
For me, the job of curators is much more important now than ever. Sure algorithms make a wonderful job at profiling us and showing us as much content corresponding to our tastes as possible. But the question of discovering new things is still not solved by algorithms. Whereas a proper teacher, TV/radio show runner, or newspaper really can make a tremendous job at extending our perspectives. Second thing, the repetition process. It is very important that we are exposed to powerful ideas, concepts SEVERAL times. And this is something that is not yet properly established in our everyday life. Advertising as a repetition we suffer from should be superseded by proper repetition of more enpowering activities.
patientplatypus 4y ago
clouddrover 4y ago
"Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule." -- David Guaspari
yarg 4y ago
There's knowledge and then there's understanding. Understanding is far more useful, but (I think) less valued. Knowledge can be gamed, you can know things that simply aren't true. Understanding can be used not only to extract new knowlegde from a corpus of data, but also as a means to validate things presented as fact.
dayve 4y ago
I imagine that AI used to generate text (e.g ChatGPT) might exacerbate this problem. As the article points out — Some researchers might care more about ‘remixing’ published papers in order to drown the competition, get jobs & other forms of leverage. Generative text makes it much easier
airbreather 4y ago
I have been saying for a long time now that we live in a world awash with answers - I can get you an answer on almost anything. But the problem is, did you ask the right question (for it to be a useful answer)?

434 points by rzk 4y ago

Wiser words have rarely been spoken.

> The drop in quality and rise in quantity of papers published makes keeping up with the scientific literature both expensive and inefficient in terms of time and energy, which slows down acquisition of knowledge and leaves less time for reflection and gaining experiences that are prerequisites for wisdom. So what incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to aspire to be wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for wisdom? In Chinese thought wisdom is perceived as expertise in the art of living, the ability to grasp what is happening, and to adjust to the imminent future (Simandan, 2018). All of these attributes seem to be advantageous to a career based on solving problems but you need the sagacity to realise that the rewards are indirect and often intangible.

ngoilapites 4y ago

In any case we've been always starving for insights

fedeb95 4y ago
that's true, but makes you wonder how much having more information helps in gaining insight. I think many hold this as a fact that's always true
- ngoilapites 4y ago
  The quality of the sources, based on your experience with them, might be the point?

graycat 4y ago

Ah, to heck with wisdom!! We are drowning in data while starving for information!!

zmgsabst 4y ago
I think you’re getting downvotes for the phrasing, but this is an insightful point: We have signal; which only becomes information when you successfully decode it. Which raises questions: eg, would we be better off sampling less and analyzing more — to extract a better portion of information from the already captured signal? But the confusion itself also points to a lack of wisdom — lots to think about.
- fedeb95 4y ago
  there's also a lot of noise
  - pixl97 4y ago
    If you look at the system as a whole, at least when it comes to search engines, you would even say it demands noise. If there were no potential for monetary gains in SEO spam sites then the amount of noise groups like Google would have to filter would drop dramatically.

wellbehaved 4y ago

Wisdom has never been popular, the dynamics that led to the death of Socrates have continued from his day to our own.

wellbehaved 4y ago
Ergo the shadowban.
- WJW 4y ago
  Some people get shadowbanned because they are right but too obnoxious, some people because they are too obnoxious and not even right. The second group tends to think they are in the first group.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  People who are shadowbanned don't want to hear it, but they almost always are banned for being jerks, trolls, and/or propagandists. It's not because they said "the truth" and nobody wanted to hear it; it's because nobody wanted to hear them because of the way they're acting. But of course they all think that they're martyrs for speaking the truth.
mberning 4y ago
I find it interesting that many different philosophical traditions all seem to discover an ascetic ideal in one way or another. Maybe "ideal" is not the right word. I think if you really examine your own life and existence one would have to admit that they would be much better off if they could learn to be happy with an sparse lifestyle. But as you point out, this is not a very popular proposition either.
BirAdam 4y ago
I was going to mention this exact thing. I will add not only do humans not want wisdom, but they also do not like to: learn from history (or even study it) learn from elders (or even be around them) read books etc I do realize that HN is subset of the population who do enjoy much of these things, but HN self-selects by nature of content.

theFletch 4y ago

A lot of stats or insights I see for things I often wonder how important they really are. Are they all really moving the needle?

danuker 4y ago
Reaching mass understanding? Innumeracy is everywhere I look. Stats are not moving the needle. On the other hand, you can use stats for personal gain. For instance, prediction markets. That might have an impact.
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
What drives me nuts about the usage of statistics in common discourse is that it is used prescriptively instead of descriptively. E.g. lets say 50% of gun owners accidentally shoot themselves. Now lets say Im talking to someone about how I want to buy a gun for home defense. They tell me "well 50% of gun owners accidentally shoot themselves, so you're safer if you dont have a gun" This is a gross misunderstanding if statistics. There is no way whatsoever to take the observed general trend, and apply it to a future possibioity in a single instance. What this interpretation misses is that there are variables well within your control. A gun owner who follows all safety rules will virtually never shoot themselves accidentally. Turns out 50% of gun owners are stupid as hell, and you are in control of yiur own outcomes. I see this problem CONSTANTLY in debates online, on the news, etc. It is very frustrating and contributes greatly to propogating dumb ideas.
- avasylev 4y ago
  There's a risk of considering oneself better than average and that aggregate statistics don't apply to you. Like most drivers consider them better drivers than average. I'd bet the same with gun owners or any other activity. You don't think you can repeat the stupid mistakes, but we all can, you get stressed, sick, drunk,... life is long and full opportunities to make a mistake and get you back to the average case.
- dreen 4y ago
  People ask each other where they're from, even though it gives you precisely zero amount of concrete information about a person, and then proceed to paint a picture going forward of that person based on assumptions about other people from there. They also do it to show interest, but it doesn't stop the painting.

kuroguro 4y ago

Marginally related (software?) rant: every time I want to learn how something specific works or I want to do something oddly specific I keep running in the same phenomenon. Google mostly returns vague abstract fluff and Stack Overflow tells me it really, really shouldn't be done because [reason]. It's like most of human written content caps out at about the level of description ChatGPT could deliver. Like there's a "knowledge event horizon". After that it always ends in hard to parse research papers, specifications, jumping around the source code of multiple libraries, debugging or reverse engineering. If I get lucky I might land on a 15 year old blog post that no man has seen since inception and it describes exactly what I wanted to know. And that's just software. Humans know exactly what parts went into it and how it works. Why must wisdom always be squeezed out of a rock? Why is only the fluff copied thousands of times making research harder each day? Why are there never indicators which way to dig for more details? T__T

vinyl7 4y ago
See also the Preventing the Collapse of Civilization talk by Jonathan Blow https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
kovac 4y ago
This is true and very unfortunate. My response to this is that when I want to learn anything in-depth, I use textbooks written by experts (e.g. professors, industry experts often from the past). It's hard to verify the expertise of blog authors and SO contributors unlike the authors, and blog posts can often be more about self-promotion than sharing deep insights. Sometimes I even write to these authors asking questions and they actually respond. To some extent, old internet is still alive and beautiful. It's just buried under a lot of noise.
- jvans 4y ago
  Agree, textbooks are very underrated. The three blue one brown guy had one of the best tips for textbook selection that's been extremely helpful for me. He suggests that textbooks by single authors are the easiest to understand and in retrospect that matches with my experience. Multiple authors tend to refine the work to the point where it's 100% correct but explained in a way that only someone who is already an expert would understand.

thenerdhead 4y ago

> So what incentives are there for a scientist or engineer to aspire to be wise given the lack of prizes and career rewards for wisdom? If everything comes down to incentives at the end of the day, it defeats any sense of morality. Perhaps that's the author's point here. The wise scientist/engineer does what they believe is right and the rest is history. In their attempt for doing what's right, they may accidentally create their best work. This overall reminds me of the search for the philosopher's stone. Where many ended up finding "philosophical gold(wisdom)" through the process of trying to find it and lead to their own individual magnum opus(great work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece

warkdarrior 4y ago
"[Doing] what they believe is right" is one kind of incentive as not all incentives are monetary.

brink 4y ago

Thinking of wisdom like food is a good analogy. But there are no "hunger pangs" when we starve for wisdom and no direct dopamine release when we consume wisdom (without training). The reward of wisdom is a better and happier life, and may take weeks / months to reveal its benefits unlike the immediate pleasure of eating. So few people care about it because it takes vision and patience, and does not reveal itself immediately. More or less, people generally don't seek wisdom because they have poor vision for the future.

EGreg 4y ago

Just wait til GPT-3 bots produce the information

daniel_reetz 4y ago
It's already underway. I run into a handful of sites every week now. Here's an example https://testfoodkitchen.com/what-is-a-top-round-roast-good-for/ https://testfoodkitchen.com/what-is-a-top-round-roast-good-f... - it seems plausible at first but the whole site is bizarre non-information.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I just want to wait when they amass more shares and likes than nytimes.com and collectively have 100x as much content as the current sites. They'll be the new Vice and Vox, but run entirely by AI https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ai-writing-is-here-and-its-worryingly-good-can-writers-and-academia-adapt/ar-AA13Sm6T https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/ai-writing-is-here-and-...
- CommieBobDole 4y ago
  From the site: "Is top round tender? Top round tender is a dish made from the top of a chicken’s head. The name comes from the fact that it is usually served at the peak of a chicken’s life, when its flesh is soft and pink. It is also called an “enormous” or “giardine” bird."

pdonis 4y ago

How is this article helping?

SPBS 4y ago

Google search results vs reddit threads

BlueTemplar 4y ago
- Reddit threads get pulled in search results. - Reddit (and HN) are bad for "wisdom" because they are deliberately violating netiquette : once in a while, starting a new thread is wrong, and necroposting is right, and reddit prevents this by locking the thread.

crazygringo 4y ago

This article is totally ignoring the existence of academic "handbooks", which is where the wisdom lies. The whole idea is that individual papers are supposed to be exploratory, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. They're supposed to be a deluge of information. But then every decade or so a team of academics take it upon themselves to serve as editors to a handbook, which attempts to survey the field in terms of history, where the most value has been found so far (and what hasn't panned out), and current promising directions. Usually something like 20-50 chapters, each contributed by a different author. If you want to get into the wisdom of a field, the first thing you do is pull out the most recent 800-page handbook, read the first few chapters, and then drill down in your area of interest on the remaining part. To say there "are no prizes for wisdom" is absurd, when being selected to publish in a handbook (or being an editor) is prestigious, a mark that you've very much "made it" in the field. And of course there are plenty of other things that serve similar roles, such as literature review papers or similar. (In philosophy you can write a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, for instance.) If you aren't finding wisdom anywhere, it means you're simply not looking right. (And this isn't even to mention the fact that at some point somebody will popularize major progress in a field in a general-audience book, e.g. when Daniel Goleman wrote the book "Emotional Intelligence" or Stephen Hawking wrote "A Brief History of Time".)

yamrzou 4y ago
Maybe the article is highlighting the fact that scientific papers are more accessible to the general public than handbooks: You can easily find academic papers on Arxiv or Google Scholar, newspapers cite them, etc. While handbooks don't get much publicity.
aiwv 4y ago
Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I bring in.

photochemsyn 4y ago

A key part of a scientific-research education is learning how to filter the vast pool of literature and recover interesting and meaningful books, reviews and primary publications. It's not that trivial and is definitely a learned skill. Take the author's example, 'entropy'. Well, a one-word search is of course going to generate a massive pile of unsorted material. Internet Archive Scholar gives ~873,000 hits. Nice resource by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919823 If you knew nothing about entropy, but knew how to research, you might start with, "okay, when is the first appearance of the word 'entropy' in the literature" and you quickly discover it's Ludwig Boltzmann, 1872. Seems to have something to do with energy and information, and if we add in those terms, we're down to 284K hits. At this point, you might think "I bet someone has written a good book on this broad topic, maybe I shouldn't be looking at the primary literature until later." Notice that adding search terms narrows results? Keep doing that until you get a smaller number of hits. Now, you can grab the top dozen or so papers, and flip to the bibliography, and look to see if they all reference a landmark paper (this is related to searching by citation count). That's probably one you want to look at. With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines, the same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get better results. If you find a site with a good article, search that site for more. For example, this gives a lot of good results, for the role of entropy in machine learning concepts at least: 'site:towardsdatascience.com entropy Shannon' It's basically mining a haystack for needles. There are lots of techniques and strategies one can use to speed up the process.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> With non-research-literature-focused internet search engines, the same general rules apply. More search terms tends to get better results. Not anymore. For a decade or so. Nowadays adding terms on general purpose internet search engines makes your results less focused, not more.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I don't understand your comment. Something like: 'entropy shannon machine learning differential' will give more focused results than just 'entropy', certainly. I suppose there is some limit, is that what you mean? Even there, if I add 'literature review' the results get more focused.

brightball 4y ago

Information: Here are some facts Wisdom: What facts are missing and why do these facts matter?

clarge1120 4y ago

Drowning in information... Starving for wisdom... No matter what we come up with, we still have to seek wisdom from the wise. The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise. This gives me hope for humanity, and makes me love God more.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> The internet (AI powered or not) will never be wise. Remember when everyone was all about "the wisdom of crowds," when talking about social media? Yeah, that isn't something anyone says or thinks about now. How quickly did that meme die? And if AI is built from that data, by definition, it cannot be wise. As Solomon realized, wisdom is a very powerful virtue.

jmartrican 4y ago

After playing with chatGPT, I'm thinking one solution would be to have chatGPT be trained on all these scientific papers, and then we can just ask it any questions we may have. Obviously, any answers would be thoroughly vetted, but it may be able to drastically reduce the time from paper to wisdom.

warkdarrior 4y ago
Facebook tried this: https://galactica.org/ https://galactica.org/ Apparently they took it offline after seeing that it generates fake information: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adyw9/facebook-pulls-its-new-ai-for-science-because-its-broken-and-terrible https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adyw9/facebook-pulls-its-ne...
- jmartrican 4y ago
  Very interesting. Did they use GPT-3?

civopsec 4y ago

The problem with this is that it’s hard to blog about it without making yourself a hypocrite.

dimal 4y ago

I’ve been thinking of creating a startup founded with the mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since there isn’t any other company doing this, I think it could really take off.

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
... How would you monetize it? Wikipedia is the closest thing to what you describe, and they have to petition for donations yearly.

LunarAurora 4y ago

IMO there is a missing middle level here : Between Information overload and (real) wisdom, there is synthesised knowledge. I don't believe AI will be "wise", But AI will definitely solve/assist synthesis, which is a big part of the issue discussed here. This of course does not solve any of the underlying causes (incentives structure..) or the "real" wisdom scarcity itself. How do you solve these in a society where quantity reigns supreme? You can't.

wnolens 4y ago

I don't know this article grasps what wisdom is, except for being able to shallowly write out a definition. There's tons of wisdom out there, but the more widely applicable it is (across different people/experiences), the more abstract or general it must to be and is thus not directly applicable. Specific wisdom (like for a highly constrained problem) is awesome, but you and your life are quite unique so this is very hard to find or probably doesn't exist. (Should I move away from home for a job? Well.. that depends on a thousand factors AND your unique self) Trying to optimize for wisdom is a little like optimizing for meaning, I think. Adopting it from others can be counter productive.

Xeoncross 4y ago

Knowledge is memorizing information Smart is being able to absorb and process things quickly Wisdom is knowing and picking the right course of action Understanding is knowing why, and what you're trading with this choice

kraig911 4y ago

Google any recipe you want to cook to experience this phenomenon.

stratigos 4y ago

One is only starving for wisdom if one refuses to eat! Kong Fu Zi say: "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." Drowning in information? Youre gaining wisdom the bitter wa ;-) Starving for wisdom? You may be thinking it is too easy to find wisdom. Try a bit harder. Wisdom might be right behind you when you are focused on how bad something in front of you may seem.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Intelligence is what you know, and wisdom is knowing how to use what you know. It's intelligent to know how to start a fire and wisdom to know where NOT to start one. We've got enough intelligence and enough wisdom. What we also have is collective, weaponized purposeful ignorance. People who know better but believe that by banding together with other people, they can force society to abandon both their intelligence and their wisdom.

mjreacher 4y ago

This issue has been talked about quite a bit over the past few years and to me it comes down fundamentally to incentives academics have to keep churning papers because that's what they get measured on. Of course the good thing about that is that you can change the incentives, just as how science funding changed significantly post WW2, but I'm afraid just like in many problematic areas of society nowadays there is a large group of people who benefit from this situation and are hence hostile to any sort of change. As such if change does come I think it will have to be top down rather than bottom up. For an interesting perspective the physicist Murray Gell-Mann spoke on similar issues in a 1997 interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM

dchuk 4y ago

When working with our enterprise customers (we make a platform for commercial vehicles), I frequently hear "we want as much data as you can give us" Which I tend to politely respond to with "You want insights. Unless you have a means to effectively extract those from all that data we can give you, that data is just a liability for you." Most data is noise. Finding the needle in the haystacks (or the patterns that are actually the needles more likely) is. where all the value is.

fleddr 4y ago

The frustrating part is that excellent content, the type that is relevant, well researched, well written, that stands head and shoulders above anything else is out there. More than ever before. I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is so damn good. But I have to actively store them to notes or bookmarks, because you'll never find a single one in Google. Google has become completely broken for me. In general it returns low quality verbose content, which seems a variation of keyword spamming from 20 years ago. Gonna be great when those crappy pages can be generated with AI. Google promotes stale content that is outdated or simply incorrect over anything else. And not only that, this effect strengthens over time. Google increasingly dismisses your input. You type a few words and it simply drops a few. Google has no understanding of meaning. You'll type "red flower thailand" and it'll just include flowers from any other random country, including those not even red. Google indexes everything and still can't figure out an original source. It'll show you spammy Pinterest garbage over the actual high quality source. So here we are. We do have a treasure chest of wisdom. But wisdom doesn't click ads so fuck us I guess. And if this isn't depressing enough, Google will continue to get away with it. Google only has to work for the masses posing normie surface level questions. It does that. It works.

WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago
Which newsletter are you subscribed to?
- fleddr 4y ago
  Please see my answer above.
lumenwrites 4y ago
> I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is so damn good. Can you recommend your favorite ones? I'm particularly interested in startups/tech/programming/AI topics, but if you know some great examples from other fields, please share them as well!

amelius 4y ago

If only we could apply collaborative filtering to webpages.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

This situation was posited very early on in the age of the Internet. When everyone can publish, the noise floor rises above everything else. Back in the late 90's early naughts I believed that a new "job/career" would arise which was simply "curator of good stuff related to <x>". There was a lot of discussion about that, and for a long time Google's page rank was a kind of side effect. People would bookmark pages that they found reasonable and then Google would harvest that curation signal and rank that content more highly. In 2010 the book "Building Web Reputation Systems" was published by O'Reilly and a consensus built around "algorithmic curation" based on social cues (like "reputation"). This web site is sort of the epitome of that way of thinking. It's diverse members "vote" on topics and bring them to the front page (or keep them on the front page if they are put there for reasons). And it suffices for a lot of things, but it doesn't really do the job that an editorial staff could do. There is no way to distinguish between votes up or down because the reader agrees or disagrees with the politics of a piece, or the merits. Everyone has their own internal metric for what deserves "up" votes and what deserves "down" votes. The aggregate of those metrics may rarely converge on a consistent notion of "good" or "not good." At the same time, there is no straight forward way to monetize curation in order to pay the curator(s). Historically that has been via subscriptions to publications, but the resistance to paywalls and intrusive advertising (both mechanisms in use on today's network) have reduced the effectiveness of those techniques tremendously. Worse, the term "blog spam" is a pejorative for a reason, the blog owner, wrapping something they felt was worth reading in some prose and advertisements, do not compensate the author, and for many provide insufficient value to justify their attempts at monetization. Getting back to the article's main point however, for specialized topics, finding that curation is difficult, getting paid to facilitate it more so. And that means that quality information (wisdom) is drowned in the sea of noise (hot takes). My guess is that the Overton Window for paying for the work someone has done to distill the wisdom out of the signal has to move from the "radical" to the "acceptable" before we'll see much progress here.

posharma 4y ago

Don't we all know this? I would love to see solutions than a rewording of the problems that we all are already facing :-).

skedaddle 4y ago

Low hanging wisdom: break long text into paragraphs!

nonrandomstring 4y ago

"information" is far too generous. We are drowning in data. Data is many degrees lower in the food chain than "information" (what is informative), which is a world apart from "wisdom".

lolive 4y ago

For me, the job of curators is much more important now than ever. Sure algorithms make a wonderful job at profiling us and showing us as much content corresponding to our tastes as possible. But the question of discovering new things is still not solved by algorithms. Whereas a proper teacher, TV/radio show runner, or newspaper really can make a tremendous job at extending our perspectives. Second thing, the repetition process. It is very important that we are exposed to powerful ideas, concepts SEVERAL times. And this is something that is not yet properly established in our everyday life. Advertising as a repetition we suffer from should be superseded by proper repetition of more enpowering activities.

patientplatypus 4y ago

clouddrover 4y ago

"Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule." -- David Guaspari

yarg 4y ago

There's knowledge and then there's understanding. Understanding is far more useful, but (I think) less valued. Knowledge can be gamed, you can know things that simply aren't true. Understanding can be used not only to extract new knowlegde from a corpus of data, but also as a means to validate things presented as fact.

dayve 4y ago

I imagine that AI used to generate text (e.g ChatGPT) might exacerbate this problem. As the article points out — Some researchers might care more about ‘remixing’ published papers in order to drown the competition, get jobs & other forms of leverage. Generative text makes it much easier

airbreather 4y ago

I have been saying for a long time now that we live in a world awash with answers - I can get you an answer on almost anything. But the problem is, did you ask the right question (for it to be a useful answer)?