What, Why & How do we Know ?
One of my subjects recently has been “quality of explanation”, and alternatives to “psuedo-logical rationale” in misplaced circumstances. Interesting quote from Neil Kinnock today, commenting on the EU needing to start from scratch on its future strategy syaing it’s “got to do what it should have done for years past … go for a propaganda-free, explicit, factual strategy of tireless explanation.”
Transparent politics – now there’s an idea.
Open Sauce Live is a marketing blog to which Johnnie Moore contributes. Some interesting quotes on the front page …
Rupert Murdoch “What I worry about much more is News Corps ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native.”
The Economist “The less control a company has over its marketing message, the greater its credibility.” This latter is an example of the rational plans achieving the opposite of their intent. Which begs questions about whether any cynical deception / game theory strategies could ever counter it ?
Another quote, not really related to my agenda, just Joe Public amateur interest – “the challenge is not awareness, it’s engagement” Slick marketing may attract attention and entertain, and sow brand awareness and linked associations, but does it ever do anything at all to make a potential customer believe in (buy into) the product. The awareness is of the brand marketing values, not the product qualities, and as a human, you can tell the difference.
A review by Josh McHugh in Wired of a paper by Peter Lynds “Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Continuity”. [via Leon] Really is just a review. Wheeler gets a namecheck, Everett doesn’t, Hawking is dismissed as “off”, but David Deutsch is the “godfather”. Typical Wired racey overview. Ominous news is “Lynds has a literary agent, Heide Lange, who also represents Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. That’s the kind of firepower that practically assures publication – and serious marketing” … whatever the quailty … “Lynds can be Dan Brown to Hawking’s Umberto Eco”. In the review, the jury is out on the multiverse – but the conclusion is the current one – time doesn’t flow anywhere, it’s just a sequence (network?) of events.
(Review also mentions different cultural views of time flowing forwards or backwards, from or to the future, etc, treated at length by many writers, Pirsig included. Social anthropology or evolutionary psychology, again.)
A couple of interesting posts by Seb Fiedler quoting Vincent Kenny / George Kelly on the non-mechanistic aspects of human learning and knowledge (of each other).[Here] & [Here] & [Anticipating Autopoiesis].
I noticed earlier that BlogWalk 8 was downunder here in Oz. Seb posts some observations.
[Oh well]
Spotted somewhere earlier, and made a mental note but failed to link to [Piers at Monkey Magic – thanks] an article on the etymology of author and authority. Anyway noticed a post from Johnnie Moore remarking that we no longer look for any “authority” independent of our own view of a source.
I see he is facilitating / presenting at “Blogging – A Real Conversation” over at Knowledge for the Digital Economy.
Interesting given the earlier link today to XHTML2. Rivets linked without comment to this Schematron site – “A language for making assertions about patterns found in XML documents”. Another ISO proposed specification. Intriguing, patterns asserted, not pre-defined.
[Aaagghh – Zamora has scored, from an Etherington cross.]
Review in the Times by David Lodge of “What Good Are The Arts” by a certain John Carey, brought to notice by Platt over on MoQ-Discuss.
If the only tool you are prepared to use is Occam’s Razor (or Aristotle’s “analytic machete”), then you can hardly conlude anything other than art is worthless – fortunately the alternative conclusion is the knife of objective analysis is too blunt an instrument to explain anything of value anyway. (See previous blog on quality computer programming.)
[HT – Preston & West Ham remain goalless, North End getting on top after Hammers early domination.]
Just one on many interesting remarks in the blog from Grumpy Old Programmer [link from Leon by e-mail]. I can’t argue – everything is evolutionary psychlogy – is a recurring mantra.
Don’t know who GOP is / are, but I sympathise with the general thrust – objective quantification misses anything worthwhile by a mile – “vain attempts to de-skill” – architecture is more important than perfection in design.
As a result of a legacy of blogs going back four years, migrated most recently from Blogger to WordPress, my permalinks are a bit of a mess.
In the WordPress set up I simply defaulted the permalink style – an index number for individual posts and a month-year format for each archive page. That has worked great except for a significant proportion of my earlier Blogger posts, where I put the source link in the header, rather than in the body text or a separate RSS tagged link field. For those posts my permalinks no longer contain links to the post itself, but rather to the referenced source piece, which is darned fustrating.
Doesn’t seem to phase Google in the slightest though. I noticed that within two days of migrating to WordPress – same home page URL, but without any index.html and every individual post and archive re-named with a new URL, Google could hit any of my content instantly. I’m constantly amazed – even when I seem to have found a hole in the indexing, it always seems to be my memory (or spelling at the time of posting, playing tricks.) Seems Google can only index what I posted, not what I actually meant to post. Never fails to impress though.
Full text appears invariably better than imperfect structure. Weird.
[Less than 15 minutes to the play-off final KO. Come on Preston.]