What, Why & How do we Know ?
Jeremy Bentham came up yesterday. Louise led us through University College past the Jeremy Bentham room, past where his mummified body or “Auto-Icon” is generaly displayed [here’s why], but alas it was not there. See also [BenthamLinks][BenthamWorksOnLine]
Bentham (a contemporary of Blake, blogged below) coined “utilitarianism” as used by J.S.Mill, later evolved into “pragmatism”.
[Mopsos][via ScaleFree] Anu was hooked by this quote “Ultimately, the economics of knowledge have something to do with the economics of love.”
What’s lurve got to do with it ? Well it’s the extreme end of implicit trust, and we all know trust is the number one item in information at the moment. Top level of the W3C model, FOAF and the bozo-bit to name a few examples. Without it there is no knowledge worth sharing.
Mentioned in the previous post that I’d been at BlogWalk yesterday in Bloomsbury, based in the Old Crown on New Oxford Street. Many thanks to Johnnie Moore and Lilia Effimova for organising and facilitating the stimulating day.
Attendees were for me all first time meetings.
Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic)
Johnnie Moore (JohnnieMoore)
Ed Mitchell (KnowledgeBoard)
Chris MaCrae (ValueTrue)
Riccardo Cambiassi (CodeWitch)
Mark Brady (Mark Brady)
Julian Elve (Synesthesia)
Lloyd Davis (Perfect Path)
Paul Graham
Louise Ferguson (City of Bits)
Martin Roell (Das E-Business)
Anu Gupta (ScaleFree)
Suw Charman (Choc’n’Vodka)(HeadShift)
Omar Green (Savaje)
Desiree Gosby (Savaje)
David Wilcox (Designing Civil Society)
Topic was blogging as Social Software in Organisations – Inside the Firewall. Led to much business debate about internal vs external communication – where is the boundary, is it clear, or fuzzy, or variable ? The issues were all business & social communication, independent of the blogging medium, everything from formal external announcements & press-releases to whilstle-blowing leakage, taking in internal community building and need-to-know issues. Some thoughts in my previous post.
Highlight of the day was that Lloyd and Louise knew the Bloomsbury area of London well and walked us around, taking in the British Museum, Russel Square, London University Senate, University College and Bedford Square. Lots of “Bloomsbury Group” blue-plaques. Very much the same “Fitzrovia” educational patch used by INFED.
Another minor personal highlight was re-acquaintance with the Princess Louise for lunch. Dark (Victorian ?) ceramics and mirrors still survive over 100% of the walls and ceiling, and so too the enormous marble and iron urinals.
Almost finished reading Bronowski’s “Man Without a Mask”, about the life and works of William Blake, and was struck, by this summary …
“We find [Blake’s life] eccentric, only if we miss it’s context, which is made by his writings and his times together [American and French and Industrial revolutions] … the context of a man who gave his mind to speaking in a public world.”
Also this succinct summary of the significance of freedom and empowerment, and that social (industrial, political) institutions should be means to that end, not means of control and restriction.
“Blake believed society had no ends. Like his [Satanic Mills] it is a means become master …. The good remains an end to which society gives means, but which man must know and make.”
This last phrase is in fact exactly Pirsig’s MoQ view of the social and intellectual levels of Quality [Good]. Lower layers support (act as hygiene) to those above, but do not direct or control [Maslow] Individual man must know and make.
Interesting given yesterday’s BlogWalk in London [walking around Bloomsbury], that a striking conclusion by David Wilcox, was that discussing blogging as social software within organisations seemed simply to raise all the issues of society and organisation, independent of blogging as the technological means, and that in itself was a valid reason for blogging as a subject and a tool. Linked posts as index cards again. How true. Nothing new under the sun again.
Those issues of society and organisation I’ve seen previously summarised by Quinn & Cameron as the classic paradoxical aspects of management – empowerment vs control, centralisation vs decentralisation, discretion vs direction, open-communication vs secrecy, and so on. Johnnie Moore mentioned a company whose elightened operational guidelines was simply a single statement that “Each member of staff should exercise their best judgement”.
BBC Radio4 Today Programme this morning 16th Sept, discussing a book by ex-Aussie-PM speech-writer Don Watson and comic Adam Hill(?). About the “generalisation” of management speak actually reducing the number of core words, particularly adjectives, in the language. Many “portmanteau” words with many meanings from trivial to important. It’s partly political correctness, using euphemisms to avoid a taboo or unpleasant word, when everybody knows that’s what you actually mean from the context. Since we all know downsized means sacked, why don’t we actually say sacked ? This is the hypocrisy.
This was contrasted with “strine” creative Australian dialectic use of the language, and a suggstion that the stereotypical rising questioning intonation, or the habit of leaving sentences unfinished, was actually adding meaning to the original phrase.
Captsolo – a semantic web / social networks blog. Or is it just an aggregator ? Or is Planet RDF the aggregator ?
Blogged earlier on the “strong opinions, lightly held” theme, but didn’t recognise the Nabokov connection to his “Strong Opinions”. Jorn has a relevant Nabokov page [Robot Wisdom] Some excellent quotes in there.
“the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery”
“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more”