Dear John,
You found the video, but missed the article. It
really is at the (truncated looking) URL which appears prematurely cut off
below:
http://reason.com/blog/2012/04/06/ideas-having-sex-a-conversation-with-joh
I have changed this email format to HTML for this
post. You may have more luck following the link with this format instead
of rich text as in the previous post.
Your YouTube link didn’t have the text around
the video which draws the point. For example, the text includes this
quote:
Tierney and Ridley also
discuss how traders and businessmen, much maligned throughout history as
exploiters and "social parasites," have actually contributed
enormously to the spread of ideas and new technological breakthroughs. Ridley
describes how Fibonacci, the son of an Italian trader who lived in North
Africa, brought the Indian numeral system (the numbers we all know and love
today) to Europe as one of the greatest tangible benefits of trade facilitating
the exchange of ideas. Ridley implores the public to "Just stop knocking
traders, they're great people, they do wonderful things."
I think the point he makes is that some minimum
density of intellectual population is necessary to raise the rate of innovation,
and that is influenced by, among other things, cultural (such as religious)
openness to new ideas and improvements. But even with an open,
nondogmatic society, there is still a minimum number of people needed to make
the society grow intellectually, rather than shrink, as the Tanzanians did with
just 4,000 population when their island was cut off from the Australian
mainland.
Ridley, ever a good book marketer, sensationalizes it
by describing it as “ideas having sex”. That is the point of
the article; people build their own ideas on top of each other’s ideas,
modulate them, apply them to new situations, and generally generalize and
specialize other people’s ideas. The rate at which people do so
varies as the number of people (and therefore the number of ideas) available to
intellectual discourse, with Tanzania’s
4,000 being too low, and Greece’s
population being adequate.
It isn’t surprising to hear that most Greek
philosophers of classical times came from outside Athens – thanks for sharing that.
Greece
itself was more likely the population which interchanged ideas. Athens was just the New
York of Greece. Athens
was just the civilization that “published” papyri of the good
ideas, chose which ideas to teach each new generation, provided the cross roads
for accumulated commerce and trade, and valued knowledge sociologically. Look
at what happened to Athens
– wars with its neighbors, poisoning of Aristotle, many other degenerate
social warps occurred there. The Athenians practiced a government like
that description Ronald Reagan gave: “Government is like a baby. A
hungry alimentary canal at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
The point of the article, as I see it, is that
individuals following self interest are the originators of knowledge, sharers
of knowledge, and the source of social progress. Grouping people into
political units (such as religious movements, democracies, socialist states,
dictatorships, pick your favorite or most reviled instance) is what turns the
groups ultimately toward the dark side.
So I disagree on the subject of the email. I
changed it back to my original “Self Interest Ontology” because I
think you missed the points I was trying to make with regard to how knowledge
is formed. It isn’t from the sole source of genius as you seem to believe.
Ridley’s material shows that the important factor is the size of the
group which can share knowledge and produce new material from combinations of
old materials. All of the people in Ridley’s groups are acting in
self interest.
He identifies “traders” as the
multiculturalists who moved knowledge from one culture (e.g., Arabic/Indian
numerals) to another (e.g., classical Western civilizations) and therefore did
the intellectual and pragmatic pollination of societies.
The point is: If we could codify self interest in
ontological form, we could possibly leverage that ontology to automate the
creation of new knowledge. That was (decades ago) Cyc’s ultimate
goal, but Cyc took the wrong turn of trying to make a single monolithic
knowledge base that knows everything they could encode. They discarded
the self interest of the individuals’ knowledge bases, and insisted on a
single monolithic knowledge base which required unreasonable degrees of
consistency, throwing out the variance which would have led to automating
knowledge creation. They chose to value the group’s knowledge instead
of the individuals’ knowledges.
That, IMHO, is the wrong conclusion. Instead,
each Cyclist should have developed an ontology of her own. Then the
sharing of those individual ontologies could have been automated (if only
partially) to create new knowledge from combinations of individual’s
knowledge as encoded in Cyc. That is why self interest is important, and
that is why I have changed the subject back to its proper title.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 11:13 PM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Promoting
invention and innovation
Rich,
Thanks for pointing out that interview. It is
indeed thought
provoking. (For two footnotes about procedural issues,
see below.)
> I found a terrific video interview with biologist
Matt Ridley
> (one of my favorite pop biology authors) which
explains some
> of the phenomenon in self interested
activities. Basically,
> his idea is that progress depends far more on the
NUMBER of
> individuals in a group exchanging ideas than it
does on any
> one GENIUS, or other appellation you might want
to use to
> describe individuals who provide outlier
services.
Following is an uncorrupted URL of the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyG8F62yB4Q
Some comments about Matt Ridley's talk:
1. I strongly agree with him that innovation
depends on having
a sufficiently large
population of people and a considerable
amount of interchange among
people from different cultures.
2. Merchants traveling from town to town, port
to port, or
country to country are
important. But the traveling or
trade, by itself, is only
part of the story. You also need
travelers who do the
innovating -- gurus, storytellers,
explorers, adventurers, and
people who have enough technical
knowledge to recognize a good
innovation when they see one.
3. Ridley also mentioned the Arabs, who
adapted, adopted, and
transmitted many innovations
from many cultures -- Greece,
India,
Africa, etc. But he said that they
stagnated because
of
"superstition". That is too simplistic.
4. Many scholars praise the Greeks for their
fantastic innovations
in philosophy, mathematics,
logic, science, democracy, etc.
But they don't emphasize one
very important point: *all* of
the early Greek philosophers
came from the colonies outside
of Greece,
not from Athens
or other cities in the heartland.
5. In fact, the first so-called
"pre-Socratic" philosophers came
from the Greek colonies in Anatolia, which were under the
control of Persia at the
time (6th century BC). That was also
close to the Silk Road, which brought merchants, soldiers, and
storytellers from China to and from Europe.
6. The philosophers from Anatolia
include Thales, Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Pythagoras,
Xenophanes, and Heraclitus. Pythagoras
left his native island of Samos
and traveled to Egypt,
where
he was initiated into the
Egyptian priesthood. He later
settled in the Greek colony
of Croton in southern Italy.
(By the way, I live in Croton
on Hudson, New York.)
Other early Greek
philosophers from the colonies in Italy
include Parmenides, Zeno,
Empedocles (who proposed the
four elements of Fire, Air,
Water, and Earth). Others
came from miscellaneous Greek
towns on the periphery.
7. The first major Greek philosopher who was
born in and
stayed in Athens was Socrates. It is significant
that
he was condemned to death for
corrupting the morals of
Athenian youth. The
philosophers from the colonies
said many worse things about
the Olympian gods, but they
got away with it because the
Persians and others couldn't
care less about the Greek
gods. But the Athenians did.
There is much more to be said about all these issues,
but one
point stands out: the fundamentalists in every
country and
every culture around the world are the ones that cause
the
most stifling kind of stagnation. That was true
of the
Greeks in ancient times, and it is true of *every*
religion
everywhere in the world. (I won't name any
modern ones,
because that would create endless debate.)
I'm not against all religions, by the way, when they
are
taken in moderation. But when any religion
becomes frozen
as dogma, the culture goes downhill rapidly.
And by religion, I include Marxism and Capitalism. I
would
even consider an uncritical idolization of Science as
a
religion. All of them have some good ideas, if
taken in
moderation. But their fundamentalists are the most
dangerous
threats to their own countries.
John
______________________________________________________________
Footnotes:
1. The long URL you cited was cut off by your
email handler.
I had to do a bit of
searching to find the above URL,
but I suggest that you get a
better email handler or
change some settings on the
one you use.
2. I also changed the subject line to indicate
the main topic
of Ridley's talk. It is
tangentially related to self interest,
but the main theme is the
kinds of factors that promote or kill
invention and innovation.
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe:
mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J