Category: Knowledge
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Social media stupidifies and radicalizes us
Back when the buzzword switched from “Web 2.0” to “social media,” I started to get quite suspicious. When I was participating in online communities, I wasn’t propagating “media.” That is something that boring corporate media types did. What would those boring corporate media types, or rather their Silicon Valley equivalents, do with once-unconstrained, lively, frequently…
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How to crowdsource videos via a shared video channel
I got to talking to one of my colleagues here at Everipedia, the encyclopedia of everything, where I am now CIO, about future plans. I had the following idea. We could create an Everipedia channel–basically, just a YouTube account, but owned by Everipedia and devoted to regularly posting new videos. We could invite people to…
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On intellectual honesty and accepting the humiliation of error
I. The virtue of intellectual honesty. Honesty is a greatly underrated epistemic virtue. There is a sound reason for thinking so. It turns out that probably the single greatest source of error is not ignorance but arrogance, not lack of facts but dogmatism. We leap to conclusions that fit with our preconceptions without testing them.…
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On the Purposes of the Internet
SISCTI 34 February 28, 2009 Monterrey, Mexico Introduction I am going to begin by asking a philosophical question about the Internet. But I can hear some of you saying, “Philosophy? What does that have to do with the Internet? Maybe I will have a siesta.” Well, before you close your eyes, let me assure you that the question…
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Why study higher mathematics and other stuff most people don’t use in everyday life?
This video was posted in a Facebook group of mine here: I find it ironic that some of the most listened-to speakers about education explain that the cure to our educational ills is to point out that education is unnecessary. I call this educational anti-intellectualism. Here’s another representative sample and another. It is possible to make the argument,…
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Against language arts and social studies textbooks
Here’s a little argument against language arts and social studies (e.g., history and geography) textbooks. We need to get rid of them. Period. Prima facie, we don’t need textbooks to teach a subject. Other pedagogical methods include chapter (trade, library) books, short readings, computer software, videos, lectures, worksheets, projects, etc. So what are textbooks for? Well, consider what they are:…
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Why is spaced repetition not better known?
Suppose a method let you remember things with a 95% success rate–in other words, whatever information you’ve put into a system, you’d have a 95% chance of recalling it–and this effect is permanent, as long you continue to use the method. That would be quite remarkable, wouldn’t it? Well, there is such a method, called…
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What I dislike about experts: dogmatism
Since I started Citizendium, which invites experts to be “village elders wandering the bazaar” of an otherwise egalitarian wiki, and am well-known for criticizing Wikipedia’s often-hostile stance toward experts, I am sometimes held up as an example of someone who places too much trust in experts. In fact, I have quite a bit less trust…
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The future, according to Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra blogged earlier today six years ago (!) that “The future is not in learning”; the future lies, instead, in “unlearning.” This sounds awfully like another example of the geek anti-intellectualism that I love to hate; we’ll see about that. Since that’s how the post comes across–beginning with the title–it has already gotten a lot of…