221 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2019
    1. I propose an architecture of layers of interoperability to unbundle complex, inflexible, and monolithic systems iii and increase competition, cooperation, generativity, and flexibility.

      I can't get behind a general comment on increasing competition.

    2. post-Internet

      What will this mean? I find it safe to assume that some sort of Internet will exist more or less as long as humans do, now that one has been invented. Even in the case of total collapse of the current system.

      It strikes me that this is like saying we need to learn from the "creation and management" of post-Language organizations.

    3. a market-based approach

      Although, given how markets might be different when de-coupled from infinite growth assumptions (moving toward stable-state or de-growth economies), maybe this statement needs some qualification.

    4. I have no idea how this tab came to be, but it's open in the browser window associated with Howard Rheingold's Augmented Collective Intelligence course in May 2019, so I assume it's related to that somehow.

    1. two parallel processes that support each other.

      Yes, agree with this point. Sometimes I wonder if the emphasis on the social dimension of learning, so emphasized today, leads some to neglect solitude and the personal study and knowledge work needed for deep learning in a subject.

    2. A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow

      Another illustration of the notion that ideas are meant to circulate, like blood in the body, money in the economy, and water in the ecosystem ... movement and flow prevent stagnation and create possibilities for connection and engagement.

    1. Alfred Korzybski, in his monumental tome, Science and Sanity, spends over a thousand pages reproving us for our wanton use of the “is” of identity, which reduces things to other things, proposing what he believes is a new “non-Aristotelian” mode of thought.

      Metaphor, essentially.

    2. Without blueprints, instructions, specifications, guidelines, computer programs, money, science texts, laws, contracts, schedules, and databases, could anyone build a microchip, a hydrogen bomb, or a radio telescope? Could anyone operate an airport or a concentration camp?
    3. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinity of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories.
    4. By generalizing particulars into categories, words render invisible the differences among them. By labeling both A and B a tree, and conditioning ourselves to that label, we become blind to the differences between A and B. The label affects our perception of reality and the way we interact with it.
    5. the dehumanization begins with any categorization, even the word “human”. This is not to advocate the abolition of nouns, only to be mindful of their relative unreality.
    6. When we knew every face intimately, there was no need to generalize into “people.”
    7. Perhaps it is the increasing abstraction of ourselves from the world, to which language contributes, that explains why “fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds; today many children can’t go beyond 100,000 and the average is 180,000. Twenty years ago the average subject could detect 350 shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130.”
    8. It is the discrete and separate self that desires to name the things of nature, or that could even conceive of so doing. To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify. No wonder in Genesis, Adam’s first act in confirmation of his God-given dominion over the animals is to name them. Before the conception of self that enabled dominion, there was no naming—none of the original vocalizations were nouns.
    1. theological differences

      though many unfortunate theological dichotomies were amplified ... such as the greater Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura and, more generally, the "Word," as compared to relative Catholic emphasis on "Sacrament." A division that was only overcome on the Catholic side at Vatican II.

    2. Laying inherited scientific works side by side for the first time also pointed up discrepancies and contradictions.

      Actually, the elucidation of discrepancies (that is, the dialectical method) was already a distinct genre prior to the development of print, as evidenced, for example, in the writings of Peter Abelard (such as "Sic et Non") in the early 12th c.

    3. copying them

      It was not simply a matter of copying existing texts, but of adding annotation and commentary, compiling florilegia, composing new texts, etc. I'm sure there were scribes whose sole job was to copy, but there was also a rich practice of creative writing ... though a creativity that was for the most part prompted by the reception of existing texts rather than the kind of quest for originality that came later.

    1. The symbols for numerals were not new. They were the impressions of cones and spheres formerly representing measures of grain, which then had acquired a second, abstract, numerical meaning

      This seems like a huge deal, the invention of numerals. Conceptually, someone had to make a qualitative leap to break away from the notion of one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and its referent. The symbols were not new, but their meaning was.

      Also, was it understood that numerals were "impressed" in the tablet, while the thing being counted was "incised?"

    2. signs representing tokens traced with a stylus rather than impressed

      Whether the sign is "impressed" (with a token) or "incised" (with a stylus) does not seem to be a huge conceptual leap in itself. The development of the stylus does, however, a much more rapid development of variety and complexity in the pictographs.

    3. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin.
  2. Apr 2019
    1. The development from tokens to script reveals that writing emerged from counting and accounting

      So, numeracy precedes literacy...