(artificial intelligence, boundary objects, cooperation, flexibility, knowledge, learning, play, rigidity, translation, truth, understanding — )
31 Aug. 2007
Agh, 50 things going on in mind at once, don't want to lose them. Sorry for incomprehensible shorthand:
Boundary objects & boundary spanners as tools for Understanding. Acts of Translation. Data v. information, meaning & importance & relevance v. facts.
Why are we so stuck on "truth" anyway? Notion of truth. Useful or not so much? Conversation at UChi, re permanence of truth, & Chang's Inventing Temperature - is a more reasonable and useful (and attainable) goal progress instead of truth? How is progress related to learning, understanding, or knowledge?
Flaws in western logical system.
Above ties in with other thoughts on why current AI will never work, see Picard, Affective Computing, but expand beyond merely being emotional to being flexible - computers, and humans, can't learn if they can't make free associations on existing/growing knowledge base, and if one can't learn, one can't be intelligent...learning also requires ability to make mistakes and be creative, and creativity requires ability to resolve (accept) contradiction
Above all, flexibility in understanding. Creativity, adaptability. Lose rigidity. Allow to be wrong, change mind, make new connections.
Rigidity result of lack of play. "Speaking of faith" NPR week of August 27.
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(cognition, information overload, learning, silence — )
10 Aug. 2007
S. and I played a game the other day. She asked me what I think about in the space between thoughts. Needless to say, I had no idea what she talking about, but then she started this game.
"Think of a movie."
Pause. "Okay."
"Think of a book."
Pause. "Okay."
"Think of a song." "Think of a color." "Think of a shape."
The weird part was, she never asked me what it was I thought of. So, of course, at first all I could think of was, "When is she going to ask me for my answers?" But she didn't, so, eventually, I started asking her the same questions back, and I gave her my answers even though she didn't ask for them. But she never offered up what she was thinking unless I asked specifically, and after a little while we fell into silence when she didn't have any more questions.
Then she asked me, "What did you think about in the spaces?"
"Well, when you asked me about a movie, I thought of Tears of the Black Tiger, because that's the last movie I saw. It wasn't nearly as creative as your answer - I wish I'd thought of something random and cool like you did, not just whatever the last thing I saw was."
Sometimes I am a little dense.
"No," she said, "I mean, what did you think about after that? When I wasn't saying anything? Where did your mind wander in between the conversation?"
Ah. Eureka. Now I got it.
She'd asked me to think of a sound, and I thought of the sound a car makes as it drives through a rainy street - sshhuuuuuuuusssshhhhhhhh - since that is my favorite sound. And that made me think of my apartment in DC, which happened to be a basement apartment with my bed just next to the little window that faced the street, and from which I regularly got to hear that sound as I went to sleep at night. And then I thought of my friend Devlan who is back in DC. I'm currently in the process of attempting to move back East, and thinking of DC got me thinking about moving, and ever so suddenly an idea flashed in my mind about a mashup of Craigslist and Googlemaps that I'd recently heard about, where the application pulls apartment price from Craigslist and maps it to a neighborhood using color (aka "heatmap"), so that you can look at the map and see immediately what the relative apartment price is in different parts of town. Then I combined DC and the digital maps into a new thought about the Center for History and New Media at GMU, which combines those two things (digital acrobatics and DC) in one entity. I thought about the lightning that happens in DC, as it accompanies the rain that makes the streets wet and that creates the sound I love, and this led - because the words sound the same - to lightning bugs, which led me to New York (where there are a lot of the little creatures).
I was using the silence in between questions to put things together into novel ways. I was going back over the things I'd heard, read, and been preoccupied with over the last few days - moving, information visualization and the digital realm, sounds - and combined them into something meaningful. I was adding meaning to disparate bits of information. Even my "boring" answer about the last movie I saw was my mind's way of incorporating my recent experiences into my overall knowledge base.
In other words, I was using the silence to learn.
And the more I've thought about this experience, the more I've noticed the connections between silence and learning, or stillness and productivity, in other arenas.
I've noticed the same phenomenom when I read, for instance. As I skim through a book, whether deeply or superficially, I don't pick up all that much. It's really only in the moments afterwards, when I find myself discussing it with a friend, jotting down notes about it in a journal, or pondering it in the shower in the morning that it really starts to kick in.
It made me think of a study I read about a while back, where researchers discovered that, when a rat falls asleep, the mind dreams about the day's events backwards - thus cementing them into memory and understanding their meaning relative to other events.
It's reminded me about an old zine I ran across about 10 years ago. I can't really even remember what it was called - Sloth? Loafer? - but it was basically an homage to everyone's favorite deadly sin, laziness. In it, the author put forth some rather interesting theories and referenced some supposedly real studies that proved that laziness actually improved productivity. Specifically, I remember him expounding on one theory that goes as follows: Bouts of laziness allow one's system to recharge, and when one is recharged, the quality of work put forth is actually significantly better than the quality of work one does when tired.
That, in turn, leads me to notice this in my own work habits - I prefer to work in ultra-productive spurts of 2-3 hours, knocking almost everything out of the way (and doing so well, I'd like to think). Then I basically screw off for about a full hour - none of this 15 minute break nonsense, we're talking a good, solid hour of chitchatting, surfing the net, picking my nose, updating my blog, etc. Then, after an hour, I pound out another 2-3 hours of killer work. Rinse, lather, repeat. On the other hand, days that I find myself trying to work straight through for a solid 8 hours invariably end worthlessly, with me looking back at all the work I have accomplished and realizing that I can probably fit it all into a thimble. According to Loafer (or whatever it was called), these are the same results several research studies came up with.
I thought about how much I like those spurts, and how they crop up everywhere in my life. All of my favorite movies, the movies that really move me, are quiet. Not silent - have you ever seen a silent movie? They're not very silent at all - but quiet. Still. Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Paris, Texas. The Conversation. Then there're the spurts in my productivity, both on the daily level, as above, but also on monthly or quarterly levels - I might have several months of still followed by several months of furious learning and productivity. And I thought about how I seem to be one of the few people that can't stand....can't stand...the constant buzz and noise that goes on in daily life - the constant squawk of the television or radio so ubiquituous in the public sphere. So on some level, it seemed to me, I must really respond to this quiet, to really get a lot out of it.
That attitude makes me think of something I read in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently, in which a professor lamented academia's current push to read more and more and more. Why, he cried, can't we go back to deep reading? What was so wrong with reading deeply, slowly, ponderously? Today, he said, we are so overburdened with data that we must merely skim, often missing the meaning, heart, and soul of the documents we read. It makes us stupider and we misunderstand what we read.
And this, in turn, was related to something said on Digital History Hacks a few months back. The sheer quantity of information we deal with now keeps us from ever being able to read everything, even though we still kill ourselves trying to do so. Instead, he proposed, why don't we stop reading when what we read stops changing our opinion on the subject we are researching? This is when we know that we have read what we need to.
Quantity of information, and information overload, has been cropping up a lot, not just on DHH. I noticed it in Ambient Findability as I was reading the other night. Inside Higher Ed. Usability experts are talking about. The Semantic Web folks. AI guys. Tufte and the MIT Media Lab. Visualization buffs. Librarians. "We must find ways to make the information more digestible!" they cry. "Quicker and easier to understand!"
But the one thing no one is really mentioning much is silence. I've thought of it. I've thought of it a lot. But I haven't been seeing it discussed much elsewhere, and I think that this is a shame. I think perhaps the answer to some of these questions - questions about usability, learning, information overload, and contentment - may reside in the quiet between the questions, and in the stillness between the push and pull of information. I think we've lost our value for silence. Learning doesn't take place in the time that we are reading, imbibing, searching, or consuming. It takes place in the still that occurs after this flurry of activity, in the calm that we give ourselves to actually ponder what it is we have just encountered.
Perhaps I will quietly think about this a little more.
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