The Velocity of Knowledge

It is interesting to see the dichotomy of old-school thinking versus the latest trend when it comes to best practices, concepts and rules. Each side's proponents tend to claim absolute truth for their movement, when the common sense lies somewhere in between. Just like the classic division in politics between the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum, the most pragmatic approach tends to be somewhere centrist.

So I was thinking about the speed at which knowledge is created in this hyper-linked, twitter-agile information age. Not only is new knowledge created, often it is at conflict with existing knowledge, with established wisdom. And at the speed of change, not often is it clear whether the new is really superior to the old, warranting rapid obsoletion of the past.

Again, the middle ground is probably somewhere in between. And then there is the great "it depends". The very same knowledge can be applied to different perspectives, warranted in one, but not in the other. The rapid trail & error approach to online marketing is certainly not conducive to build airplanes or nuclear plants. Yet, it's hard to stay competitive in any online or media business these days with a velocity of molasses in January.

Along those lines I was thinking that people, society, would be well served to establish a knowledge base, not driven by the latest version number (newer is not always better), but by merit, and/or practical use. Perhaps along the lines of the crowd-sourced media judgment, and product rating by online buyers. Whichever new concept/approach works well, or better over a prior version, will quickly establish itself via the broad acceptance that crowd-ratings would provide.

Perhaps akin to to some metrics used in the academic space as to how many times a publication is referenced. I understand Google does the same on a larger scale, but the agents creating the links often have dubious motifs that don't necessarily indicate the quality of the source content. This is an effect that increases as Search Engine Optimization techniques become more prevalent. Will the Semantic Web reset some of these patterns?

Possibly, Wikipedia may be progressing toward this philosophy. What I am missing there today is a tangible measure of how established the knowledge is, how proven versus how volatile (as in "still evolving) it is.

For sure is, any heavy-handed, top-down management attempt will fail. The solution lies somewhere in awareness, a culture so to speak, in all the participants of the vast network of knowledge.

It may be evolving one day out of the same technology and drive that today is used for tracking peoples' activity on the Internet, but for a broader benefit than just online marketing.

Why is it so hard to predict the future?

There is this time machine paradox. If you were able to go back into the past to change things to make things "better" in the present, you may end up altering the course of history that lead to the developments that caused you to exist, or that made the technology available to you to time travel. A recursive dependency, ending up in a logic trap we can't wrap our limited brains around.

This is the same reason why it is extremly difficult to reliably predict what will happen in the future. The more precise, tangible we try to pin down future events, the more likely we will affect the outcome leading to an alternate, different future. At least if we communicate our prediction to those involved in the assumed future outcome.

The stock market is a good example of that. If someone spreads a "secret" tip, how to get rich quick in the stock market, many people will follow, do the same thing, and in effect eliminate the niche opportunity by their very actions of pursuing it.

If we develop a hypothesis as to how the future will shape up, it is most stable if the factors that influence that hypothesized future are unaware of our theory. If the factors involve self-aware agents, like people, they may adapt to intermediate events, or even the expected outcome, and by these actions possibly avoid the assumed future event/outcome.

On the scientific side, popular examples in this real are the Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, and Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment. As Quantum Computing will advance, interesting possibilities may shape up for predicting the future. Not necessarily to our satisfaction. The human mind is a paradox in itself. If you ever pondered "how big is the universe?", what if I told you it is <this> big. Then the logically next question would be "where does it end?", and I tell you it ends <there>. "And what comes after that?".

If first-graders already ask such pertinent questions, what can our highly developed adult minds come up with?