Wild sourdough science
Westerfeld's LEVIATHAN
My new Locus column, "Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise," explores what it means for science fiction when the cost of knowing something falls to zero, and when the difference between knowing something can be done and doing it narrows away to nothing.
Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it -- even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.Cheap Facts and the Plausible PremiseIn the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.
This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.
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This sort of hacking has always been around, but it's true that Google has made it easier to find the secret info.
I still enjoy inventing things: coming up with ways to put things together that no one had ever thought belonged together, but it's obvious in hindsight that they were meant to be together.
Yet most of the electronic circuit invention that I do involves using circuits published in application notes instead of coming up with new circuits. Why reinvent the wheel when I can just find a new home for it?
Ow, you couldn't've called it Cheat TRUTH and the Plausible Premise?
If the "secret" you're looking for is unique, google will not be able to help you. Is cryptography unknown in your future?
For some reason, I'm reminded of Itanium, which promised huge performance increases if only the compiler programmers would get their act together and write sufficiently clever algorithms. The clever compilers never materialized, and neither did the promised performance. Certain problems are hard, and no amount of wishing or googling will change that.
Love your columns Cory!
So now that you know how to go to the moon, you are as good as there, right ?
A thought-provoking essay. Thanks!
"what magic words will cause a collection agent to stop calling you for fear of prosecution for harassment"
You should share this specific info here, for the good of mankind.
"Well, the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00."
"The Web" has also introduced a slew of misinformation and heavily spun information. Corporations are getting craftier about spreading their marketing around the web in the guise of innocent "facts". I expect that the market for discriminating fact from fiction will only rise in the future. That kind of discrimination will take a real pro.
Your essay is ultimately about Innovation, but you start with an appreciation of Con Artistry. I'd just like to point out that the "Plausible Premise" is the keystone of every successful con. Shifting the real innovations from the cons? That kind of discrimination will take a real pro.
;)
What happened to "Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard"? Surely the most challenging, satisfying and frustrating part of 'invention' is the implementation.
'Principal'.
Whether "knowing is doing" or "ideas are cheap, execution is hard" is correct depends on what area you are talking about. Maybe there's a sliding scale. As mentioned above, space flight is close to one end of the scale. I'd say that pure mathematics is at the other end - once Andrew Wiles knew how to prove Fermat's last theorem, writing out the proof on the blackboard wasn't particularly hard.
Inspirational!
When I was a kid in England, the internet was expensive and local calls were metered, so practically no-one used BBS boards. So all the secret knowledge was on physical media, floppy disks, which were really much more fragile than files existing on a hard drive. Amiga floppies would go corrupt if you looked at them wrong.
Making copies had a larger "nearly free" cost built-in, then, for the medium, and the necessity of making copies if you wanted it to last. On the other hand, we had physical artifacts, a locus for value (like dusty old secret tomes)
Of course, you're just as likely to get misinformation as you are to get useful information. Separating the fact from the BS is a job in itself.
Sounds almost Singular...
I think the author undervalues the disaster of misinformation. The, 'you can reprogram your car and make it burn less fuel' claim is a great example of this. My initial response to the claim is deep skepticism. I know auto companies are evil and really want to drop their gas mileage and all, but none the less, I find the claim hard to swallow. Even if it is true, I imagine that there are attached unintended consequences. My dearly beloved mother on the other hand would likely buy this claim hook line and sinker.
In this case, maybe she is right and she squeezes a few extra MPH out of her car. That doesn't change the fact that her computer is a petri dish of spyware from her belief in other such claims, while my computer is pristine.
Information existing is a lot different from being able to sort it and determine what is bullshit and what is true. I personally think that as this age moves on, we are going to find that the noise level is going to go up dramatically until we reach a point when the greatest function of a search engine won't be finding information, it will be sorting bullshit from reality.
"This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. "
i've actually hacked my car to do this with open source tools and about 5$ worth of soldering.
Not some wak resister hack either...i'm talking live data recovery, plus rewritable RAM to change fuel settings.
www.ecuproject.com
t5suite is what i use.
Anyway...i love the above statement. All we create is built on some prior knowledge and discovery, but when the information becomes so accessible...the entry cost of discovery goes way down.
As a matter of fact, I do know all the answers. It's just that telling the right ones from the wrong ones gets a bit difficult.
Samsam
There is, indeed, a huge amount of misinformation available. Thus the value of a particular skill: Critical Thinking.
The title of the article includes the word "Plausible" -- for people who have been taught for even a fraction of a decade to believe that various uncritically-accepted myths are "plausible" and who are insulated from the consequences of their beliefs and have artificial consequences for disbelief imposed by their society, a lot of things /seem/ plausible -- that dinosaurs and men co-existed, that there was a worldwide flood, that electric discharges carved the Grand Canyon, that some guy climbed a rope to Heaven and the entity he met there wants children to blow themselves up, that Windows is a good OS, that VietnamAfghanistanIraq can be occupied and secured, that their taxes are ridiculously and cripplingly high and that government-run medical insurance will be mandatory, crippling, and shoddy, that Sarah Palin would have made a good Vice / President of the United States, that deep packet inspection is both necessary and at the same time impossible for common carriers, that the US Government is too big to care about your personal information that they are illegally wiretapping and archiving, that the abuses and crimes of the past eight years by the White House executive staff ought to be buried and forgotten instead of being prosecuted (screw you, Ford, for setting precedent), that global warming isn't happening, that global warming isn't harmful, that major industries don't sicken and kill people and screw little guys for massive profits, that cigarettes are good for you and that chronic alcohol consumption is safer for the individual and society than occasional marijuana or LSD use.
I end there - inherently analogising LSD to information - because Bill Hicks said it best:
"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"
Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.
So, Cory, you ever read DOKTOR SLEEPLESS? He (Warren Ellis) speaks of this innovation technique at length.
I know you must have read it, right?
The article implies that everything, once successfully demonstrated, becomes trivial to the point of being nearly free, which is obviously not the case.
The issue here is that many things that people want to build are actual physical things, and not just software. This argument only applies to things that can be duplicated for zero cost -- software and other information products.
It definitely does *not* apply to cars or houses or food. Certainly it's been shown that growing food is possible, but this doesn't mean I can google up a farm and have a delicious salad by dinnertime.
Additionally, the fact is that software, by itself, isn't particularly useful. It needs computers to run on. Making an already-existing computer do something that a different computer already does is trivial, but this rule doesn't apply to much outside of this very narrow sub-definition of "something that can be done".
Edison knew in principle how to design the battery he was working on. Fifty Thousand experiments later he marketed his first battery only to withdraw it and work another 5 years on improving it.
It contained no lead and used an alkaline solution instead of sulphuric acid. Hey Greenies!
Vladimir Zworykin told David Sarnoff at RCA he could complete the research on television for $100K. Some $50 megabucks later they had a product.
It cost me nothing to tell my mother-in-law that her friend with poor eyesight could drive again if she got a car with a bifocal windshield. She believed me.
I have to think that we have the ability to, for example, cure many more people than we do, but our diagnosis is wack. Our procedures are often fine but we don't always know when they're needed.
Evaluating Google results is an acquired skill that requires a firm grounding in skeptical principles - something many geeks take for granted. I do Mac consulting, and half the time I get my answers from Google. Often the same exact Google pages that my clients have stared at blankly for hours.
So, 'knowing' may well increasingly be 'doing', but 'seeing' is increasingly *not* 'knowing'. Nor will it ever be, since the ability to judge credibility is one of the most difficult to acquire skills known to man and BTW it has a *huge* breadth requirement.