Why do you recommend a german book if your knowledge of German is next to zero?
The book is by an American and was originally written in English. I have read the English version, and also some of the earlier articles that the author wrote about studies that are mentioned in the book. I linked to the English version of the book in a previous post.
According to my dictionary it is Icelanders(Not islanders as a german would derive it from "Isländer"). It might be that the British use islander _and Americans use _icelander.
I'm afraid I don't understand the confusion here. The dictionary on my Mac gives the following simple definitions of these English words:
island: a piece of land surrounded by water
islander: a native or inhabitant of an island
Iceland: an island country in the North Atlantic ... Capital Reykjavik.
Icelander: a native or inhabitant of Iceland, or a person of Icelandic descent
"Iceland" is a country, a political entity, while "island" is a geographical feature. This is just standard English, in all its varieties, as far as I know.
Did you verify the story of the icelanders?
The story was about islanders, not Icelanders. The words Iceland and Icelander should always begin with a capital letter in English, because it is the name of a country, or a citizen of a country. So we write "France" and "French", not "france" and "french". As soon as you see "islander", beginning with a lower-case letter, you know that it is not about the native of a country (unless the writer is sloppy). I am usually fairly careful when I write, though, like anybody else, I make typos from time to time.
I did not verify the story personally, because it was told to us by a respected academic with whom I worked for many years while he was my supervisor, and whose knowledge and expertise is beyond doubt. In any case, the story really serves as a warning not to make assumptions about the universality of the concept of "intelligence". The cultural bias inherent in IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet has been acknowledged for a long time, and has been prominently discussed. See this from the American Psychological Association: Intelligence across cultures.
I am more of a reduce complexity person, you seem to widen your sea of options.
This is a psychological characteristic that seems to be related to need for cognition. My experience suggests to me that a lot of academics are very happy to pursue complexities, and tend to be wary of simple explanations. I remember the British historian Sir Richard Evans saying that one of his German colleagues (it may have been Hans-Ulrich Wheler) had observed (roughly) that if you had only found one cause or explanation for a complex phenomenon, you had got it wrong. I think one of the great drivers of scientific progress is people saying to themselves "There must be more to it than that ..." In a sense, it is just intellectual curiosity: pushing one step further or one step deeper. There is no risk of drowning. It is opening up new horizons, and the excitement of discovering yet more things to investigate. Simple explanations are so often dead ends, and not intellectually satisfying. But perhaps looking for simple solutions is more of an imperative in some fields than others. Engineering, perhaps?
I don't know anything about machine learning, but I would surmise that there are significant differences from human learning. For one thing, human memory is not like machine memory, and is incredibly unreliable. Its fallibility has been much studied by Elizabeth Loftus. See her Memory Faults and Fixes.
Only reduction of complexity makes it possible to handle more complexity.
If interested, I can elaborate on that.
I am interested in making use of knowledge, your goal is aggregation of knowledge for the sake of knowledge aggregation (while risking to assign the same importance to possibilities that will not come into being).
That is quite fundamental.
Because this is how we use Zettelkasten.
And this might be the reason why I am unhappy with the system, because I wanted to use it for conclusions, preferably by itself without me having to do additional work other than to enter data, for which it seems suboptimal.
But for connecting knowledge for the sake of connecting knowledge and generating more knowledge(regardless of any use case) it must be perfect.
But then again, if you have no way to verify it by applying it in the real world, you could have gone off the rails many kilometers ago.
This is what is described by "drowning", a metaphor I came to like quite a bit in this context.
PS: It reminds me of the discussions moralists start. A group of people tries to create innovation and the moralists, not having invented anything useful in their life, paint the worst picture this innovation could lead to and condemn it at the same time, while not understanding the fundamentals of the innovation.
This is where "artificial intelligence is human intelligence and will replace us" comes from.
Everyone having dealt with AI knows that artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, far from it and therefore every conclusion based on this wrong premise leads to more errors in thinking.
I follow the narrative that knowledge needs to be verified in reality. So I demand that everyone create an experiment that can be conducted in real life to prove and disprove a theory.
My profession financial clerk My interests Thinking, tinkering and model making
@GidoAdams said:
I follow the narrative that knowledge needs to be verified in reality. So I demand that everyone create an experiment that can be conducted in real life to prove and disprove a theory.
This demand will shut down 90% of all discussions on this forum. I would rephrase, since it is stated as following a narrative, but all narratives are false, including personal narratives. Is there an experiment that would confirm or disconfirm this demand? I have no interest in refuting a positivist philosophy, if that's what it is.
Zettelkasten works well enough for mathematics--at least one has to develop proofs or develop computational evidence if there are statements to justify. Another use is linking related thoughts that may reflect one's understanding of virtually anything at a given time. There is no epistemic requirement to demonstrate that one really had the understanding recorded at the time notes were written. Is only externally verifiable knowledge permissible in a Zettelkasten?
Intellectual hygiene is desirable, though it is possible to become excessively concerned with "germs." (My apologies if this image should have been preceded with a trigger warning.) I don't see an urgent need to approach an organic system like Zettelkasten with the "right" philosophy or attitudes or experience already in place, or to have thoroughly internalized, "The Excellent Mind: Intellectual Virtues for Everyday Life," by Nathan L. King before venturing further. Do you really need professional philosophers breathing down your neck over what values you should bring to your Zettelkasten? Preparation is good, but so is starting.
I once posted an image of my bookshelves on Facebook. Someone I didn't know very well wanted to know the "overarching theme" or purpose of this library. How could I possibly reduce an organically developing library and with it a lifetime of reading to a "theme"? And that was after the fact, to say nothing of what I might have had in mind years ago when I first started building my library, and during the years that books were added, read, reread, then given away or retained. I hardly recognize those persons in any event.
Post edited by ZettelDistraction on
GitHub. Erdős #2. CC BY-SA 4.0. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein.
Comments
@GidoAdams
The book is by an American and was originally written in English. I have read the English version, and also some of the earlier articles that the author wrote about studies that are mentioned in the book. I linked to the English version of the book in a previous post.
I'm afraid I don't understand the confusion here. The dictionary on my Mac gives the following simple definitions of these English words:
"Iceland" is a country, a political entity, while "island" is a geographical feature. This is just standard English, in all its varieties, as far as I know.
The story was about islanders, not Icelanders. The words Iceland and Icelander should always begin with a capital letter in English, because it is the name of a country, or a citizen of a country. So we write "France" and "French", not "france" and "french". As soon as you see "islander", beginning with a lower-case letter, you know that it is not about the native of a country (unless the writer is sloppy). I am usually fairly careful when I write, though, like anybody else, I make typos from time to time.
I did not verify the story personally, because it was told to us by a respected academic with whom I worked for many years while he was my supervisor, and whose knowledge and expertise is beyond doubt. In any case, the story really serves as a warning not to make assumptions about the universality of the concept of "intelligence". The cultural bias inherent in IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet has been acknowledged for a long time, and has been prominently discussed. See this from the American Psychological Association: Intelligence across cultures.
This is a psychological characteristic that seems to be related to need for cognition. My experience suggests to me that a lot of academics are very happy to pursue complexities, and tend to be wary of simple explanations. I remember the British historian Sir Richard Evans saying that one of his German colleagues (it may have been Hans-Ulrich Wheler) had observed (roughly) that if you had only found one cause or explanation for a complex phenomenon, you had got it wrong. I think one of the great drivers of scientific progress is people saying to themselves "There must be more to it than that ..." In a sense, it is just intellectual curiosity: pushing one step further or one step deeper. There is no risk of drowning. It is opening up new horizons, and the excitement of discovering yet more things to investigate. Simple explanations are so often dead ends, and not intellectually satisfying. But perhaps looking for simple solutions is more of an imperative in some fields than others. Engineering, perhaps?
I don't know anything about machine learning, but I would surmise that there are significant differences from human learning. For one thing, human memory is not like machine memory, and is incredibly unreliable. Its fallibility has been much studied by Elizabeth Loftus. See her Memory Faults and Fixes.
Best of luck with the reading!
Only reduction of complexity makes it possible to handle more complexity.
If interested, I can elaborate on that.
I am interested in making use of knowledge, your goal is aggregation of knowledge for the sake of knowledge aggregation (while risking to assign the same importance to possibilities that will not come into being).
That is quite fundamental.
Because this is how we use Zettelkasten.
And this might be the reason why I am unhappy with the system, because I wanted to use it for conclusions, preferably by itself without me having to do additional work other than to enter data, for which it seems suboptimal.
But for connecting knowledge for the sake of connecting knowledge and generating more knowledge(regardless of any use case) it must be perfect.
But then again, if you have no way to verify it by applying it in the real world, you could have gone off the rails many kilometers ago.
This is what is described by "drowning", a metaphor I came to like quite a bit in this context.
PS: It reminds me of the discussions moralists start. A group of people tries to create innovation and the moralists, not having invented anything useful in their life, paint the worst picture this innovation could lead to and condemn it at the same time, while not understanding the fundamentals of the innovation.
This is where "artificial intelligence is human intelligence and will replace us" comes from.
Everyone having dealt with AI knows that artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, far from it and therefore every conclusion based on this wrong premise leads to more errors in thinking.
I follow the narrative that knowledge needs to be verified in reality. So I demand that everyone create an experiment that can be conducted in real life to prove and disprove a theory.
My profession financial clerk
My interests Thinking, tinkering and model making
This demand will shut down 90% of all discussions on this forum. I would rephrase, since it is stated as following a narrative, but all narratives are false, including personal narratives. Is there an experiment that would confirm or disconfirm this demand? I have no interest in refuting a positivist philosophy, if that's what it is.
Zettelkasten works well enough for mathematics--at least one has to develop proofs or develop computational evidence if there are statements to justify. Another use is linking related thoughts that may reflect one's understanding of virtually anything at a given time. There is no epistemic requirement to demonstrate that one really had the understanding recorded at the time notes were written. Is only externally verifiable knowledge permissible in a Zettelkasten?
Intellectual hygiene is desirable, though it is possible to become excessively concerned with "germs." (My apologies if this image should have been preceded with a trigger warning.) I don't see an urgent need to approach an organic system like Zettelkasten with the "right" philosophy or attitudes or experience already in place, or to have thoroughly internalized, "The Excellent Mind: Intellectual Virtues for Everyday Life," by Nathan L. King before venturing further. Do you really need professional philosophers breathing down your neck over what values you should bring to your Zettelkasten? Preparation is good, but so is starting.
I once posted an image of my bookshelves on Facebook. Someone I didn't know very well wanted to know the "overarching theme" or purpose of this library. How could I possibly reduce an organically developing library and with it a lifetime of reading to a "theme"? And that was after the fact, to say nothing of what I might have had in mind years ago when I first started building my library, and during the years that books were added, read, reread, then given away or retained. I hardly recognize those persons in any event.
GitHub. Erdős #2. CC BY-SA 4.0. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein.