Amateurism
Ben Franklin was the ultimate amateur scientist:
“It wasn't just his extraordinary work that he did in electricity. He was also the first person, for instance, to understand that weather just didn't happen locally, that a storm that you experience today might be a hundred miles over tomorrow, and he was the first person, using his position as postmaster general, to track a hurricane going up through the colonies. He was the first person to study the sociology of insects. He was the first person to analyze the teeth of a mastodon and figure out that the climate in Siberia, where the mastodon had been found, must have changed, so that meant that climate was not something that could be relied on as being constant all over the world.”
Amateur musicians flock to concerts; amateur radio enthusiasts keep plugging along; amateur astronomers add to our knowledge of the universe. The interactive, networked screen makes it easier for all of these amateurs to find one another — joined by the internet as well as by their common interests. The net can be used to create intellectual common areas of all kinds, built by gift. Code is love as well as law.
Yet another reason why Ben Franklin would have loved the internet. Happy Valentines Day.
'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Jared Diamond has written a chatty book (”Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”) that suggests that metainformational depth (he doesn't use those words, but others might) is important for the success of atoms as well as informational things.
Diamond uses five parameters as bases for comparative analysis of vanished societies: (1) damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment; (2) climate change (not just global warming, but all kinds of variances); (3) hostile neighbors; (4) decreased support from friendly neighbors; (5) responses/governance mechanisms adopted in response to all of this. I'm fresh from chapters on Easter Island, Mayans, Pitcairn Island, Anasazi, Vikings, and Norse Greenland.
I once spent an hour listening to someone talk me through his snapshots of Easter Island statues. The pictures were hypnotic and the statues seemed to me to be completely mysterious — full of a message I didn't understand. Now, because of Diamond's book, I know that the reason all those eyeless Easter Island statues are lying toppled is that
1) they ran out of wood to build machines/tracks to hoist the statues up on their pedestals (eyes were separately prepared, by the way)
2) when they ran out of wood, they started to starve
3) warring tribes ran around knocking down everyone's statues
And they started carving statues in the first place because there was no other way to show off around there. Had they been less isolated, perhaps they could have come up with other tricks and avoided the destructive deforestation.
Meanwhile, clever New Guineans survive, even though isolated, by being very thoughtful about how they use their land, and very curious and experimental. One day some New Guinean brings home a little seedling that looks interesting, and presto! deforestation halted.
It looks as if Diamond's thesis is going to be that failure to see clearly where you are (and what you're doing to your surroundings) can lead to extinction. (What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree on the island think to himself as the tree fell?) We need to be better at making good group decisions, by doing things like “thinking skeptically, allowing discussions to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and having leaders occasionally leave the room.” [paraphrasing slightly, p. 439]
In other words, you need wisdom to deal with dirt, and trees, and mines. Although I don't think that ruins of NYC skyscrapers will someday be viewed with the same sense of puzzled awe that is triggered by the Easter Island statues, I'm all for better group decisionmaking. And for curious experimentation.