101 Interesting Things, part fifty-four (b): The WizKID Epistemic Framework - Theory & Practice

Last time, I introduced the information science department's WizKID epistemic framework and listed a few advantages it has over the philosophy department's JTB model of knowledge.  Today I'll be talking for a somewhat long time about some theoretical weirdness that comes up from the structure of the framework, and then for a considerably shorter time about some practical consequences and what they mean for our own knowledge construction.

101 Interesting Things, part fifty-four (a): The WizKID Epistemic Framework - Intro & Advantages

Philosophers as a discipline are still stuck on the Justified True Belief (JTB) model of knowledge, even though Gettier showed pretty effectively where that breaks down.  But even better, information scientists have made a replacement model that works, is quantifiable, and more accurately reflects how we construct and use knowledge in real life.  I hope that one day philosophers manage to bring this better model over to their side, but I'm not interested in doing that because I'd have to fight against the tide and I'd really rather just do my own productive work.

But if you wanna know how knowledge really works, and get in on the ground floor of cutting-edge epistemology, then have I got something for you!

Thoughts on Techno-Criticism

A Faceborg friend recently tagged me in a wonderful article on technology's mechanisms for hijacking the human mind.  Tristan Harris, the author, provides a lot of valuable in-depth insight at a very accessible level, but seems to miss the forest for the trees (no article can cover everything, though).  I wanted to rap a little about the bigger picture elements outside Harris' scope.  First, I'll provide some basics on sociotechnical systems, a little history on community informatics, and then I'll be talking about implications for media literacy.  As this is my primary area of interest and expertise, I'll mostly be riffing today, rather than providing the usual spray of links.

No, not - ugh, never mind.  (Image from... Pak's Wholesale?  What?)

Information, Entropy, and the End of the Universe

One of the first readings for my survey class was a review of James Gleick's The Information:  A History, a Theory, a Flood.  It's a fun read and I highly recommend it, touching as it does on a lot of the main points in the history of information theory, putting everything from Claude Shannon to Wikipedia into context.  What's more, it does what any good book review ought to do:  it makes me want to read the book.

But then the reviewer went and said a dumb thing:

The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole.  Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information.  The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems.  In the living and the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest.  Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information.  The technology arising from Shannon's discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.

There are a few things wrong with this.