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From: arch_ems@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: What to know
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Date: 1 Sep 89 14:47:38 GMT
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Organization: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
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>In article <56543@aerospace.AERO.ORG>, abbott@aerospace.aero.org (Russell J. Abbott) writes:
>> In this world of instantly accessible information that we are
>> constructing I'm beginning to wonder what one should actually bother to
>> learn.  That is, why know something when one can look it up using an
>> information locator service?  I also wonder what the difference is
>> between knowing something and knowing where to find out about something.

I think that it is interesting to note at this juncture the
argument attributed to Socrates regarding books -- there was
an philosphical opinion in Greek times that the reading and
writing of books was a destructive practice -- it allowed
people to stop relying entirely on their memories.  It seems
to me that there is a direct correlation between the book/
memory argument and the learning/information retrieval one.
The acceptance of books as an information media did indeed
allow people to stop relying entirely on their memories -- with
the result being a vastly greater ability to 'manage ever
larger amounts of information.'  The notion of the specialty
that one would have to learn emerged (at least in part) because
the varying terminologies, massive numbers of books, and 
multiple information sources became too great for one individual
to 'remember.'  Thus we had to learn how to find things out
in our individual specialties.  Many lawyers have told me that
the majority of law school is about learning how to look things
up in a library.  I think this phenomena is fairly wide spread.
The advance of information retrieval systems will (initially)
free people from narrow specialties since the capacity for
knowing where to look for information will be vastly extended
through artificial intelligence, expert systems, neural nets, or
whatever your favorite retrieval system is.

Information Retrieval might eliminate our need to learn alot of
things that can mor easily be retrieved as necessary in the same
way that the introduction of books allowed the Greeks to stop
remembering a lot of things that could more easily be written.

By the way, I have been writing 'book' when I meant to be writing
'writing'  The text I had in mind in particular is Plato's Phaedrus
where the story of the Egyptian god of learning presenting the
Pharoh with the gift of writing is related.  Of course there are
many interesting transformations that the book had on our culture
and my comments regarding specialization probably have more to do
with the advent of the book.  Putting aside the question of the
historical reality of technological advances, an interesting
model for the development of information technologies could be
a psuedo-economic one:

Stage 1 -- Verbal culture -- A limited amount of information
  primarly stories (entertainment) and crafts

--as story-telling and crafts develop over time and peoples
begin to settle into particular geographic areas it becomes
increasingly desirable to keep written records--

Stage 2 -- Written culture -- Writing emerges as a valuable
  technology to store and convey the increasing amount of
  economic data, entertainment, and skills (sword making etc)

--crafts people begin to gather in guilds, the sciences emerge
as a way of furthering technical achievment, economic transactions
become more complex -- in short an information explosion--

Stage 3 -- Publishing culture -- At first used to convey the
text that everyone wanted (the Bible) soon the printing press
was being used for everything -- to convey and store information.
The book was popularized about fifty years after the printing 
press and fueled the growth of knowledge and accumulation of
information.

-- as in all of the above cases, the advance of a new technology
was heralded by an increasing amount of information and then
the new technology in turn fueled the growth of information...

Stage 4 -- Electronic culture -- Instant access to exact infor-
mation from an ever increasing pool of common data.  It will
soon become more important to have access to good information 
management tools than it will be to have expert knowledge of
a particular narrow specialization. This too will change.. I
wonder what technology awaits us out beyond information retrieval
systems -- I'm sure that Guttenberg and Aldus could never have
imagined a Sparcstation or Macintosh...

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