X hits the spot

1st
May

549 notes

NexNote: Justin Knapp, 1,000,000 edits on Wikipedia - slow clap. Hooray for free culture!
thedailywhat:
Everybody Needs A Hobby of the Day: One man, 1,000,000 edits: Justin Knapp, a 30-year-old Wikipedia editor from Indiana, has spent the bulk of his free time since 2003 giving the open-source encyclopedia the ol’ spit-and-polish, and he’s finally hit seven digits. And that’s easier said than done, considering the site is the sixth most-visited in the world.

Among his crowning achievements on the site is the bibliography on the George Orwell entry, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world; it took Knapp more than 100 hours to complete. He also has tasked himself with keeping the site’s information on music albums up-to-date. And all for what?

“I’ve never accepted any restitution for my work on Wikipedia — it’s purely voluntary. … Far be it for me to say that it’s an act of love to edit Wikipedia. But I really do feel like it helps other human beings. That makes me feel good — knowing that somehow I can be a small part of helping someone who I’ll never know.”

[gizmodo]

"Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude (He who has begun is half done: dare to know!)."

– Horace’s Epistularum liber primus

18th
February

0 notes

Six Things That Are Dead, According to Harold Bloom

“Celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom turns eighty-two this year and is still publishing and teaching. In his honor, I’ve compiled a list of six things he’s outlived.”

The Truth Wears Off

“Is there something wrong with the scientific method? “

George Steiner, a certain idea of knowledge

“Literature, philosophy, science: today, our tools for understanding the world are developing separately, regrets the renowned intellectual and humanist. However, culture remains a saving grace, particularly in Europe. Excerpts.”

Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age

“Human knowledge is based on memory. But does the digital age force us to remember too much? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we must delete and let go”

The Information

“How the Internet gets inside us.”

How We Know

“The central dogma says, “Meaning is irrelevant.” Information is independent of the meaning that it expresses, and of the language used to express it. Information is an abstract concept, which can be embodied equally well in human speech or in writing or in drumbeats.”

Nice to meet your big idea

“How useful are global gatherings that invite great minds to share ideas and innovations in person?”

22nd
February

191 notes

I love Shit you dont know you dont know. Haha
proofmathisbeautiful:

gchoate17:

maxistentialist:

Here’s a great article about 3 types of knowledge.

Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?

There are three types of knowledge:
Stuff you know
Stuff you know you don’t know
Stuff you don’t know you don’t know
Most people assume that learning is adding as much as possible to group “a,” but learning predominantly involves moving as much as possible out of group “c.”

Along these lines, “wisdom” may be defined as the ability to not be dangerous. So what then is the point of education and experience? Your professors and teachers (and typical exam structure) would lead you to believe that you must cram as much information as possible into the shit you know category.
I am going to be bold and suggest that this is wrong. The goal isn’t to put as much as possible into the first category, it’s to take as much as possible out of the third category.

Basically - the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. This is more or less what Plato said.
Be wary of people who think they know exactly what they are doing.

They legitimately think they know everything. The thing is, they don’t. These people are usually very egotistical (not to be confused with simply having a healthy ego) and don’t realize how little they really know. In other words, they have far more in the third category (shit they don’t know they don’t know), and far less in the second category (shit they know they don’t know). The first category is probably more or less the same.