I think I might now have the market cornered on the combination of information security, the philosophy of language, and the I Ching. 😄 (I’m not making an attempt to speak accurately.)
An interesting issue that parallels this one is the question of the domains in which we want to encourage people to compete. For instance, the biathlon in the winter Olympic games combines cross-country skiing 🎿 with rifle shooting 🎯. If we can imagine combining those into a single sport, why can’t we imagine awards for explaining concepts from physics in the most verbally and/or visually poetic way that has genuine explanatory power? People are attempting to do such things but might not be getting all of the credit they deserve, and as soon as people are getting more credit, there will be more interest. What I’m thinking about is in the direction of attempts to view the “journey” as important as the “destination”, which I would say was famously illustrated by Douglas Hofstadter in GEB.
I think of it like the catch-phrase from Field of Dreams: ‘Build it and they will come.’ As soon as you can define a goal post, people will compete to get there, as long as it’s been officially sanctioned as deserving of recognition. (Have you heard of competitive cup stacking? 😆) There is nothing at all inherently wrong with the desire to compete. Things turn sour only when you or your supporters feel as though you’ve failed if you haven’t reached first place. The interesting thing about competing is that sometimes there is more than one way to “win”. I could mentioned the 4-man Jamaican bobsleigh team in the 1988 winter Olympic games. They lost the competition because they did not even officially finish, but they had a movie made about them, while nobody remembers who won first place that year. I could also mention the game of chess that the knight played against Death at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s renowned movie The Seventh Seal. I won’t spoil it for you in case you want to watch it; however, it does raise important questions about the nature of intelligence that are all the more obvious in light of the association between artificial intelligence and the game of chess. ♜♚♛
I think I might now have the market cornered on the combination of information security, the philosophy of language, and the I Ching. 😄 (I’m not making an attempt to speak accurately.)
An interesting issue that parallels this one is the question of the domains in which we want to encourage people to compete. For instance, the biathlon in the winter Olympic games combines cross-country skiing 🎿 with rifle shooting 🎯. If we can imagine combining those into a single sport, why can’t we imagine awards for explaining concepts from physics in the most verbally and/or visually poetic way that has genuine explanatory power? People are attempting to do such things but might not be getting all of the credit they deserve, and as soon as people are getting more credit, there will be more interest. What I’m thinking about is in the direction of attempts to view the “journey” as important as the “destination”, which I would say was famously illustrated by Douglas Hofstadter in GEB.
I think of it like the catch-phrase from Field of Dreams: ‘Build it and they will come.’ As soon as you can define a goal post, people will compete to get there, as long as it’s been officially sanctioned as deserving of recognition. (Have you heard of competitive cup stacking? 😆) There is nothing at all inherently wrong with the desire to compete. Things turn sour only when you or your supporters feel as though you’ve failed if you haven’t reached first place. The interesting thing about competing is that sometimes there is more than one way to “win”. I could mentioned the 4-man Jamaican bobsleigh team in the 1988 winter Olympic games. They lost the competition because they did not even officially finish, but they had a movie made about them, while nobody remembers who won first place that year. I could also mention the game of chess that the knight played against Death at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s renowned movie The Seventh Seal. I won’t spoil it for you in case you want to watch it; however, it does raise important questions about the nature of intelligence that are all the more obvious in light of the association between artificial intelligence and the game of chess. ♜♚♛