|::| Sunday, September 01, 2002
- |::| 11:51:56 AM
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I need to spend some time thinking about "lost knowledge" -- that is, things that get lost from one regime to another (between generations, between age-sets, and so on). I used to annoy Grace Harris at UR by continually bringing up the concept, but never really went anywhere with it at the time. In technology, the examples are easy to find. Consider all the old standards about "knowing where to tap." What's kewl, and what's currently regarded as cost-effective, generally push out some basic knowledge about How Things Work Right Now (and in the future): How many COBOL coders raked in big consulting fees in '99 and '00? How desperately do you need all the old AS/400 jocks when it comes time to port your business systems to Oracle?
Email retention policies are a great example. Organizations kill their archives to protect their goal-seeking rationalizations from the light of the ethics they claim to support, but to which they seldom obtain. In the process, they jettison any formal record of their tribal, basic knowledge -- thus keeping it underground, cultural, as opposed to documented and regimented. That permits the organisation to exist above (or below) morality, or even law, if need be. By the same token, organizations can continue to (largely) ignore human desires in deference to the minimal human needs required to keep them working to further the corporate goal.
In a way, though, one could see policies that aggressively eliminiate the formal records of potentially compromising knowlege as a subversion of the "virtual life." Some human knowledge continues to be required; humans never quite make the transition to being fully interchangeable, predictable and exploitable "human resources." (At least when we were "personnel" we were persons, and not resources.)
- |::| Teleology for Fun and Prophet [02.08.31] 10:48:04 AM
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There's a notion that Natural Selection produce optimal results by definition. While that's true in terms of the relevant selection context, it's not true at all over time or -- most importantly -- with regard to human desires.
Natural Selection results in the survival of the organism, species, meme, or other entity, which most adequately fulfills the currently relevant requirements for survival and self-perpetuation. In a famous example, transport of enslaved Africans under conditions of extreme privation selected people with a tendency to sequester sodium; ultimately, that meant that the population of Africans in America had a predisposition to hypertension. The selection was optimal with regard to the ship, but not with regard to the environment that preceded or succedeed it.
In the IPO-driven market of the late '90s, behaviors or characteristics which proved most likely to improve stock price were selected. Those often included the ability to mystify the flow of capital, which is, after all, an essential nutrient to a corporation. In organismic terms, that's kind of like breatharianism: You find a lot of people who claim to do it, but if anybody really tries, they tend to... well, die.
