12 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. If we consider organizations (universities, corporations, governments and so on) as organisms (a view I do not agree with) we can argue some increase in intelligence and institutional memory through record keeping and information technology. But, in my opinion, organizations don’t have significant emergent reasoning capabilities that aren’t really more properly attributed to their members.

      What does Hidalgo have to say with respect to this quote? Can we push this argument?

  2. Jun 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWkwOefBPZY

      Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).

      Some of this is similar to:

      The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110

      Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/

      Use of Wiki version histories

      Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.

      Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.

      Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9

      I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.

      Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes

  3. May 2022
    1. These aren’t just random artifacts with no value—they are“knowledge assets” that crystallize what you know in concrete form.

      Points here for a Cesar Hidalgo reference.

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  4. Feb 2022
  5. Nov 2021
    1. But it should be observed that it is experience in mass, the experience of institutions, the experience of a generation, and not individual experience, which is of value.

      Sounds somewhat akin to Hidalgo's thesis of the personbyte in ever growing groups.

  6. Sep 2021
    1. The minds of other people can also supplement our limited individual memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, named this collective remembering “transactive memory.” As he explained it, “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally — and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t.” A transactive memory system can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Organizational research has found that groups that build a strong transactive memory structure — in which all members of the team have a clear and accurate sense of what their teammates know — perform better than groups for which that structure is less defined.

      Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.

      How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?

      How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?

      She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.

  7. Jul 2021
    1. teaching is a very special art, sharing with only two other arts-agriculture and medicine-an exceptionally im­portant characteristic.

      Note here that this analogy only goes so far. The sciences of medicine and agriculture have come leaps and bounds since the start of the industrial revolution and our outputs and expectations for both with respect to humanity have increased tremendously.

      Not so with education. While we have dramatically increased the amount of information, there still seems to be a limit to how much an individual can learn.

      César Hidalgo calls this limit the personbyte.

      The perennial question for education technology is how might we get around this limit?

      The only solution in some areas is new discoveries concatenating and compressing some of the knowledge by abstracting it to simpler spaces, as sometimes happens in physics, but generally this is relatively rare. (or is it? justify...)

  8. Oct 2020
    1. Reversing the trend toward privatization will thus require not just massive public mobilization and demand of elected officials, but also a hard turn away from efficiency as a primary value, a recognition that the building of relationships and the cultivation of care is slow and difficult and of necessity inefficient. In fact, that its value lies in its inefficiency — but making the case for such inefficiency as a necessary value requires a lot of effort, and a lot of caution.

      There's a kernel here of something about the value of links (social, business, etc.) as put forward by Cesar Hidalgo in Why Information Grows. Where is the real value? How can it best be extracted? Built up? Having a more direct means of valuing these otherwise seeming intangibles will be important in the future.

    1. You could throw the pack away and deactivate your Facebook account altogether. It will get harder the longer you wait — the more photos you post there, or apps you connect to it.

      Links create value over time, and so destroying links typically destroys the value.

  9. Apr 2019
    1. Digital sociology needs more big theory as well as testable theory.

      Here I might posit that Cesar Hidalgo's book Why Information Grows (MIT, 2015) has some interesting theses about links between people and companies which could be extrapolated up to "societies of linked companies". What could we predict about how those will interact based on the underlying pieces? Is it possible that we see other emergent complex behaviors?

  10. Nov 2018
    1. I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”—like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carrying groceries or walking long distances—and their repertoire of pro-test, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.

      I find it interesting that she's using words from information theory like "capacities" and "signals" here. It reminds me of the thesis of Caesar Hidalgo's Why Information Grows and his ideas about links. While within the social milieu, links may be easier to break with new modes of communication, what most protesters won't grasp or have the time and patience for is the recreation of new links to create new institutions for rule. As seen in many war torn countries, this is the most difficult part. Similarly campaigning is easy, governing is much harder.

      As an example: The US government's breaking of the links of military and police forces in post-war Iraq made their recovery process far more difficult because all those links within the social hierarchy and political landscape proved harder to reconstruct.