The Goldfish Chronicles

How do you know when what you believe in is bullshit, and when what you believe in is your own righteousness.

This seems to me to be one of the fundamental aspects of an individuals approach to a multi-individual situation, be it a community, a society or a relationship between two individuals. So, 1..N, N..N, 1..1 or something

As a Maths student, I lack the education of many in the computing world. This makes me especially susceptible to not being aware of older wisdoms from computing [algorithms, bit-manipulation, protocol-creation] and far more aggressive in my self-education than others. It also makes it hard to know at what point my view on a computing subject has become uneducated, rather than focused and pertinant.

Being a newbie [mud upbringing showing] is easy, as you can take the view that you are a bumpkin on everything. This is probably why the Educated view that the newbie should go educate themselves [RTFM, RTFS, RTFML] is so painful to hit, but is one of the tried and tested ways in which a newbie gets educated to the next step.

Being an Educated [Wiz, Cre] is more insidious though. It is accepted that you grokk [tm, heinlein] a subject, but obviously in other areas you are still a newbie. Separating these from each other seems the tricky part, knowing when you are a newbie and when you are educated involves an extra process to double-check yourself. As you become educated in more subjects, I’m assuming it is hard to recognise the edges and things blur.

I would have assumed there was a next state, Guru, akin to humble wisemen who often seem to be in legends. However, some of the most Educated people I know don’t seem to have achieved it through humble-wisdom, they seem to have reached it via being very good at recognising their own bullshit so that either they know when to be a newbie and when to be Educated, or they avoid areas in which they are not Educated, or separate those areas. It often seems to go in hand that people in this next state are very strongly opioned in their education area and have the reputation of being a pain in the arse.

So installing a personal bullshit detector appears to be an essential step somewhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2003 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.