Continuations

This summer I have been blogging less. That’s largely because I have been reading more and also been spending more time thinking about some of my favorite topics. All of this has me more convinced than ever that we need to invest heavily in elucidating the interconnections of knowledge. Way too much of our teaching and learning occurs in highly fragmented pieces. I have written about this before but now I have an idea for what to do about it. I want to help organize knowledge around basic con...

We spend a lot of time in tech inventing and building new things. Some people are perfectly happy doing so without needing a deeper reason — some simply want success, others wealth, and many are excited about the potential to make the world a better place. Still I am struck by an undercurrent of dissatisfaction even among people who have accomplished a lot. I attribute that to the lack of a deeper purpose. Few people in tech seem to accept an easy religious answer to the question of why we ar...

As our son reminded me the other day, the classical definition of knowledge, going as far back as Plato, are statements that are justified, true and believed. Each of those criteria though is problematic and lacks a clear meaning, despite the best efforts in epistemology. I have become enamored with a completely different approach that considers knowledge as the subset of information that is reproduced by humans over time. This interpretation is my reading of David Deutsch’s views on knowledg...

Yesterday we landed a probe on a comet. I am saying we because this is a major accomplishment for humanity. For reference, powered heavier-than-air flight was invented only a tad more than one hundred years ago. It is important to really let this sink in. After millennia of dreaming about flying into the skies we went in a little over a century all the way to steering a craft to line up with a comet traveling at 40,000 miles an hour! What makes all of this possible is human ingenuity together...