From: Douglas P. Wilson (dp-wilson@shaw.ca)
Date: Mon May 06 2002 - 06:45:08 MDT
Chris Williams-Goodrich <karunama@mail.com> wrote:
> i am a bit of an extropian, however i put no blind faith in science ...
Try putting your faith in technology. Technology is "know how" as
distinct from the "know what" and "know why" that are in the domain of
science. Not all technology works, and not all of technology should work
or should be used even if it does work, because not all of it is safe
(e.g. nuclear power plants), but EVERYTHING THAT DOES WORK IS TECHNOLOGY,
by definition.
Or at least by my definition, which goes roughly like this: "Technology is
the creation, collection, study, and application of tools and techniques".
I am a great believer in science, but I believe in technology more,
especially when it comes to the social sciences versus social technology.
The social sciences have just not proved themselves very successful, and
though social scientists try very hard and are much more rigorous about
experiment design and controls, etc., than physical-science scientists,
they haven't been doing all that well.
By contrast, social technology, which includes a lot of very low-tech
stuff like the WorldWideWeb, mailing lists, all law and government (very
low-tech, paleolithic, in fact), and also includes a wee little bit of
hi-tech stuff like recommender systems and collaborative filtering (e.g.
http://www.SocialTechnology.Org/casa.html) -- by contrast, as I was
saying, social technology is all over the place, some of it very good,
some of it pretty bad -- but a lot of it works, we use it all the time,
and without it we'd be uncivilised savages.
Try putting your faith in technology, and see what happens -- especially
when it comes to social, political, and personal technology.
dpw http://www.SocialTechnology.Org/dpwilson.html
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