Alot of people bring up alot of subjects in this forum, but how many of us take on boardthis knowledge? what is good and bad knowledge and how do we define it.

This message is about the spread of good knowledge. It compares good and bad knowledge and demonstrates the role of bad knowledge in spreading good knowledge.

Good Knowledge

Each person must learn good knowledge on their own in order that good knowledge infects them.

Good knowledge must be learned by a person in order that the person gets infected.

Good knowledge is hard to learn. In order to acquire a piece of good knowledge one already has to be endowed with some good knowledge.

To learn a piece of science you need to know the basics. To learn a theorem in mathematics you need to have much knowledge so that you can understand the theorem.

Good knowledge cannot spread by thoughtless imitation. In order that good knowledge can spread by imitation, the imitator must already understand very much of what someone is trying to convey.

If you want to implant a piece of good knowledge in a person, when that piece of knowledge is incompatible with that person's current set of ideas, then you must first implant many other related ideas to reduce the incompatibility.

In other words, you have to teach that person simpler and related ideas and gradually develop a conducive environment, before your original idea can be accepted by that person.

Spreading good knowledge requires either learning or teaching. Somebody has to do the learning or somebody has to do the teaching before good knowledge can spread to another person.

The considerations above make it seem difficult for good knowledge to spread. There is, however, a very interesting way good knowledge spreads. It spreads through bad knowledge.


Bad knowledge

Bad knowledge is simplified or distorted. It's not the real thing but it carries some of its properties.

Bad knowledge is usually easy to imitate. Bad knowledge is often widespread in society.

The important thing is that a piece of bad knowledge usually univocally points to a piece of good knowledge. The following passages explain this thesis clearly.

A piece of bad knowledge often contains enough inspiration for a perspicacious person to decode it. A piece of bad knowledge often touches on the essence. It is often vaguely related to the truth. It is often true, under some conditions only.

A perspicacious person may be properly inspired even by bad knowledge. Such a person can filter out the informational noise and see clearly through the bad knowledge and create good knowledge. Coming in touch with bad knowledge can inspire perspicacious people. They will take away the bad stuff and develop the good stuff on their own. Bad knowledge can often be developed into good knowledge. Bad knowledge can be inspirational. Upon contact with bad knowledge a perspicacious person can re-create the good knowledge that gave birth to the bad knowledge.

Good knowledge is thus spread in the form of bad knowledge. Imagine this scenario. One good scientist comes up with a piece of good knowledge. Some journalists and some worse scientists misunderstand the idea. They simplify it and sensationalize it, they make it easier to spread. The thing that spreads now is bad knowledge. It becomes widespread and persists for three decades without anyone really understanding it. Then, after three decades, a young bright scientists gets in touch with the bad knowledge and using his insight and his sharp mind he re-creates the original good idea.

It is not the idea itself that has been spreading for those three decades. A distorted version has been around, rather than the original. Still, it was enough for the original version to jump from the first scientist to the other scientist. In a way, good knowledge can spread through bad knowledge.

Sharpseers are people who can see the truth in bad knowledge. Sharpseers are those who can decode bad knowledge. Sharpseers pick up the merit in bad knowledge.

A thought provoking post. I think GOOD and BAD are not sufficient to explain the situation. I think we have HIGH PRIORITY information, LOW PRIORITY information, DISTORTED information. The distortion may be accidental or deliberate. I think LOW PRIORITY and DISTORTED are commonly deliberately mixed to waste people's time and keep them ignorant.

I worked for IBM for 4 years. I built my first computer a couple of months after I started with them and studied the schematics so I understood how it worked. Studying the diagrams of IBMs machines revealed a basic similarity in all of them. This basic sameness is called the VON NEUMANN MACHINE ARCHITECTURE or VON NEUMANN ARCHICECTURE.

I never heard or read the term "von Neumann machine" in the entire 4 years I was at IBM. I didn't learn it until years after I quit. I didn't ask myself until years after that: "How could I work for the biggest computer company in the world and not hear about von Neumann machines?" Somebody there had to know. The competition in this society is largely based on information hiding.

This is possible but it can waste a great deal of time, months, even years.

A Google search on "How computers work" yields 65,900 hits.

A search on "von Neumann machines" yields 13,900 hits.

A von Neumann machine uses address lines to access memory so explaining its workings requires mentioning them.

A search on "von Neumann machine" and "address lines" yields 57 hits.

Knowing the GOOD or HIGH PRIORITY knowledge to search for eliminated scanning 65,000 hits. A good use for this site is sharing HP knowledge and saving each other time.

umbrarchist

Tacit knowledge is what you would refer to as information hiding, tacit knowledge gives you the competitive advantage for example deep in a bank vault somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia there is a piece of paper with 17 or 18 mostly common ingredients on it. Mix those items in the right proportions under the proper conditions, and you re-create the world's most popular soft drink: Coca-Cola. Billions of people across the globe know the name, but rumor has it that only 3 or 4 company executives, including the company's chief chemist, know the exact formula from that piece of paper in that mysterious vault. Special undisclosed measures are taken to ensure the safety of these individuals, as if they were royalty. They rarely travel together, and when one dies, the others must approve his successor.


KFC secures its recipe in a bank vault. This one is somewhere in Louisville, Kentucky. To ensure that spice vendors don't know the formula, the secret blend of eleven herbs and spices is mixed at two different locations and then combined elsewhere with the aid of an IBM processing system. All this technology, secrecy and security for a formula that used to be mixed by KFC's founder, Colonel Harland Sanders, on the concrete floor of his own backyard porch.


This is tacit knowledge that exists the competitive advantage from a business point of view. Secret societies that exist all aroundthe world have tacit knowledge to give them the advantagefrom a social point of view.