There’s nothing clear about me missing the point Mr. Barbarian.
What were we talking about in the first place?? Good knowledge wasn’t it, which in Stephenson’s argument is knowledge that brings about beneficial results. It doesn’t have to be bug free and I dispensed with the qualifiers to the Marx argument because I don’t have time to constantly write things out over and over and over again. Whether the idea is ORIGINALLY bug-free or not is irrelevant as long as it brings beneficial results, it is whether it has been corrupted after creation that is important.
Think Chrisitan ideals, good solid ideals, love thy neighbour, etc. Now that some of the ideals were orginally ‘coded’ badly is essentially irrelevant and I never said they weren’t (I really don’t want to keep using computer speak as we are essentially talking about ideas and the corruption of ideas here) This imperfect but generally beneficial code was then corrupted, for example in the Middle ages by focusing on the ceremony of religion instead of the ideals and keeping the scripture from the meek and using it to get them to do what Bishops, Cardinals, etc. wanted them to.
That is what Stephenson is talking about, as I interpret it from what Pax said. Now if you were paying attention there you’d noticed I moved from talking about knowledge to talking about ideas. There was a reason for this.
My beef with the argument, apart from that it’s a Dawkin’s rip-off, is that it talks about knoweldge. Knowledge is universally regarded as true, ignoring subjectivist objections such as Marshall mcD’s (not that they’re not valid points). Most ideas that are floating around in our society are not true. I highlighted this by using the atom and the ideas about tax, etc. So Stephenson has firstly incorrectly identified knowledge as ‘software’ when in fact it is ideas, which do not need the qualifier of being True to be good.
Now what highlighted to me that Stephenson hasn’t thought about what he is writing was the phrase “Information Hygiene”. The phrase conjures up to me the idea that for an idea to be beneficial or good, it cannot have been corrupted. And I take objection to that too. I was trying to demonstrate that an uncorrupted idea, such as pure Marxism, can be destructive. And I was implying that a corrupted idea, such as European social democracy, a cross between marxism, capitalism and indirect democracy, with a massive slice of misunderstanding by the majority of occupants of those social democracies, can be very beneficial.
And the little bit about the white lies, it was meant to underline the whole idea, every white lie is a corrupted piece of knowledge. And it works for society better if it is corrupted as a majority of people wouldn’t know what to do with the uncorrupted knowledge, which could cause societal problems, or just wouldn’t understand, which could also cause problems. And I think the communists adequately demonstrated my point. As are Mugabe’s henchmen, where they have taken knowledge of democracy and misunderstood it and turned it into the idea of mob rule. They would have been better off with the white lie idea of democracy.
So it’s not that society survives despite the little white lies, but because of them. They are the grease in a society’s axel, they help the world run without constantly having to explain things to people. People get given a corrupted idea by society because in the long run it is for the benefit of society. Don’t misinterpret this that it’s fine to decieve people, as on many things it’s not, but there are a lot of things that the world works better when people are allowed to believe things which are, on the whole, not entirely true.
Am I still missing the point?
Kube - If we take it as ideas instead of knowledge, an idea is good if it brings some sort of benefit to society as a whole in a utilitarian sense. This is vaguely subjective as it’s difficult to measure hapiness, but there are obvious examples, Nazi genocide was a bad idea, human rights were a generally good idea.
