[dumbfounder]

The internet has made it very easy for people to homogenize both words and ideas very rapidly. This is the cost of making knowledge universal I guess. Maybe it’s a good thing if it allows us to progress all on the same page rather than taking the time to understand differences? If progress is good. Whatever progress is. Who knows. Although the ideas aren’t really homogenizing in a lot of cases, it is often causing dichotomies. But really it’s no more than a few factions that reinforce their homogenizations. Ok I guess it’s bad… I am rambling as much as that essay. You have increased your follow count to 6 now, good show.

[avs733]

Just as an observation about this…I’ve increasingly begun to see the term knowledge expand to encompass information as if they are equivalent. That tracks, in my field, with changes in US K-12 education and the problems we now see in college learning behaviors.

I agree with your general ramble, but found this interesting in context.

[dumbfounder]

Yeah, good point, should have said information. Knowledge cannot be transferred directly to people, only information. The person needs to understand the information to convert it into knowledge. An analogy I have heard used before is that data is the primitive, the integral of data is information, and the integral of information is knowledge.

[hardlianotion]

The point of the thing for me was that the Crimson analysis showed no change in rate of decline since 1900. So there is a need for more examples over larger timelines before we start modelling, perhaps.

The analysis also seems sensitive to the mapping of words to categories. Some kind of robustness analysis to this sensitivity would also be interesting to see.