"The Apology" by Socrates: Reading Response to Selected Quotes

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Even though he spent much of his life looking outward, Socrates was a great believer in the practice of self-reflection. Like the saying goes: A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. This is to say that if you don't learn from your past (mistakes and failures) you will continue to repeat yourself, never growing in the way which is uniquely human. Socrates believed this so unequivocally that he tells us that if you aren't taking the time to contemplate and reflect on your current state that you might as well be dead. Despite being rather extreme, we could likely gain a lot by adopting this teaching of his in the world today. With the number of distractions available to us at the highest it's ever been, we spend almost no time looking at our own life or reflecting on our past. Online videos, smart phone apps, radio, books, TV, digital music downloads, magazines, social networks and, in general, consumerism, compete for the limited amount of hours we have available each day.

“To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.”

This is really one of my favorite quotes by Socrates. In this quote he is telling us that we should keep our mind open to new ideas and never stop learning, for once we do, once we think that we know everything and no longer need any other information or knowledge and that is a dangerous situation. The reason people have been looking for the "secret of life" forever is because the secret is as big as all of life itself. The amount that we actually know compared to what we may know in the future is so small and insignificant that we might as well say that we know nothing at all.

It's Good To Be Bad

Though I have probably had several times in my life when I had an emotional flight or fight response to knowledge or facts that challenged or undermined my belief system, I can only think of one that happened fairly recently. The time was about 3 months ago during November of 2014, and the event was the random room checks by the fire and safety inspector. My roommate's and my room got checked while we were away at classes and when I came back, we had a notice that the powerblock I had plugged into my powerstrip to charge my various electronic devices was not allowed. Rather than first giving me a warning to remove the violation, they simply wrote us up for a violation and fined us $50 each.

When I first found out about this I was shocked, not just because I now knew I had been doing something which was not allowed all along but that I was not given a chance to correct the behavior first before receiving punishment. (For those who are unaware how the process works, usually the RA for your floor catches all of the on campus housing violations which you might commit when they inspect your room earlier in the year. They give you a warning and allow you to remove or fix the violation before receiving any punishment. Our RA had not informed me that I was doing anything wrong.) Paying the fine wasn't the issue for me, the real reason I was sent into a flight or flight response is that this actually challenged my belief system. 

I have always been one who believed in the good of humanity. "What goes around comes back around" and "You gotta do a little good to get a little good", you know, stuff like that. Because of this, I always take the time to do the rigt thing even when it may cause me inconvenience. I turn off lights when they are left on in order to save electricity, I help people pick up change when they drop it all over the ground, and I stay after an event ends to help clean up and put away chairs and tables. Sure, they might be little things, but a lot of other people still don't bother to do them. On top of this, I also avoid breaking the rules, so while many other people on my floor choose to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, or steal things from the dining hall, I don't because it goes against my morales.

Now don't think that I believe I deserve a medal, a slow clap or something in return for me going out of my way to help people and obeying the rules. As I said: I obey the rules because of my morals and I help people because of the smile it puts on their faces. However, when I got fined as punishment for doing something wrong which I didn't know was wrong I felt that it devalued all of the little things I do to be a "good person". The way it felt to me is that I was doing all of the previously mentioned things to improve the Ithaca College community and the only thing I was actually getting in return was a $50 fine (well actually $100 cause I volunteered to pay my roommate's half since he had nothing to do with it). And on the flip side, the people who were committing violations or worse didn't face any punishment because they were aware that they were breaking the rules and were purposely hiding it from the authorities who be. Overall this whole experience just made me realize why their is so little good in the world: we don't reward good behavior as much as our society incentivizes cheating the system, breaking the rules, and scamming your friend just as long as you don't get caught.

"Too Big To Know" by David Weinberger: Prologue/Chapter 1 Summary/Response

Say goodbye to the paper trail, the reign of 'experts', and possibly your sanity. According to David Weinberger, the internet has ushered in a new era of knowledge; one that shatters the traditional hierarchical pyramid of data, information, knowledge and wisdom into a vast amorphous network which is literally too big for one person to ever consume. This is the main idea Weinberger is trying to convey in his book Too Big To Know, and he wastes no time acquainting readers to it. In the Prologue, Weinberger presents the idea of a network of knowledge and introduces his infamous phrase ... He also shows his negative view of the internet with phrases like "everyone with any stupid idea" to describe internet content, while balancing it nicely with how he believes it helps improve science, business, and other things.
Weinberger spends the first chapter of Too Big To Know going into more depth about how the internet is reshaping the way knowledge and information is filtered and organized. He writes about how editorial, curatorial, and professional filters have been replace with algorithmic and social techniques only popular in the age of the internet. These new techniques only sort the knowledge and information so that it is easy to find rather than filtering the verified and expert backed to the front, radically changing our most basic strategy of knowing from knowing-by-reducing to including. Weinberger is neither endorsing our newest and messiest form of communication nor praising it for the strength which it gets from the variety of people in it, he is simply discussing the changes which are happening to our complex system of knowledge.
I really liked how Weinberger defined knowledge as "actionable information" (even though it was Russel Ackoff who said it originally). He also used an interesting quote by Milan Zeleny which described knowledge as "the recipe that turns information into bread, while data are like the atoms that make up the flour and the yeast". Because we rarely stop to think about what knowledge is, I realized that if someone had asked me to define knowledge before I read the Prologue and 1st Chapter of Weinberger's book that I likely wouldn't have been able to. Weinberger used the DIKW pyramid a lot when talking about how our filter system of the past used to function and then compared it to the web-like structure of our knowledge system today. By using these shapes to describe this fundamental change, he made the concept very easy to grasp and picture visually.