The Criminalization of Learning in a Knowledge Based Economy.

"The right to learn is now aggressively opposed by intellectual property advocates, who want ideas elevated to the status of land, cars, and other physical assets so that unauthorized acquisition can be prosecuted as theft." - Robert Laughlin, Nobel Prize winning physicist

Sequestering knowledge under  the cloak of a freely available information-rich world is alive and well, as the barriers that scientists, engineers, etc, encounter get larger and larger.  Since the 1970s, intellectual property law (knowledge restriction law) has expanded exponentially, and as I have posted several times before, is about ready to expand once more, as many powerful forces conspire to make acquiring information dangerous, or even a crime.   Now, an innocent  flash of insight could potentially lead to to infringing on a patent or, even threaten national security!  Nevertheless, as paradoxical as it sounds, in a knowledge based economy,  real knowledge will become increasingly less available.  Why? Because, when you commodotize something, it must become less available in order to retain its value.

Sure there is a ton of disposable knowledge, on the Internet, but how useful is it?  Nobel prize winning physicist, Robert Laughlin, author of The Close of Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind claims that  increasingly, the really useful stuff is classified or privatized. The knowledge connected to how you make your living is and will become more scarce. At the same time, the information connected to advertising has and will become more plentiful.  In other words, through the dumbing down of our current public education system, absurd patent laws, and excessive disposable knowledge, the knowledge based economy will continue to increase our ignorance. Can you say scary??

Take word processing software, for example. It has made the technology of communication proprietary. It's a computer program that you must buy. In addition to the monetary cost, the price you pay is that it becomes illegal for you to know how it works. If you figure out the communications protocol and write it down on a piece of paper,  and then show someone that piece of paper, you're in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. 

And in Oregon, someone wrote a computer program to control his electric trains and promptly got sued. Why? Because the concept of controlling your train with a computer had been patented!

As more and more technical knowledge is outlawed, there is a very real danger that our most brilliant and creative minds, when trying to learn how the world works through the discoveries of others will be rendered impotent by a legal framework that prohibits them from attempting learn about the world around us .

Within the past ten years it has become illegal to to understand encrypted communication and distribute code-cracking devices.  Moreover, it is now legal for corporations to monopolize certain forms of communication; and it is possible to patent sales techniques, hiring strategies, and gene sequences. There are now attempts to patent the entire idea of Internet learning. So, if you want to teach someone over the Internet for profit, you will have to pay a liscencing fee to the people who invented Internet learning. Broad areas of science, in particular, physics and biology, are now off limits to public discourse because they are national security risks and there are notorious examples in the literature of medical research at universities that are blocked because of a patent position that a company has taken.  You can't do research on it without paying them a liscence fee. These ever increasing restrictions on fertile scientific and technological fields are creating a new Dark Age

In effect, the decision to deindustrialize is making us an even more ignorant society.  The more knowledge based our economy becomes the less knowledge there is going to be for free.  The  continuation of this trend will end up in a situation where there is nothing left but knowledge and none of it is free.

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Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence

Confucius say, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance"; however, apparently, insight into one's own limitations is lacking to say the least. People tend to be blissfully unaware of their own incompetence.

This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them.

On the other hand, top performers tend to underestimate their competence. Researchers found that people's performance estimates have very little to do with objective performance and much more to do with preconceived beliefs.

People’s estimates of their performance arise, at least in part, from a top-down approach. People start with their preconceived beliefs about their skill (e.g., “I am good at logical reasoning”) and use those beliefs to estimate how well they are doing on any specific test. This strategy at first seems to be a good one—people who believe they have logical reasoning skill should have some basis for that claim—except for one fly in the ointment. People’s impressions of their intellectual and social skills often correlate only modestly, and sometimes not at all, with measures of their actual performance (Falchikov & Boud, 1989). Indeed, and perhaps more important, people just tend to hold overinflated views of their skills that cannot be justified by their objective performance (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Weinstein, 1980). Therefore, preconceived notions of skill can lead people to err in their performance estimates.

This inability to recognize one's own deficiencies might explain some people's lack of effort in trying to improve their skills, or performance. It also might explain American Idol.

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Information Overload: Separating the Crucial from the Trivial

With the arrival of the Internet, the amount of information available is estimated to double every 18 months or sooner. This continuous flood of information with no frame of reference for managing it makes separating the crucial from the trivial an anxiety producing and overwhelming task.

Society has a harder time adjusting when media becomes more abundant than when it is scarcer, so every time a great shift occurs in the delivery or distribution of the body of knowledge that is available to society - such as the printing press - people at the time of its occurrence  feel overwhelmed, and unable to focus or keep up  with the overflow of material.  The new media can be very distracting, in part, because it is has not yet found its place...it’s a novelty and novelties divert our attention.

Institutions, such as implementing an entire structure to teach children to read were built to mitigate the downsides and increase the value of literacy after the printing press arrived.  Billions of dollars and countless hours per year are required each and every year in order for   print to be a valuable thing. In the same way, new institutions will have to be created to ensure the value of  this new media.

Basex estimates, based on data it has gathered, that information overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion to $1 trillion per year  in lost productivity and reduced innovation.  This is based on information overload in the office and how much businesses are losing due to inefficiency of workers who are changing taks so often that when they go back to the first task, they have long recovery time where they try and regain focus and that is incredibly costly to a business when you have employees who aren’t focusing at all. 

Breakdown of knowledge worker:

28%-Unnecessary interruptions followed by "recovery time" to get back on track

25%-Creating content-productive!

20%-Meetings-some productive, some not

15%-Searching for information (and an estimated 50% of searches fail)

12%-Thinking and reflecting

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"Bedside Ingenuity" Tackling Old Problems in New Ways

Atul Gawande, author of Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, is inspirational, not only to the medical profession, but to all of us, to make better use of the knowledge we already have,

In order to better ourselves it is not always necessary to discover the new; it is just as important to continuously assess the performance of the confirmed procedures currently used, always willing to acknowledge and interrogate failure in order to find a better solution.

Dr. Gawande emphasizes the importance of applying "bedside ingenuity" when it's obvious that standardized methods are failing to improve the situation. Sometimes it's necessary to throw away the textbook and allow the mind to explore old problems in new ways. We often hear the phrase "thinking outside the box", especially as it relates to gaining employment. "Bedside ingenuity" takes that phrase one step further by requiring introspection, reflection, and a genuine concern for what we are tying to either repair or change.

The three core requirements Gawande describes for success in medicine could easily be applied to many other situations.

Diligence – attention to detail.

To do right — despite moral obstacles.

Ingenuity – arising “from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions."

Take a grocery clerk whose main job is bagging people's groceries. Most of us would think this is a fairly insignificant position having very little impact in the grand scheme of things and that it would be silly to think we could apply any of this to performing a job like that. An elderly person or a person in poor health would disagree. The grocery clerk's performance; the way he packs bags treats the person, whether or not he offers additional help could very possibly go a long way in determining the kind of day that person may have.

The stakes are higher in medicine than probably any other field because the smallest mistake, oversight, lack of reflection, introspection or concern, can lead to loss of life. Fortunately, for most of us, this is not the case, but because most of what we do whether it is shampooing a person's hair, bagging groceries or presiding over a country..."We the People" have a much bigger impact on the lives of others than we think.

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When "Smart" People are "Stupid"

I always thought the difference between a robot and a human being is the human being's innate drive to make sense of the world. Whereas a robot or computer absorbs or passively receives objective knowledge and responds in such a way that it has been preprogrammed to respond, a human being actively constructs knowledge by integrating new information and experiences into what they have previously come to understand, revising and reinterpreting old knowledge in order to reconcile it with the new. In other words, human beings try to make sense of what they have perceived, learned and reasoned by attempting to fit it into the context of which is it acquired.

Apparently, this is not always the case as the following story indicates.

A Lifesaving Checklist

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