A Trip Through The Minefield of Knowledge

I have frequently been the victim of an author who has a peculiar view on a subject, which turns out to be simply wrongheaded. Because there are so many books, many more than I could purchase, read and evaluate and because turning to book reviewers is frequently just as useless as getting the wrong view from the wrong authority, the value of books can be somewhat limited.

It is easy to assume that if a book is published on a subject that the author knows something about the subject, that they are well versed in he subject and

The problem is that authors have differing views on the same subject. They have different backgrounds and differ about what is important to them. Writers generally write what they know. This is a problem, for example, in music. Thirty years ago you could not find a book explaining harmonic theory behind blues harmony. Oh, there may have been a few academic or musicological works on the subject, but generally, if you wanted to learn blues harmony you had to listen to recordings or ask a blues musician.

This was because the cohort of music theory writers disdained or held blues music in contempt, did not listen to it and thought it base or childish. Blues, they thought, lacked the sophistication of Western classical music. It was all bump, bump, bump and grind. It musicologically wasn't worth the time of day to them.

Yet, blues music contains the most sophisticated polyrhythms outside of Polynesia and the most colorful expressions and sophisticated harmonies of any music, borrowing the Western harmony and mixing it with expressive melody moans and instrumental vocalizations and "harmony" bordering on chaos and dissonance. These writers could not see (or hear) this, because they didn't want to hear or see it. They were racists or elitists or just didn't like the music. My parents, who liked 50s rock and roll, never liked singers who "yelled" and where "you couldn't understand the words." So to them, at least some of the blues based music was inaccessible because of its affront to the senses.

I noticed that despite my love of various forms of hard edged music, that even after enjoying several hours of hard rocking music, that my ears would tire of the distortion. I loved cranking up the distortion when playing electric guitar, but have to admit that hours, maybe even minutes as I grew older, became grating on the ears compared to folk music, classical guitar or classical European music (my brother found he could not concentrate on his work while listening to classical music because the strong emotions it evoked were distracting).

However understandable the reluctance to write seriously about blues music was, it was incredibly damaging to the quality of description, transcription and writing of blues and blues based music in book or sheet music form for a long time. This did not deter people from learning blues by stumbling through poorly written books, slowing down records on tape recorders and asking friends how to play licks.

But it did make it terribly confusing and difficult to learn anything about blues from books. You might ask where is this all leading other than to the ran tings of a frustrated guitar player? It raises a profound question about information, whether the "Wiki" model of authorship, collective authority, is best or whether the traditional model of authorship as a single authority is best. With the wiki model wisdom becomes refined by becoming conventional. There is a tendency for collective authorship to become settled.

(A word about why this bothers me: One of the things I was taught (part of my miseducation -- a story for another time, but an important concept as an education, because everyone gets a miseducation as well as an education) when very young was that what separated us from both societies before the introduction of movable type and before literacy, was the capacity to record knowledge in book form, by which knowledge could be transmitted to future generations and distant persons with perfect accuracy. All that was necessary to learn something, was to find a book on it, and follow the instructions. This turns out to be impractical and bordering on the absurd. Although there are rivalries between "book learning" and "experience" nearly all crafts, professions, activities engaged in by people require more than "book learning" to achieve any results. Most professions, from computer programming to music, require "folk knowledge" such as "programmer lore" or ways of solving problems, common algorithms, etc. handed down from programmer to programmer by "word of mouth" and deemed to minor to put in books. Of course, this knowledge can be vital to success in the real world of programming.)

Collective authorship can create greater accuracy, given the weight conventional wisdom formed by this authorship is ordinarily correct, than from an author with a peculiar point of view. However, you are much less likely to encounter a disruptive point of view from a radical individual who takes on a false conventional wisdom. There seems to be no solution to this problem of authority in information, other than to say sometimes conventional wisdom is correct because it reflects the intelligence of mobs and sometimes a lone wolf is correct while the conventional wisdom mob rules with a pack of profitable, self-serving lies or delusions.

So will it be the Digg model where the mob tosses the good stuff up on the heap, the Wiki model where the mob through collective wisdom and weight of numbers creates a refined collective wisdom, the Google Knowl model of collectively peer-reviewed free form works with bylines, or will it be the social network that filters knowledge through a mob of friends and groups that works best?