Why Geeks Will Save The Earth (and other tantalizing conclusions)
Posted on: August 28th, 2007 by perkisetIn the August edition of Wired magazine there’s a story about how Geeks will save the earth. It’s interesting, because of the premise that, because Geeks understand huge numbers, they can understand the notion of why saving one person is good, but saving a million people is, in fact, better.
The article corroborates a theory I’ve had for quite a while now – that the reason people will get pissed off hearing that a local government employee took a two hour lunch (and all the money that this represents to them in tax dollars) will get top billing on the news and spur fantastic public outrage, but the notion of us coming up on a trillion-with-a-T dollars spent in Iraq barely works people up at all - is because of this very thing.
The problem is frame of reference and context. As numbers get larger, they get harder to understand and therefore are less grokable by the average Joe and is why, to the thesis of the article, that Bill Gates makes an excellent, if unlikely, philanthropist.
But I hypothesize another derivative: it is this very “Large Number” understanding that makes the BH community so different. Really smart geeks understand the notion of a million websites, with a couple hundred thousand pages of just as many keyword phrase - and the systems and techniques for managing it all - as effortlessly as some people walk their dog. It is this very same principal that makes the war between the Googlites and the AdSenseSlammers both fasncinating and utterly incomprehensible to the normal web user.
An excellent read and a good gear turner, it can be found here:
fantomaster
First, the ability of geeks, nerds, black hats etc. being capable of scaling up their cognitive grasp of big numbers does seem a mite debatable, begging the question how this should come about in the first place. “Because it’s their job”, as the article states, seems a rather lame explanation when it’s actually arguing that our (i.e. human) inability to do so is probably “hardwired” into our system.
Because you can’t really have it both ways: It’s either Darwing or Lamarck - LOL
More importantly perhaps, what the article fails to address in any way is motivation or, rather, perceived advantage of anywhich action.
E.g. there’s tons of plausible reasons why Bill Gates has turned philanthropist: It may be an act of compensation, of vicarious living, of narcissist megalomania, of private fetishism, of proactive contrition, etc. etc. (Not saying that any of this actually applies - just pointing out some possibilities off the cuff.)
Lacking which, you can be capable of spinning googols as much as you like - it’ll still remain stuck in the realm of mere abstract mindfuck. (Obviously, crunching numbers is a highly abstract activity anyway - and not necessarily one which will aid us in coping with hands on real world issues, either.)
What I did like was the hearing analogy - it’s probably a fairly accurate one and while it doesn’t contribute a terrible lot to explaining our propensity to relate to smaller numbers rather than larger, even in their incarnations as fellow humans, it may indeed be a pointer which sensory mechanisms to explore further down the road.
Personally, I think it’s really more about individuals owning up to their intrinsic personal capacity for abstraction (mathematical as well as social/societal) by adopting professions (or even hobbies) that seem to accomodate them the most.
(E.g. consider the question why some people will opt for the geek’s life in the first place - after all, it’s nothing set in stone when you’re born. Or is it?)
As for “rescuing the Earth” itself, I guess I prefer the time proven stance developed and adopted by my old friends, the gnostics. Or as that neo-gnostic arch-cynic Cioran put it once in his “Short History of Decay”: “Injustice governs the universe. All that is made and all that is unmade therein carries the imprint of a corrupt fragility, as it matter were the fruit of an outrage in the womb of nothingness.”
Which, of course, may or may not be an entirely different story, depending on whom you choose to ask…
perkiset
Yeah, what he said LOL.
Actually FM, I agree that the notion re. Uncle Bill is a bit thin and superficial, and you’re right - whether it’s the job that imparts the capabilitiy for the grasp of large and complex data or those that have the ability to grasp large and complex data are drawn to particular jobs is a more penetrating question - but at the core, I think this illustrates a core human fallibility (and/or capability, depending on how you look at it) and describes how to either exploit or circumvent it.