Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: experience (Anti-Microsoft sentiment)

Author:David McCusker
Posted:9/21/2000; 12:12:13 PM
Topic:Debunking the OSS Bazaar?
Msg #:21600 (In response to 21563)
Prev/Next:21599 / 21601

I love to pick on TV. That's the only reason I include this part.

Josh Allen: One example is television. By the time someone reaches the age of Mr. Rogers, how much television have they watched?

Hard to say. I'm two years younger than Dave Rogers. (Or did you mean the other Rogers, with the TV show? :-) I've seen about as much television as, say, an average 24 year old. I stopped watching in high school, and resumed sporadically years later, mostly for movies. I can't stomach situation comedies. (Seinfeld who?)

Josh Allen: Except on a sophomoric level, would anyone really confuse watching TV with any really useful experience.

Useful experience requires making choices and being analytical about what happens. A mix of both is best, since only choosing or analyzing alone has diminishing returns. There's not much scope for that in TV, but maybe some. (Professional visual authoring types might get more stimulus from TV analysis.)

Josh Allen: Another problem with the whole age card is that it is quite possible to gather wisdom from the experiences of others.

Yes, that works. Civilization rides on that working well.

Josh Allen: By the same token, if you take Karl Poppers "I might be wrong" to the extremes, you end up with pure relativism and this useless idea that truth is relative.

I give folks many reasons to think me a relativist. But I've actually been exploring a middle ground between objective and relative perspectives which emphasizes context. Since this doesn't fit into a traditional category, it seems to puzzle folks often. (Is the value of a chess piece absolute or relative?)

Josh Allen: As people get older, I think they often ossify and move toward the other extreme.

If older folks got really strange, it might be hard to detect this. Any sufficiently flexible person might be labeled as a simple anarchist if they defy easy categorization. (I like to play with other folks' taxonomies, the way some boys might like to pull the wings from flies. :-)

Josh Allen: Is it better to seek experiences that might challenge your wisdom, or seek validation for your wisdom by adding supporting experiences to the feedback loop? I think both are necessary. I also think it would take a pretty pompous person to say that they know what the best balance is.

I'm not sure what wisdom is, and I don't know if it correlates with age a lot. Most folks who ever struck me as wise seemed that way when younger, and just go more so over time. At some point it reaches a threshold that makes it remarkable enough to be more interesting. Others develop the ability to express what they know when the get older. Heck, it varies so much, I give up. :-)

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