Friday night fortune cookie: Morpheus says...

They call it Google Maps.

the point was better shown on Jackie Brown

on that scene where Samuel Jackson was going on and on about guns to Robert DeNiro and when he leaves Deniro tells Bridget Fonda that Samuel's character seems to know a lot about guns and she tells him that he doesn't know anything, "he's just repeating stuff he heard"

Isn't 90% of what we think we know just repeating stuff we've heard, or read? We live in a culture of second hand knowledge, don't we? Of academics who study things they don't do, of people who think they understand SF because they watched Star Wars, which is rehashing what the SF books did 80 years ago? More and more I find myself beginning sentences with, "I heard," or "I read."

Isn't the nature of second hand knowledge why so many people can support policies that hurt other people? How many people know that when we invaded Iraq, CNN showed us the video game version while showing the rest of the world the bodies being carried off? I've never quite trusted CNN since.

Of course, my second hand knowledge also includes the writings of Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Nietzche, Smith, Rand, Beard, Diamond, and many, many more writers I do not regret learning from. And yet, I do understand their path better when I've tried to walk it.

Isn't 90% of what we think we know just repeating stuff we've heard, or read? We live in a culture of second hand knowledge, don't we? Of academics who study things they don't do, of people who think they understand SF because they watched Star Wars, which is rehashing what the SF books did 80 years ago?

Paul, I'm not sure that this is fair. Human culture depends on the transmission of knowledge, and therefore secondhand knowledge is inevitable and necessary; the amount of information we need to function and make sense of our world is overwhelming, and we simply can't go out and get it all ourselves. As for academics: many are at the forefront of their fields and personally making new discoveries. And as for the stories we tell each other: we've always reinterpreted old tales to make new ones since forever.

I have no problem with second-hand knowledge; but I reserve the right to test and probe it to see if it holds water. And I think those who possess first-hand knowledge have the responsibility of communicating it honestly and completely. It's when those who have first-hand knowledge fail to fulfill this responsibility (as with your example of CNN), and those who receive second-hand knowledge fail to challenge it, that we get in trouble.

Of course, my second hand knowledge also includes the writings of Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Nietzche, Smith, Rand, Beard, Diamond...

I love the writings of Diamond too. This passage in particular is, I think, a perfect expression of the human condition:

I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair...

;-)

Bluejay: all valid points. Ironically, I started out that post as a defense of saying what he'd heard, and it turned into the opposite. I wonder if I'm in a mid-life crisis and this is the philosophical side of it.