|
In fact, when we are relaxing we avoid useful information. "Advertising is Fun's evil twin brother. This is why some people do not like my Facebook posts and Twitter updates. Once you realize this the email variety is not as bad as we think.Gaining real knowledge has a cost. What is more, it is not kept secret because it is technical in nature, rather, we define it as technical when it is kept secret. OK, I'll just admit it, I am a lousy book reviewer. So, rather than go through the motions, I have decided to just post my nuggets that I have taken away from Robert B. Rather than access to all knowledge, it has become a great cover for those who want some knowledge hidden.
The closer you get to knowing, the more likely you will end up in jail.Explaining a genuinely new idea is extremely difficult because the listener does not possess the contextual knowledge of the speaker.Most entertainment is the celebration of disposable knowledge. The two go everywhere together." If you want to enjoy yourself from free you have to accept advertising.TV commercials are spam. (Sorry, but I do not plan to stop. What is worse, the more you try to reduce the cost of gaining knowledge, the more spam you will have.I close with this quote, "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." This is a dangerous belief. Let me quote from the book, "Soap operas are enjoyable because their intellectual maintenance costs are low."All advertising is information you do not want to see. I am not talking about JFK or 9/11 conspiracies, I am talking about knowledge that are held as proprietary or trade secrets. Just unfriend or unfollow me, I am really OK with it). Laughlin's The Crime of Reason.While most knowledge is freely available, most economically valuable knowledge is kept secret.
They are on these technologies to relax and I am confronting them with potential useful information. Try to gain the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb for example. The book made me think about the availability of knowledge on the Internet differently. There are certain things that it is just plain illegal to know.
That's my hope. I would say our societies tend to evolve in unpredictable ways to get beyond the type of current contradictions between allowing free scientific thinking/pursuits without running into risks of infringing on someone's (economic) interests. The kinds of thinking proposed in this book is like the common challenge for an engineer to think scientifically or for a scientist to see things through the eyes of an engineer; both instances seem to involve pains for each other and digression from focus area but are of the same nature.
This book while written to address a growing problem of monopolizing scientific discoveries toward economic incentives is not an easy read/or to swallow if the reader fails to have the overview as it is argued in this book. This sounds like a circular argument but may also be described as a non-dual nature of science and society, they are co-dependent. I know Robert Laughlin from my free study of a lot of his works and also through his popular science writing.
In my view Robert Laughlin is daring enough of a distinguished scientist to speak freely for a system, suffering from internal inconsistencies ie promote free thinking and speech but also apply restriction to certain manners of thinking. Alireza Robert is a distinguished applied physicists and is well aware of the fuzzy lines between what's in one's head and what's out there; he has written at times on delicacies between confusing realms of theories vs experiment and in my view this is where his views in this book tie into the complex web of society, survival and progression of science.
In my view the problem is like the analogy of fish in water; while science by nature is open to free inquiries of all sorts without any hint of repercussions of its discoveries nevertheless these scientific inquiries are made by people who live in and depend on societies that their rules transcend the ideal goals of curious investigations, that's where economic reasoning can at times contain or threaten the spirit of free scientific minds but again these inquiries are driven by engines of economic progress that were set in place to direct these minds.
One important one is that the need for the government to preserve technological (particularly defense) secrets has led to an implied acceptance of the need for people to voluntarily suppress information. He should have shown more discipline in the book.Bottom line: I'm sorry I did not wait for the paperback. A paragraph or two from a well-written argument, I would find myself confused about the direction of the present argument.
While the criteria for editing this book are different, there still remains the need for a paper to not become adrift and bloated in arguments. The book looked promising when I bought it. Laughlin, I am sure also reviews scientific papers.
Looking over previous reviews, I see that others share my opinion that this book, while filled with some interesting ideas could be shorter and should have had better editing. It's interesting but the lack of proper editing muddles the effort.From time to time, I review scientific papers for journals. It is worth a read, but wait for the paperback or get it from the library.
The editor really needed to force Laughlin to write precise outlines of the individual chapters, and then shoould have made him stick with those outlines.Make no mistake, there are intriguing ideas here. Then he shows that commercial secrets (which in this country really preceeded the defense secrets) have the same effect.
He suggests thoughts and conclusions, but often fails to elaborate enough to make them clear.Ultimately, I think the book ends up giving the subject short shrift. The price of the hardcover is definitely too high for these ~ 150 large font, double spaced pages. THE CRIME OF REASON is about how knowledge sequestration and commoditization are destroying [or can destroy] individuals' intellectual and creative potential, thus harming society as a whole. knowledge restriction law] has expanded exponentially since the 1970s. I wish he had taken the time to expand on them a bit more. Unlike some previous reviewers, I think the subject is extremely important and deep. His logic is stated so directly, and with so little elaboration, that the ideas end up being ambiguous.
It is an intellectual adventure and there are many intriguing ideas to be found in these pages. The sections of the book about hard sciences and technology are the most interesting and convincing, while the ones about society and economics are the least.Laughlin is obviously brilliant, and it is fun to ride along with him, following his thought patterns, as it were.
There is a very real danger, which Laughlin suggests is already manifest among young scientists today, that our most brilliant minds will be left impotent by a legal framework that disallows them from understanding the world around them, or from even attempting to understand it.This is a strange book. There is a sort of arm-chair philosopher's self satisfaction in the reasoning which does the reader little good and the author little credit.
For example, intellectual property law [i.e. This is a musing book, and, probably to the author's horror, I would suggest that it is a little bit intellectually lazy.
It almost feels like textbook style pricing. More particularly, many forms of technical knowledge have actually been outlawed, with knowledge of nuclear technology being the prime example and test case.
Laughlin, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, utilizes an unforgiving sort of analytical reasoning that is often hard to follow.
Laughlin, who clearly has a distinguished career, should be embarrassed by this "book." A blatant distaste for government and lawyers permeates throughout the book, to the point where it discredits any argument that could be laboriously construed from the few interesting, insightful points that breath occasional life into what was an otherwise painful reading experience. (And no, Prof. Readers - don't be fooled by the intriguing description on the book jacket or the excerpts on Amazon.com - this reads like an overly long, meandering blabber of that angry, paranoid co-worker of yours who keeps that weird blog on his home computer but never talks to you face-to-face. If not for my compulsion to finish books that I start, this one would have ended around page 8. Laughlin, this is not being written by some robot that is out to get you). This is 149 pages of awkward and often inappropriate humor, coupled with bizarre predictions about a future that sounds comic book inspired. Prof.
|
