Dear John,

You found the video, but missed the article. It really is at the (truncated looking) URL which appears prematurely cut off below:

http://reason.com/blog/2012/04/06/ideas-having-sex-a-conversation-with-joh

I have changed this email format to HTML for this post. You may have more luck following the link with this format instead of rich text as in the previous post.

Your YouTube link didn’t have the text around the video which draws the point. For example, the text includes this quote:

Tierney and Ridley also discuss how traders and businessmen, much maligned throughout history as exploiters and "social parasites," have actually contributed enormously to the spread of ideas and new technological breakthroughs. Ridley describes how Fibonacci, the son of an Italian trader who lived in North Africa, brought the Indian numeral system (the numbers we all know and love today) to Europe as one of the greatest tangible benefits of trade facilitating the exchange of ideas. Ridley implores the public to "Just stop knocking traders, they're great people, they do wonderful things."

I think the point he makes is that some minimum density of intellectual population is necessary to raise the rate of innovation, and that is influenced by, among other things, cultural (such as religious) openness to new ideas and improvements. But even with an open, nondogmatic society, there is still a minimum number of people needed to make the society grow intellectually, rather than shrink, as the Tanzanians did with just 4,000 population when their island was cut off from the Australian mainland.

Ridley, ever a good book marketer, sensationalizes it by describing it as “ideas having sex”. That is the point of the article; people build their own ideas on top of each other’s ideas, modulate them, apply them to new situations, and generally generalize and specialize other people’s ideas. The rate at which people do so varies as the number of people (and therefore the number of ideas) available to intellectual discourse, with Tanzania’s 4,000 being too low, and Greece’s population being adequate.

It isn’t surprising to hear that most Greek philosophers of classical times came from outside Athens – thanks for sharing that. Greece itself was more likely the population which interchanged ideas. Athens was just the New York of Greece. Athens was just the civilization that “published” papyri of the good ideas, chose which ideas to teach each new generation, provided the cross roads for accumulated commerce and trade, and valued knowledge sociologically. Look at what happened to Athens – wars with its neighbors, poisoning of Aristotle, many other degenerate social warps occurred there. The Athenians practiced a government like that description Ronald Reagan gave: “Government is like a baby. A hungry alimentary canal at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

The point of the article, as I see it, is that individuals following self interest are the originators of knowledge, sharers of knowledge, and the source of social progress. Grouping people into political units (such as religious movements, democracies, socialist states, dictatorships, pick your favorite or most reviled instance) is what turns the groups ultimately toward the dark side.

So I disagree on the subject of the email. I changed it back to my original “Self Interest Ontology” because I think you missed the points I was trying to make with regard to how knowledge is formed. It isn’t from the sole source of genius as you seem to believe. Ridley’s material shows that the important factor is the size of the group which can share knowledge and produce new material from combinations of old materials. All of the people in Ridley’s groups are acting in self interest.

He identifies “traders” as the multiculturalists who moved knowledge from one culture (e.g., Arabic/Indian numerals) to another (e.g., classical Western civilizations) and therefore did the intellectual and pragmatic pollination of societies.

The point is: If we could codify self interest in ontological form, we could possibly leverage that ontology to automate the creation of new knowledge. That was (decades ago) Cyc’s ultimate goal, but Cyc took the wrong turn of trying to make a single monolithic knowledge base that knows everything they could encode. They discarded the self interest of the individuals’ knowledge bases, and insisted on a single monolithic knowledge base which required unreasonable degrees of consistency, throwing out the variance which would have led to automating knowledge creation. They chose to value the group’s knowledge instead of the individuals’ knowledges.

That, IMHO, is the wrong conclusion. Instead, each Cyclist should have developed an ontology of her own. Then the sharing of those individual ontologies could have been automated (if only partially) to create new knowledge from combinations of individual’s knowledge as encoded in Cyc. That is why self interest is important, and that is why I have changed the subject back to its proper title.

-Rich

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 11:13 PM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Promoting invention and innovation

Rich,

Thanks for pointing out that interview. It is indeed thought

provoking. (For two footnotes about procedural issues, see below.)

> I found a terrific video interview with biologist Matt Ridley

> (one of my favorite pop biology authors) which explains some

> of the phenomenon in self interested activities. Basically,

> his idea is that progress depends far more on the NUMBER of

> individuals in a group exchanging ideas than it does on any

> one GENIUS, or other appellation you might want to use to

> describe individuals who provide outlier services.

Following is an uncorrupted URL of the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyG8F62yB4Q

Some comments about Matt Ridley's talk:

1. I strongly agree with him that innovation depends on having

a sufficiently large population of people and a considerable

amount of interchange among people from different cultures.

2. Merchants traveling from town to town, port to port, or

country to country are important. But the traveling or

trade, by itself, is only part of the story. You also need

travelers who do the innovating -- gurus, storytellers,

explorers, adventurers, and people who have enough technical

knowledge to recognize a good innovation when they see one.

3. Ridley also mentioned the Arabs, who adapted, adopted, and

transmitted many innovations from many cultures -- Greece,

India, Africa, etc. But he said that they stagnated because

of "superstition". That is too simplistic.

4. Many scholars praise the Greeks for their fantastic innovations

in philosophy, mathematics, logic, science, democracy, etc.

But they don't emphasize one very important point: *all* of

the early Greek philosophers came from the colonies outside

of Greece, not from Athens or other cities in the heartland.

5. In fact, the first so-called "pre-Socratic" philosophers came

from the Greek colonies in Anatolia, which were under the

control of Persia at the time (6th century BC). That was also

close to the Silk Road, which brought merchants, soldiers, and

storytellers from China to and from Europe.

6. The philosophers from Anatolia include Thales, Anaximander,

Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus. Pythagoras

left his native island of Samos and traveled to Egypt, where

he was initiated into the Egyptian priesthood. He later

settled in the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy.

(By the way, I live in Croton on Hudson, New York.)

Other early Greek philosophers from the colonies in Italy

include Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles (who proposed the

four elements of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth). Others

came from miscellaneous Greek towns on the periphery.

7. The first major Greek philosopher who was born in and

stayed in Athens was Socrates. It is significant that

he was condemned to death for corrupting the morals of

Athenian youth. The philosophers from the colonies

said many worse things about the Olympian gods, but they

got away with it because the Persians and others couldn't

care less about the Greek gods. But the Athenians did.

There is much more to be said about all these issues, but one

point stands out: the fundamentalists in every country and

every culture around the world are the ones that cause the

most stifling kind of stagnation. That was true of the

Greeks in ancient times, and it is true of *every* religion

everywhere in the world. (I won't name any modern ones,

because that would create endless debate.)

I'm not against all religions, by the way, when they are

taken in moderation. But when any religion becomes frozen

as dogma, the culture goes downhill rapidly.

And by religion, I include Marxism and Capitalism. I would

even consider an uncritical idolization of Science as a

religion. All of them have some good ideas, if taken in

moderation. But their fundamentalists are the most dangerous

threats to their own countries.

John

______________________________________________________________

Footnotes:

1. The long URL you cited was cut off by your email handler.

I had to do a bit of searching to find the above URL,

but I suggest that you get a better email handler or

change some settings on the one you use.

2. I also changed the subject line to indicate the main topic

of Ridley's talk. It is tangentially related to self interest,

but the main theme is the kinds of factors that promote or kill

invention and innovation.

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