what do you know

June 9, 2009 | Category: personal development, software development process |

Say whut?!
It occurs to me that people are at the center of our society. I’ll give you a couple of seconds to digest that bombshell … Granted, my mayonnaise runs slow; i still don’t fully grasp the concept of humans. Which is odd, because i’ve been one for almost thirty years. Shouldn’t i get it by now? Nope, au contraire, every day i get a bit dumber. Almost every day i see things that i just can’t process. For instance when i see a commercial for yet another reality show on the idiot box. Do you feel me? Man … Where are we going with this? I can’t be an old fart complaining all the time already, right?

The problem is that i still try to hold on to logic. And well, it’s no secret that logical, our society ain’t. Or is it? I found that when someone does something weird in this world, it frequently boils down to very simple motivations. More often than not one of three; money, power or sex. The key to enlightenment there is information. And a sufficient understanding of that information. Too bad the trail to that information alone grows to an ungraspable complexity in no time, not to mention the connection between the related pieces that make up the whole “information”.
As an outsider it’s hard to populate all the variables, let alone define them. Look at the number of unsolved crimes. People with the right tools and training still fail regularly at solving the hard ones. And i don’t think they need to be ashamed of this, because it happens all around us, every day; people’s amount of stored information and their grasp thereof is almost arbitrary.

Kickin' it at the summit

With that in mind, eviler minds than mine state that when you’re in a discussion, it’s not so much knowing the subject through and through, but knowing what your colleague debater’s level of knowledge on the subject is. I guess that’s one of the reasons not everyone can join in on some discussions, like say G7 summits. (Wouldn’t it be a hoot though?)

In my opinion, nobody can know everything, and an informal discussion is only useful if it leads somewhere… i know, informal discussions barely be useful. It’s a shame that we have this human condition to drag with us everywhere; If one person gives up because he thinks he’s under qualified this might be a shame, because the other person might as well be bluffing, or wording things wrongly, etc.
The angle at which you look at knowledge can be different too; a programming language as seen by a business developer or an academic for instance.
So i guess the weaponry sold in this piece is “know your meta”. Recognizing at which angle people are speaking at any given moment, makes for efficient communication. But hey, don’t expect logic of course…

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