I Meta Meta

No, it isn't a fraternity or sorority.

It is a level of abstraction, a way of putting a description of information into the information, or on top of it. In other words, information about information. You can think of meta data as the column headings in a spreadsheet or a corporate financial statement. In that case, the meta data labels the data in the column below the label.

For a time sequenced group of spreadsheets or financial statements, there is also the date, which in a sense is meta-meta data, data about the group of spreadsheets or statements.

OK, I know we all understand what it is and how it works, and those who write html code, xml, css and other data descriptive things use it all the time. An html tag is meta data.

So is a card catalog in the library, or a building code.

Describing data is important in cosmological and philosophical senses as well. I touched on this in a previous blog, but it's important to say it again: In any closed system, there is not enough space to describe that system. Self reference or recursion is well known to computer geeks like me to require careful management to avoid running out of resources due to circular references, or too deeply nesting the recursion.

If we were able to use every atom in the universe as a storage medium, there wouldn't be enough of them to describe the system we had built, much less describe the universe. In other words, there are simply some things we can NEVER know.

One easily seen example of this is weather modeling. The most powerful computers ever built can't reliably model our planet's weather pattern for any extended period. There are too many variables, and some are linked in poorly understood ways with others. We have to build models that are incomplete because we don't yet understand all the interactions, but if we understood all the interactions, we wouldn't have a model, we would have a weather system. A perfect description is the object described. I have read fantasy fiction where knowing something's true name gave you power over it, and it's the same for objects. The only way to perfectly describe something is to point at the thing you are describing.

So maybe instead of trying to pile descriptions on top of descriptions of data, maybe we need to use the idea of "de-metaing" the data, or reducing the amount of data required to describe something as well as minimizing what is needed to tell us what the data means. Sort of a .zip or .arc compression. A function in mathematics can describe a complex set of relationships, so we only need the function and the ability to analyze it to understand all those relationships. We don't have to store all the data about them because the function does that for us.

It's time to start looking for ways to normalize all the data that we have generated. A primary record and a secure, guaranteed backup is all that is needed for any single piece of data. Repetition is wasteful when the storage resources are finite. Of course, this only applies to factual data. This will leave more room for the infinite ways in which we can use these facts for discourse and theory.

An example: Google "GNP 2000". There are more than two million hits. Most of the information is redundant, and that's only the copies on the world wide web. There are plenty of hardcopy references that may not even be listed once. Sure, many of those hits are analyses (and some are irrelevant) but the same basic information exists in each analysis. It's nice to have a book in your hands, but at some point in our future, that is going to be a huge waste of resources. Books don't have a very high information density compared to solid state (computer) memory, which is itself wasteful of resources when compared to technologies that store data on molecules, atoms or even photons.

Also, there is the issue of errors. Today, an correcting an error in data that is used in many different analyses takes a certain amount of time to propagate. During the propagation period, there exists a decreasing number (with respect to time) of references to the invalid data, which in turn may be cited and used in decision making. Those decisions are then necessarily flawed, and may cause damage to the very system being analyzed when implemented.

Of course, certain data are proprietary, as are many of the algorithms used for analysis. If a stockbroker uses incomplete or erroneous data, or demonstrably flawed analysis, to make recommendations for buy/sell/hold decisions, that can affect many investors. It is very important that corrections are made in the shortest possible time, and those recommendations should change in as close to real time as possible. This benefits the broker as well as investors. This is still an argument for a new approach to information storage, the difference being only in the possession of the data, not it's structure or usage.

Once we have perfected the science of storing facts, then we approach the thornier issue of what to do about all of the crazy people saying insane things just to hear themselves talking. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

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The Latent Lunatic

Lies lucidly, leaving little, losing less, laughing both with and at the ones who think themselves the guardians of truth, for only he holds the keys to unlimited imagination. Limits are for fools who believe that the narrowness of their minds is a shield against that which is unknown, but the truly unlimited mind needs no shield, for it is the source of those unknowns, the fount of terrors, the realization of the reality of fantasy.

Who can say that the perception of the unexpected is false? Is there one who has never observed something that no one else saw? Who is right, the viewer or the denier?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth" which is, of course, just a restatement of Occam's Razor with a bit of a twist.

Those who have read earlier posts will recognize my theme here. There are plenty of adages and fables regarding truth and the impossibility of certainty when it comes to belief. What is a fact, and what is merely wishful thinking? History is full of examples of "facts" which were "disproved" later by science. The scare quotes are intended to demonstrate that these never were facts to be disproved, merely wishful thinking or maybe political correctness that needed debunking. There was never anything to prove, one way or the other. They were merely convenient beliefs, existing because someone, or some group, gained something by espousing them as truth. See religion, all brands and all times: and practically every 'ism that you can find.

No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.

Jascha Heifetz (1901 - 1987)

How true. How about this: No matter what the argument, or your side in it, there are always unpleasant implications of your position.

Is that true? Is it possible to have a belief or opinion, where the facts are incomplete, that doesn't have a negative component?

Facts are facts. They have no agenda and don't discriminate. They simply ARE, stark and unchanging regardless of what we might believe or wish.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have opinions, only that we must recognize the difference between hope and fact. And that having an opinion contrary to fact is a sure sign of lunacy.

Is that a fact?

Centric

Egocentric. Ethnocentric. Theocentric. Culturecentric.

All are based on being centered (or based) on a specific place from which to view things. Even thinking outside the box centers on the box. Being outside implies somewhere on the inside as a reference point.

One can have a 360 degree view from anyplace, but the universe isn't a circle. It's more like a globe. Having that 360 degree view only means that you can see everything on the equator, but nothing north or south. Or maybe a circle containing two points on the equator and both poles. Either way it's a two dimensional view of a three dimensional object. What's worse, it's only the surface being examined, anything not on the surface is outside our scope. And it's true that even the concepts of equator, poles and surfaces have some centricity.

Things get really complicated when time becomes involved, because the surface and the things not on the surface keep interacting, but we can't see anything but the minuscule slice where our viewpoint intersects the surface, causes and effects not on that intersection seem to be magic or perhaps divine. What we think of as the surface is really a frothing fluid that won't keep still long enough to be analyzed.


It's kind of like the dark matter in the universe. We can't explain how the universe works without allowing that there are some things we just can't see or measure. But we keep on theorizing about how it works, using the idea of something we can't see but must be there to balance the equations.

We know that, mathematically, a closed system cannot contain enough information to describe itself. Yet we manage to design computers that do a marvelous job of manipulating more information than any single human could possibly comprehend in a lifetime, and do it in a way that allows said human to both understand and use that information to the benefit of all. And it all happens in much less than a human lifetime. And when there's a problem with the computer it can often tell us that something is wrong with it, what it is, who to call, what part to bring, and how long it will take to fix it.

We even have holograms, 3D representations of solid objects, that can be viewed from any perspective, and in perspective.
My point is that it isn't the object, it's the viewer. As humans, we seem to be limited to a single reference point at any given moment, and we need to learn to be less dimensionally limited.

We need to learn how to see things from all possible points at the same time. Or maybe to see all possible times from the same point.

Some good words to think about: grok, karma, parallelization, synchronicity, interconnectedness, synergy, normalization

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