
The Irreducible Complexity of Society (2006) - icanhackit
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complexity-of-society.html
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icanhackit
_Indeed, economies of knowledge suggest that the proportion of knowledge would
be even less widely shared in a very wealthy world of physically optimal
computer and network technology than it is today -- although the absolute
amount of knowledge shared would be far greater, the sum total of knowledge
would be far greater still, and thus the proportion optimally shared would be
smaller._

Add to that the the amount of additional information or metadata needed to
specify what category the knowledge "pigeon" is, how it relates to other
"pigeons", the sources of knowledge that led to the discovery of the pigeon
etc and how the pigeon can be applied. In some ways, perhaps knowing the
framework for how chunks of information relate to each other, or how to
traverse it, will be more important than knowing the information itself.

It wouldn't be difficult to posit that HTTP and the indexing engines built on
top of it is that framework. So even as the sum of knowledge and its metadata
grows, and the diversity of the knowledge economy between individuals grows,
the fundamental principals for discovery of knowledge remains the same size
and complexity.

