The Plato’s Cave Study: Does Bullshit Truly Baffle Brains?”

”Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favor of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position."-Bertrand Russell

Of course the title is borrowed as most things here in this blog........so thanks to the one  from whom it originates and thanks for the quotation. Also thanks to Bee for her Blablameter Some Fun can be taken seriously.

I mean I did offer Sokal as a example of what may be engendered "as a voice of reason" to see that we had all been baffled by such arrangement of words as to think this new subject on Quantum Gravity is somehow being spoken too? Maybe you didn't get that?;)

This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo. But it's also a fiction. There's a lot of work that went into it after that. And what he's done is he's actually reshaped, digitally, all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index. So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis. The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there. I don't know where we are now. This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong. And similar topography. I wonder why. Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

For me it is a question too, about what is set as the basis as "a pattern that exists" that has been written by code.  To set in motion "a causation of events that have smeared out the contributing algorithm which is set now as the "global event that catches our attention"....or,  those that become highlighted in origination,  as to what one should or could become aware of once they"ve actually awoken to the reality of these patterns in life.

The event in society is a mountain and the metaphor that has been so eloquently described contains some relevance to the high's and lows in life. Some people's dreams about life and the surmountable, or about that way with which we may discribe the landscape of possibilities.

For me it was always about potential and the constraints that could be applied to thinking(the relevance of the reservoir Wayback) and where in this basis is Google as a contributor to such methods but to classify and count,  based on popularity, numbers of hits, etc,  as to the truth of the story that is written? In this case it is about statistics, not about truth?

It about encouraging the many possibilities, as to what shall be funneled down through some youthful mind, as to some concrete thing, as an idea from that potential to be disperse throughout society as an ideal, to then become pervasive throughout our culture?

How many ebooks have been cataloged and where is Wayback to think the developmental of the internet has been considered as a voice that has been attached to this reservoir and hence revealed this idea? A Google search engine then emanating from a virtual avatar to create a link to this vast reservoir of potential as to display concrete things?

"If the price of avoiding non-locality is to make an intuitive explanation impossible, one has to ask whether the cost is too great."

-David Bohm et al. “ Physc. Rep. 144, 321” (1987)

Okay Google, I have set before you, a challenge. Instead of a page that demonstrates a search feature as a main page, then change this to be represented by an virtual avatar who will lead you to these vast reservoirs of possibility? "Speak" your mind then and the Wayback becomes "your synapse" to the global thinking mind...... To have culminated in a set of info particulates "that are combined" to make this idea funnel into a wo/man to reset society? A holographic realization of all the components which help to make this world view.

The origins of technology was not in 1829, but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang, and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot, and it was so tight in there there was no room for any difference at all. That's the definition. There was no temperature. There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang, what it expanded was the potential for difference. So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. Those are all basically the same thing. And those are the things that technology bring us. That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms. That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences. And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing. And that's why we continue to grab technology -- because we want those things. Those things are good. Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities. And each time we make a new opportunity place, we're allowing a platform to make new ones.Kevin Kelly on how technology evolves

In no way is this to make slight of, or,  imply things about Google. My thoughts are to advance society not by the creation of the algorithms but to idealize the access to information.

See Also:

• Who Are The Gate Keepers?
• The Black Swan