There is a billboard in southbound 101, I think from ask.com thats says something like
"Who is teddy bear named after? Find at ask.com..."
I realized that everytime I see the billboard I get a bit agitated. I am annoyed about the fact that I don't know the answer, about the fact that I never questioned that myself, about the fact that the marketeers won and they will get their way to drive traffic by coming up with a gimmick.
But on the other hand the northbound 101 billboard has a different question.
"Why do people blush? Find at ask.com"
Somehow that annoys me less. And I wonder why. It maybe that I kind of know some portion of that answer. But the more I think of it it is because I dislike "factoid" quizes and I love logical puzzles. I remember my disappointment when a good friend of mine knowing my interest in etymology (and tracing any possible word back to its (greek) roots) they brought me as a birthday gift a huge book the with a pompus title about words. I randomly shuffled it. "Porterhouse steak : comes from some place somewhere that was known for the particular steak cut. "Hamburger" something about a lord .... named so and so that a few centuries ago...". The etymology that is exciting and attractive is etymology that is logical relies on rules - its what allows you to discover and understand by yourself how enthousiasm traces back to its roots of "the state of having god inside you".
The relevance to the billboards : Who, When, Where questions are typically facts. Why is different - why is explanation. Facts take more space in my brain. And given that my brain is already practically full they just displace other facts. Explanations instead are more like, data compression, you don't need to know x and y and z because you can compute(explain) z from x and y. So my brain feels lighter after an explanation. My brain feels some anxiety when a new factoid comes in that somehow I may need to recall later.
Another way to see this is try to understand how harder it is to build an AI program that answers whys from and AI program that answers who, whens and wheres. The latter can be achieved with an oversized db of facts. But answering whys thats very hard. (We portray androids, 7 of 9s and Datas in movies as less human by just showing how they fail to answer "why questions" in satisfactorily way)
If you think about it every why does not have a single answer.
Why do people blush? Because some surface blood veins expand? No, but I mean why this happens? because some brain signals sth that causes sth else. But why that happens? Because the brain triggers that in a state of x, y. Yes but why does our brain does that? Because for state x, that gives an survival advantage in cases so and so or a mating advantage in cases y. But why that doesn't happen in chimps? Because chimps have hairy faces - so that wouldn't help. So (I am making everything up) our aquatic past resulted in facial skin exposure which enabled... blah blah..
I can keep on moving on that thread for ever. What is the right answer to whys. Social humans understand : they understand the social context , they attempt to guess the knowledge network of the questioning person's brain, they over-impose the current context to apply weights of proximity in that knowledge network and then try to find the explanation that would achieve the best "compression" of that dataset. They do all that subconsciously, instantly.
To my kids the answer may be "Because blush when they get embarassed" - essentially a fact answer to add to their mostly empty still brain. To my doctor sister, I would answer in a wise-guy mode - something that contradicts her own medical understanding of it.
"Who is teddy bear named after? Find at ask.com..."
I realized that everytime I see the billboard I get a bit agitated. I am annoyed about the fact that I don't know the answer, about the fact that I never questioned that myself, about the fact that the marketeers won and they will get their way to drive traffic by coming up with a gimmick.
But on the other hand the northbound 101 billboard has a different question.
"Why do people blush? Find at ask.com"
Somehow that annoys me less. And I wonder why. It maybe that I kind of know some portion of that answer. But the more I think of it it is because I dislike "factoid" quizes and I love logical puzzles. I remember my disappointment when a good friend of mine knowing my interest in etymology (and tracing any possible word back to its (greek) roots) they brought me as a birthday gift a huge book the with a pompus title about words. I randomly shuffled it. "Porterhouse steak : comes from some place somewhere that was known for the particular steak cut. "Hamburger" something about a lord .... named so and so that a few centuries ago...". The etymology that is exciting and attractive is etymology that is logical relies on rules - its what allows you to discover and understand by yourself how enthousiasm traces back to its roots of "the state of having god inside you".
The relevance to the billboards : Who, When, Where questions are typically facts. Why is different - why is explanation. Facts take more space in my brain. And given that my brain is already practically full they just displace other facts. Explanations instead are more like, data compression, you don't need to know x and y and z because you can compute(explain) z from x and y. So my brain feels lighter after an explanation. My brain feels some anxiety when a new factoid comes in that somehow I may need to recall later.
Another way to see this is try to understand how harder it is to build an AI program that answers whys from and AI program that answers who, whens and wheres. The latter can be achieved with an oversized db of facts. But answering whys thats very hard. (We portray androids, 7 of 9s and Datas in movies as less human by just showing how they fail to answer "why questions" in satisfactorily way)
If you think about it every why does not have a single answer.
Why do people blush? Because some surface blood veins expand? No, but I mean why this happens? because some brain signals sth that causes sth else. But why that happens? Because the brain triggers that in a state of x, y. Yes but why does our brain does that? Because for state x, that gives an survival advantage in cases so and so or a mating advantage in cases y. But why that doesn't happen in chimps? Because chimps have hairy faces - so that wouldn't help. So (I am making everything up) our aquatic past resulted in facial skin exposure which enabled... blah blah..
I can keep on moving on that thread for ever. What is the right answer to whys. Social humans understand : they understand the social context , they attempt to guess the knowledge network of the questioning person's brain, they over-impose the current context to apply weights of proximity in that knowledge network and then try to find the explanation that would achieve the best "compression" of that dataset. They do all that subconsciously, instantly.
To my kids the answer may be "Because blush when they get embarassed" - essentially a fact answer to add to their mostly empty still brain. To my doctor sister, I would answer in a wise-guy mode - something that contradicts her own medical understanding of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment