I shunned Doug's communication on Net Baud Rate for some time because I
thought it would be techie and incomprehensible. When I finally looked,
I found it clear and largely new; reading it, I had quite a high "net
baud rate".
HOWEVER, I think that the concept suffers from the same kind of
off-centeredness that most pursuits of efficiency suffer from. It may
achieve the goal of most information moved per second, but it will fail
in the deeper purpose of disseminating ideas, just as economic
efficiency may increase economic activity but rarely succeeds in
disseminating wealth or happiness.
Those who already know enough to achieve a high net baud rate will
probably get the most pleasure out of doing so. But they were not born
with their capacity. They earned it by plowing through a wealth of
material at a much lower net baud rate until their familiarity became
great enough to increase the rate. In other words, if you seek only the
highest net baud rate, you are talking to the at least partially
converted, and ignoring all those who are potentially interested and
who might become the very best "customers" for your information.
One exception that springs to mind in the context of this conversation
is where your communication seeks to elicit a certain type of
information-- e.g. statistics rather than principles (as in the Genuine
Progress Indicator discussion). Then for sure you are better off
talking to people who have the numbers. But even then, if they have
only numbers related to one paradigm, and do not alert you to the
existence of other paradigms, you are stuck in a limited world view. A
friend of mine said last night, "It's good to get out of your own
narrow culture once in a while." This was witty, because the narrow
culture she was referring to was the dominant western world view, which
to many people is as pervasive and invisible as water is to fish.
Since writing the above, I read "reply to Peter Marks, re: net net baud
rate", and it led to further thoughts. I will just quote one passage,
reply to Peter Marks:
"Actually this part of the message was just a way of introducing an
idea from information theory that some people might not know -- the
idea that even the free and easy conversation between old friends
doesn't necessarily involve much actual communication -- the net baud
rate may be quite low because the conversation lacks novelty."
Much intercourse between old friends (as well as between other people)
is not about the efficient transfer of symbolic information, but rather
about communicating feelings, emotional comfort or support, etc. I
suppose that a baud rate could also be devised for this type of
communication, but I suspect it would be of another order of magnitude.
I think this information is more analogous to the transmission of
images. Yesterday Ireceived an email from a friend that I had to fetch,
because it was 252 kb. I was expecting an encyclopedic treatise on
beaches (he is on holiday in Australia) but in fact it was 1/3 page of
text and anattachment containing an 8x10 composite of 4 snapshots.
If emotional content could be reduced to bauds, it would require even
more of them than images, yet the "transfer" is almost instantaneous.
This can be true of written as well as spoken communication. The fact
that the symbolic intercourse lacks novelty does not necessarily mean
that a low baud rate is involved.
However, it seems that Doug's reason for all this is that he is seeking
suitable peolple to fill out a form in a timely manner. If it is a form
seeking technical information, he would of course be well advised to
approach people who have that type of information. But if the
information sought is "normative", i.e. concerned with social as
opposed to PURELY technical issues, he would be well advised to spread
the net as wide as possible because those with the highest baud rates
with respect to the material also most likely share the same opinions
and prejudices.
It is because people like economists and MBA's, or US politicians and
the pentagon, can only hear each other (i.e. share a high baud rate
with each other) that they can blandly wreak destructionon large
numbers of other people in the cheerful confidence that they are
spreading joy and light.
Caspar Davis
