Memento Nescire

Being a member of the species of stories increases this complication of signaling by several orders of magnitude. There was a time, many tens of thousands of years ago, when every individual discovered a great deal of what they knew, perhaps even most of what they knew, directly, using their own senses. But as we evolved into the species of stories, the proportion of knowledge we gained by being told, that came via the hearsay of the senses and perceptions of others, increased and kept increasing with every new storytelling technology, so that today almost everything we know comes indirectly from other people’s stories, and almost nothing we know comes directly from our senses. — Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art Most of what we call being informed is only knowing which strangers we currently trust. That isn’t shameful; it’s the condition of living in a complex civilization. But it is a poor foundation for the daily manufacture of…