Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.