Tossed this off just now in response to yet another righteous refusal of the Sisyphean work of education, re: racism, sexism, etc. There are lots of things that everyone ‘should’ know. But as long as they don’t, there’s a boulder to push up a hill.
Ignorance is a kind of entropy. It can’t be moraled away.
4 Comments to “Ignorance is a kind of entropy. It can’t be moraled away.”
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If what you are saying is that ignorance can’t be cured by harping on how ignorance is bad, bad, bad, I’d agree. But, serious question, what is ignorance these days? Given the information explosion, none of us will ever know more than a tiny fraction of what there is to be known, and agreement on what constitutes a body of knowledge that everyone should share now seems a fading dream.
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Happy Year of the Monkey!
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Right you are. I first saw this point made in David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. Ogilvy was reminding advertising creatives, who always want to do something new, that we preach to a moving parade. To which I would add that every attempt to expand the reach of a message requires addressing people for whom it’s a new idea. What’s old to us may still be new to them.