Journal Of Civilization Discussion

Is JournalOfCivilization a new independent Wiki, or a page or set of pages on WardsWiki or on TheAdjunct?

Regardless, and for what it's worth, count me in. -- DaveVoorhis

I mean a new wiki. And good-o. When I did GC and RS I tried inviting people in - much better for folk to just self-select. Add/mangle some ideas please. -- Pete

Need hosting? I usually go with UseMod or MediaWiki, but any Linux-compatible alternatives will happily be attempted. Ideas will be added as they manifest. -- DV

Hosting offer gratefully accepted. Not crazy about UM or MW - what do you think of http://hikiwiki.org/en/about.html ?

Looks reasonable. I'll give it a go later today, as it's now well past my bedtime. Stay tuned to this channel for news as it happens.

It is installed. Pete, please email dave<aht>shark<dhot>armchair<dhot>mb<dhot>ca to obtain the URL so you can configure the beastie. -- DV

Little updates: Dave & Pete have settled on TiddlyWiki + PyTw as an engine and there's been a bit of extra content produced too. KeithBraithwaite, DougMerritt and MarkTilley have agreed to come on as co-hosts. While we're cobbling things together please feel encouraged to continue right here.

Does this "journal" have a URL yet? -- Eliz

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The notion of a PatternLanguage of civilization is particularly excellent...

Which perhaps begs the question: What shall this pattern language capture - current civilization, ancient civilization, desired-yet-realizable civilization, utopian civilization?

Let us purely for fun, and just up to the next divider, equate wisdom = civilization. In other words, the wiser we are, the better we get along with each other, and the more fulfilling our lives are.

Then the answer to the posited question is perhaps influenced by our personal answer to the following philosophical question: Do we believe in CumulativeWisdom? Are we, as a species, becoming wiser? Do we stand on the shoulders of the wise ancients, thereby having access to more wisdom than they did? Is our wisdom and the wisdom of the ancients additive? Will our children be wiser than we are?

We can give "mathematical" style answers to this philosophical question:

• We as a species steadily get wiser.
• We as a species have the ability to steadily get wiser, but the default is to slowly become stupid. So we have a burst of becoming wiser, then a slow loss, then a burst, then a loss, etc., but with a net gain.
• Wisdom is asymptotic, and lossy - there is only so much wisdom we as a species are capable of, and we approach the limit, then become more stupid, then approach the limit, then become more stupid, etc.

Alternatively, we can look at our personal opinion of the "uneven history" of wisdom:

• Wisdom and science in the West increased under the greeks and romans, stagnated from 300 AD to 1300, and increased together through the 1700's. Then science (i.e. the physical sciences) separated from wisdom. Science "took off", and wisdom stagnated again. Then about 2000 AD, wisdom slowly started increasing again. In other words, wisdom is "behind" science by about 300 years, but currently posed to "take off".
• Western wisdom peaked with the Romans in 300 AD, plateaued (sp?) until 1900, and has been declining since.
• Western wisdom has been steadily increasing, with greater bursts of improvement in the 400's BC, the 1600's / 1700's AD, and the 2000's AD.
• [From JournalOfCivilization] The original intent of the luminaries - the happy future lampooned by "The Jetsons" - has fallen away.

[Science = that which is easily improved by the modern scientific method; Wisdom = that which is hardly improved by the modern scientific method]

But getting back to the first posited question. (to be continued)