tavie.com

Ah ha. And now we get to it.

(They've given me no work today-- probably having me come in so's I can get paid for the last two days of the week, which is really nice of them, I suppose-- so I am sitting at my desk reading Bateson. I do so love Bateson.)

The following from "Metalogues", in Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind:

Daughter: Daddy-- has anybody ever measured how much anybody knew.
Father: Oh yes. Often. But I don't quite know what the answers meant. They do it with examinations and tests and quizzes, but it's like trying to find out how big a piece of paper is by throwing stones at it.
D: How do you mean?
F: I mean-- if you throw stones at two pieces of paper from the same distance and you find that you hit one piece more often than the other, then probably the one that you hit most will be bigger than the other. In the same way, in an examination you throw a lot of oquestions at the students, and if you find that you hit more pieces of knowledge in one student than in the others, then you think that student must know more. That's the idea.
D: But could one measure a piece of paper that way?
F: Surely one could. It might even be quite a good way of doing it. We do measure a lot of things that way. For example, we judge how strong a cup of coffee is by looking to see how black it is-- that is, we look to see how much light is stopped. We throw light waves at it instead of stones, it's the same idea.
D: Oh.

***

D: But then-- why shouldn't we measure knowledge that way?
F: How? By quizzes? No-- God forbid. The trouble is that sort of mesauring leaves out your point-- that there are different sort of knowledge-- and that there's knowledge about knowledge...

Well, anyway, I'm tempted to just type the whole damn thing here but I won't. I think I need to put this in my collection, though.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:56 AM | shower me with attention