Tuesday, April 12, 2005

A thought experiment

Imagining for a moment a community in which every individual is convinced their own browser window is showing the correct view, and everything else is incorrect. A blogger would be able to picture this fairly easily. As might anyone who works in an office environment.

Based on this spectre and taking the statement "each browser window is correct and all others are incorrect" and assuming there is more then one browser window, the resultant community is either all correct - or, all incorrect. If each individual browser window is correct then they all must be. (Everyone is certain theirs is) . And, if every other browser window is incorrect then they all must be.

This is the kind of statement that causes hard-drives to crash, and then everyone goes offline and the community breaks down.

The bug fix; loose the ego. Change the statement. "There are individual browsers. Each shows a view based on a string of characters typed into it's address bar and customised by the viewer."

Hence reality-based. Reality de-based is another thing entirely. Or maybe not.

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