Sean Carney

Quotes

  • Norbert Wiener on the Automatic Age

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    Sean Carney
    in

    What the feedback and the vacuum tube have made possible is not the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms, but a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type. In this they have been reinforced by our new theoretical treatment of communication, which takes fill cognizance of the possibilities of…

  • Norbert Wiener on Education and Originality

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    Sean Carney
    in

    I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as…

  • Norbert Wiener on Doctorate Studies

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    Sean Carney
    in

    Some of my friends have even asserted that a Ph.D. thesis should be the greatest scientific work a man has ever done and perhaps ever will do, and should wait until he is thoroughly able to state his life work. I do not go along with this. I mean merely that if the thesis is…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Exchange of Knowledge and Secrecy

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    Sean Carney
    in

    To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its…

  • Norbert Wiener on Modernizing Industry

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    Sean Carney
    in

    What is true of England is true of New England, which has discovered that it is often a far more expensive matter to modernize an industry than to scrap it and start somewhere else. Quite apart from the difficulties of having a relatively strict industrial law and an advanced labour policy, one of the chief…

  • Norbert Wiener on Information as a Commodity

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    Sean Carney
    in

    I am writing this book primarily for Americans in whose environment questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American crierion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market. This is the official doctrine of an orthodoxy which it is becoming more and more perilous…

  • Norbert Wiener on Information and the Scientific Approach

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    Sean Carney
    in

    When we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty percent…

  • Norbert Wiener on Power and Presence

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    Sean Carney
    in

    Where a man’s word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

  • N.T. Wright on Personal Purity

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    Sean Carney
    in ,

    We in our modern world have many ways of dealing with personal impurity. Contemporary hygiene and chemicals mean we don’t need to worry about it nearly as much as people in the ancient world … there are still other types of pollution as well: the pollution which gets into our minds and hearts, into our…

  • Norbert Wiener on Using Statistics to Emulate Language

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    Sean Carney
    in

    One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English. This meaningless simulacrum of…