I used to overuse a dichotomy for 'being' and 'doing'. Now I'm altering that slightly with a new target - knowing. It is stil not about being, and it's still about doing, but something makes me think that a lot of people stop at knowing.
I knew a pothead who once said that brains are a cheap commodity. He was right but only for a short time. He was saying that all of the computer science graduates with original ideas would end up serving at the alter of human sacrifice that is Microsoft. They might have known a lot of cool things, but there was a new class of them every year who knew basically the same things, and all of that didn't add up to compete with the reality of Microsoft (and IBM) who only knew a few things, and those were the only things that were selling. The pothead was right for about 10 years, after which ten generations of CS grads, in and of themselves made for a significant market. So finally, knowing better than Microsoft, which was relatively easy, became profitable. But that required the doings of open source, web services, n-tier computing and a bunch of other stuff. Somebody had to build the alternative, not just know that there should be one.
These days I'm thinking a lot about my history with Xerox. The history is being remade in the public consciousness that most people at Xerox were clueless about the wonders they created. We were not. We just lost political and economic battles and subsequently moved on. We knew. We just couldn't do - not there. Once you grasped the enormity of what Xerox had, it all became a matter of execution. We were the alternative, but we had to build what we knew outside of Xerox.
Knowing is not trivial. I still pay close attention to what I call information thermodynamics. It still takes a lot of energy and time to keep a disciplined understanding of an idea alive in peoples' heads. People have to use that concept over and over until it becomes permanent to the point at which they would have to unlearn it. Let's call that the breakeven point of a concept or idea, the point at which it is so embedded in praxis that it takes more energy to do things another way. All this still counts, but praxis is key. Praxis requires doing.
BTW. The new phrase going around is: "I know, right?" It indicates perfect agreement, and it usually and expression made about common sense, or any concept just about the level of common sense. When I hear it, I hear communication, not education. The "I know, right?" response says, yes this is obvious. So whatever the subject matter is that gets that response, it is well past the breakeven point.
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