Letter from the Editor

Yearn Learnto

Data isn’t wisdom

I’m a great believer of the adage “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will deplete the oceans of sea life and ruin the environment for generations to come.”

Not that I have an issue with teaching or education per se, I just don’t trust humans with any information beyond, say, how to screw in a light bulb—and even that is fraught with devastating implications in this moment of late capitalism.

For me, there’s always been a continuum when it comes to understanding the ways and means of our universe—it starts with data, which is followed by information, then knowledge and finally wisdom. For some reason, we’ve been stuck somewhere between data and information for the past decade. I blame it on the obsession our corporate nation-states and social-media tycoons have with “metrics.” These are mined from the mountains of data they collect from us but provide only the shallowest understanding of what a human actually is. In short, one can’t measure the depth of a human soul with click-thru rates.

In fact, I don’t think it can be measured at all. All we can do is make ourselves available to the experience of having a soul. And then try to remember that everyone else has one, too. I’d take that little morsel of teaching over any fish fry, because the more empathy we engender, the more understanding will bloom— and understanding is the seedbed of wisdom.

No matter how many data points are scraped from our posts, pics and other digital posturings, not even the mostsophisticated algorithm will ever be able to understand this about us. If only we understood this about ourselves. Ergo, education. Or, as journalist Sydney J. Harris famously observed, “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” All we have to do is look outside our selfies. —Daedalus Howell, Editor

PHOTO BY SEEMA MIAH

SMART Drink from the cup of knowledge.

Jeffrey Edalatpour’s writing about arts, food and culture has appeared in KQED Arts, Metro Silicon Valley, Interview Magazine, Berkeleyside. com, The Rumpus and SF Weekly. Lou Fancher has been published by WIRED. com, Diablo Magazine, the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, InDance, San Francisco Classical Voice, SF Weekly and elsewhere. Mark Fernquest is a Mad Max fan from way back. If he isn’t attending a post-apocalyptic festival in the outer wasteland, he’s sure to be writing about the last one he went to. Janis Hashe is a freelance journalist who writes on everything from the arts, to politics, to tea. Michael Giotis contributes to the Pacific Sun, the North Bay Bohemian and the East Bay Express. His most recent book of poetry is Daybreak.