All you need is useless information
The slightly annoying philosophy problem.
To prevent a bunch of freeloaders overwhelming the Society for Useless Information (SUI), the Society demands a single item of useless information from prospective members. But twelve years later, there’s not a single new member and it appears this noble and august society is going to have to close.
What’s gone wrong?
I can imagine this being the sort of problem presented to you by some smug git who knows the answer, taunts you for not being able to work it out, and provides with a series of useless clues until you punch the annoying twat in the face.
I would argue that there’s no such thing as completely useless information. It might be of limited use to the point of being almost utterly uninformative, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn’t be useful to the right person in the right circumstances. In fact, this is more or less what the book suggests, but with particular reference to the SUI. No matter how banal and pointless the information may be, it does have one use: enabling people to gain admission to the SUI. Of course, this means that no one can become a member because the information they have isn’t completely useless after all.
Now you can see why I said this is the sort of problem which would be put to you by some smug git just for the purpose of watching you wonder what the hell the answer might be.
(Have I done this problem before? When I was adding the tags, I found I already had a tag for useless information. Indeed I did in May two years ago. Not so useless after all.)
What’s gone wrong?
I can imagine this being the sort of problem presented to you by some smug git who knows the answer, taunts you for not being able to work it out, and provides with a series of useless clues until you punch the annoying twat in the face.
I would argue that there’s no such thing as completely useless information. It might be of limited use to the point of being almost utterly uninformative, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn’t be useful to the right person in the right circumstances. In fact, this is more or less what the book suggests, but with particular reference to the SUI. No matter how banal and pointless the information may be, it does have one use: enabling people to gain admission to the SUI. Of course, this means that no one can become a member because the information they have isn’t completely useless after all.
Now you can see why I said this is the sort of problem which would be put to you by some smug git just for the purpose of watching you wonder what the hell the answer might be.
(Have I done this problem before? When I was adding the tags, I found I already had a tag for useless information. Indeed I did in May two years ago. Not so useless after all.)
I’ll skip the remaining two problems in this section, which I see I’ve done before, and move on to the section on ethics instead.
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