Blog B'omer: This is the Eleventh Post

Submitted by: firstpob_moo

As part of a move to be a hip technology company - like Google - our offices have moved to open plan.  We sit at long tables with TV’s above us playing CNN without sound.  We’re surrounded by bright colors and meeting areas with couches instead of chairs. The walls along the perimeter of the space are covered in whiteboard paint for easy jump-up-and-work-it-out-in-big activities.   Last week the CTO stood in the middle of the room and filmed a question and answer session about new technology methodologies.  Those walls that don’t have whiteboard paint on them have inspirational sayings in big letters:  “Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it. Geniuses remove it!”  

My personal favorite, attributed to Aldous Huxley, is “Information is the enemy of knowledge.”

If inspiration can be defined as the spark toward thought and wonder, this is perfect.  Every time I notice it, I think and think and think what is could possibly MEAN.  And I wonder who thought it was a good idea to put it on a wall.

I assume that what they’re trying to say is that if you have facts, it may stop you from experiencing on your own, which means you may not have a full breadth of knowledge - you can’t say you own that knowledge if you didn’t get it yourself.   It’s a cool idea, but as a company who is putting emphasis on lean and fast, we shouldn’t be encouraging our employees to start from scratch and create their own list of learned data that will inevitably match lists that already exist.  It’s a waste of money.   Plus, once you’ve gained the knowledge, then you have the information - which according to this, cancels out the knowledge.    Seems rather catch-22ish.

The quote is attributed to Aldous Huxley, which also confuses things.  Aldous Huxley is famous for his book Brave New World, an alternate-world fiction intended to clarify individualist values & natural emotions by describing the evils that a government-run utopia would cause.

So if Aldous Huxley said it, one has to first figure out if Aldous Huxley meant it as a true statement or one that the evil people say and that as a reader you’re supposed to understand is false.  

Aldous Huxley doesn’t seem to have said this at all though, satirically, ironically, conversationally, controversially, or otherwise.  I’ve investigated this.  I didn't investigate to have information that could be construed as knowledge, heaven forbid, but just to help me figure out how to interpret "information is the enemy of knowledge."   And not only can I not find this quote related to Mr. Huxley, I can't even find all these words listed in that order anywhere on the internet.

So Aldous Huxley doesn’t seem to have said anything like this - because really, who would? - and no one else seems to have said it either.  In the interest of spreading truth I did tape up 8x11 pages in landscape orientation that say “never” “said” “this” after the “ - Aldous Huxley” on the wall, but someone removed the papers.

One thing that’s clear is that somebody involved in the decoration of our Open Space values knowledge enough to make sure its enemy is called out permanently on a wall.  

I’d love to know where this statement comes from, who made the decision to put this on our wall, toward what aim, and what they thought it meant.  But I don’t want to be pegged as anti-company by gathering this information.