Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks(businessinsider.de) |
Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks(businessinsider.de) |
With the secret unknown it's 'magic'. With the secret known it becomes just a simple trick.
A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.
Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.
Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.
But I think the issue with the site discussed in the article is mainly just copyrighted material:, books, videos and the like.
https://www.google.com/patents/US6623366
And of course they can be trade secreted. Can they be copyrighted? That I dunno. A performance can be copyrighted. But the ideas? Probably not.
I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley? PEG? Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you're working in, how much time you may invest… Or say you write a compiler. Will you use OCaml/F#/Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures? Or do you want C/C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?
One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject. It would be hard to get in, but once there you'd only get quality stuff. (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…) The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.
Realistically, if there's a video of a trick, you can usually figure it out. If there are multiple videos from different angles, it's easier. For that matter, there are explanatory videos for most of the big tricks on YouTube now.
I once saw a professional magician having a miserable time performing on the stage on the Santa Cruz beach. He was doing a levitation, and in brilliant sunlight it was embarrassingly obvious how it worked.
:)
http://dresdencodak.com/2016/05/23/dark-science-64-turncoat/
No need to go to the dark net though - 99% of magic tricks are now readily exposed on Youtube public channels, and I am not just talking about the original instructions videos being leaked on there. A myriad of kids stand ready to either perform tricks so badly that they give away the techniques, or else outright show how things are done.
Still though, it is like seeing how a commercial airliner is flown. Watching hundreds of hours of video footage is no substitute for formal training and real like practice.
Also, one of the biggest draws of magic to me is hearing of the origins of most tricks, and researching guys who came up with these things over a hundred years ago.
Some examples...
See "guilds" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild
See "companies" with "trade secrets".
See Vatican Library (no longer fully secret) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Library
See "classified information" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information
Manager: "As senior developer, you lack sufficient knowledge of our most important application."
Me: "Wait. I am the one who wrote most the documentation that is in our knowledge base for that application. I am the one who set up the knowledge base."
Manager: "That is not knowledge. Knowledge is what is in your head."
Me: blinks incredulously
I departed the company shortly after this exchange.
But I think you're right. It was certainly the manager's idea that if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, his position would be treated (and generally was, among his superiors) with the respect he felt it deserved. But I'd have to assert that this secret society dedicated to hoarding knowledge was a self-delusional sect.
That's generally been my experience.
I suspect that the real solution is an absence of secrecy - indefinite hoarding of information is no help to anyone except those who want their egos stroked by the number of "things" they have, and knowledge that nobody can access is barely knowledge at all.
As far as noise goes, you can never hope to rub it out completely. There will always be transcription errors, deliberate mistruths and gaps - the most you can do is carefully curate the repository to make sure you catch and repair as much as possible.
Essentially, the closest thing we have is probably Wikipedia. I don't know if that's especially complimentary to us as a species.
The truth is, if you want high quality, more eyes the better. (And the article mentions that magical art was greatly improved by general accessibility of things on the Internet.)
Yes, this. We had actually worked together amicably for several years, he as senior, I as mid-level. Then we both got bumped up. As part of my new responsibilities as senior, I tried to surface issues and confront them transparently. I was mindful not to point fingers or show anyone up but rather identify them as shortcomings in our practices or policies.
For cultural reasons, I think he felt threatened by this and assumed it was his responsibility to hide issues and save his own face. It fell apart pretty quickly. It sucked but I've used it as a career lesson.
Is the information better? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know enough about the country to say. But it's a chore to read. Last updated in June 2013, so that's three-and-a-bit years without updates in a rapidly-changing part of the world.
My mother sold World Book encyclopedias when I was a kid, and we had a set. I grew up reading those cover-to-cover. There's something beautiful about having info at your fingertips that can be consumed at the speed of reading. Paper encyclopedias have it, and wikipedia has it, but online Britannica does not. Well, not from my excursion there just now.
Crowd-sourcing can be a great tool, but not for high-integrity information. IMHO: As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda, I've come to think that overlooking Wikipedia's accuracy problems was a forerunner to this situation. I'm sure much of Wikipedia's information is good; I just don't know which is correct and which is complete nonsense.
I get a similar differential with 'orchestra', where the wikipedia article goes into much more depth, not just about composition, but also about things like selection criteria. 'Grasses' gets the same kind of results as 'resistors' - one paragraph in EB, lengthy page on WP. At this point, I ran out of free views :)
(I was purposefully avoiding subjective topics like biographies, as no matter what is written in a biography, you can always find something to complain about.)
If it works for you, keep using it, I guess. But I found it slow, poorly laid-out, with fewer pictorial examples, and at least for the selections above, the inferior source.
> As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda
The public has always done this. Yellow journalism has been there since the start, and propaganda goes back at least as far as Ancient Egyptian steles (damn, should have looked that one up). The only thing that's new (IMO) is the 24-hour news cycle, which has given everyone 'scandal fatigue'. When scandals are coming at you thick and strong, you just can't care about them anymore.
Is more better? Is more mediocre information better than less? How do you know what you're reading is true?
>> As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda
> The public has always done this.
It's always been true to a degree, just like there is always crime, but sometimes it's much worse than others. Right now there is plenty of evidence that the situation is bad.