This website has had its name changed. Formerly, it was known as The Paranoid Agnostic: Suspicious but Unconvinced. As of now, it is The Synthetic Librarian. The name change reflects a shift in my interests. The site used to primarily focus on issues of Systems Administration with some coverage of Cognitive Science and Library Technology. There is much more coverage of library-related topics now.

The term “Synthetic” is borrowed from the concept of Synthetic Psychology. Valentino Braitenberg wrote a book titled Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, and Mike Dawson wrote one called Minds and Machines that suggest a new method for forming psychological explanations. The “synthetic method” involves choosing a system of understood components, observing its behaviour, looking for surprises, and then analysing the system. The goal is to understand the complex interaction of components. This contrasts analytical methods which typically tries to apply reductionist explanations to a system to understand the components.

The synthetic method is appealing to those that seem emergent proprieties in systems that might otherwise resist reductionist explanations.

Synthetic Librarianship then, might mean attempting to discover information through the interplay of small well-understand components, rather than through the analysis of knowledge and rigid categorization.

The author of this site is Cloned Milkmen. Cloned Milkmen is not a professional librarian though CM is sometimes mistaken for one on the Internet.