Talk:Secrecy

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to: Secret

Secret is (a piece of) knowledge not shared, or not intended for use by others, thus kept hidden. In contrast to knowledge, the basic aim of which is to be shared and distributed usually indiscriminately. Society works by seeking and/or creating new knowledge and keeping some of it in/as secret. Today the world is described as going toward a Society of Knowledge, whereas quite convincingly it continues to follow the path toward a society of secrets. Typically, you do not share knowledge a) of your true internal nature, thoughts, feelings and ideas "as is" they are; b) neither are you ready to share out secrets implying that your rights to the freedom of information are just as limited as any other rights in society that is based on secrecy rather than sharing assets generated on mutual confidence, such as money. Now each trade is "a plot aginst the rest of the trades" as G.B. Shaw put it somewhere, hence they all have knowledge of how to generate money, legal or otherwise by practising the tricks of their trade. These are called trade secrets and they range from patent rights to devices of tax evasion. It is a general assumption that Nature has secrets that have to be discovered by practising scientific research into various single-minded directions, groupped under the labels of disciplines. Most of the research and study can be described as finding ways to extend the range of human perception, senses and other faculties to go beyond direct, hands-on experience. As a result, we have been mainly using destructive technologies to "unearth" what is inside objects, large or minuscule. Our targeting and shooting capabilities whether nano or cosmic precision level are amazing, yet the point or purpose of the endeveour has not changed much, i.e. it remains to be "to get there". One day we may just as well find out that the whole story of humankind was started by a gross misunderstanding and/or lapse of some early wisdom or teaching, such as "go and breed", or "you will own and rule the Earth", etc. that gave rise to unjustified confidence in intelligence of humanoid kind (cause/reason cycle or chain). apogr Can anyone see this page going anywhere? Is "secrecy" really a phenomenon that merits a whole article's worth of discussion? Do people have serious and in-depth things to say about secrecy? Right now we're basically a dictionary entry. --Ryguasu 12:14 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yes, there are serious and in-depth things to say about secrecy, but I don't have the time right now to write about them. However, secrecy is a key concept in politics and warfare, and we should let this stand as a stub for a better article to evolve.

Current social theorists and politicians claim that Knowledge Society is based on sharing knowledge (meaning: selling technology transfer to places where it is not always relevant or productive) whereas in fact the whole of the business world is based on hiding knowledge called business and trade secrets, etc. the biggest source of making extra profit until universal copying exercise renders them worthless.

Therefore I suggest exploring the "publicly known", but not necessarily documented secrecy of professions and trades to demonstrate how they effect the resultant turbulence and chaos that we suffer. What do you think? Apogr 15:59, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Feel free to be bold! Jussenadv 07:49, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

William Penn quote
Is the William Penn quote ("It is wise not to seek a secret; and honest, not to reveal one.") really best quote on secrecy we could use? I find it somewhat silly (sometimes it is indeed wise to seek one, and often very honest to reveal one—I might be misinterpretting this but this quote sounds a lot like "don't ask, don't tell" to me). Personally my favorite secrecy quote is the only Ben Franklin one, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." --Fastfission 00:59, 22 August 2006 (UTC)


 * A better quote, by far. __meco 07:53, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Contradiction
"among a group of people, which can be as small as one person" Group: "any collection or assemblage of persons or things; cluster."--84.249.253.201 23:41, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Fixed, two and a half years later. Gary (talk) 18:14, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Secret/Sacred
Can someone tell me if these two words have the same word derivation.

Thanks.

Richard Collins —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 144.139.37.47 (talk) 10:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC).


 * According to OED, secret is from a Latin root of secernere and secretus meaning to separate or divide. Sacred is from sacre or sacrare which has pretty much the same meaning as sacred, as far as I can tell. So the answer seems to be no. --24.147.86.187 01:28, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

POV Change
Removed a sentence in Military Secrecy that referenced doublespeak because I felt it sounded accusatory and paranoid. 76.21.35.17 (talk) 07:40, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

The definition is not well formed. "Shared" implies one person passing information to one or more others. How can that be done in a group "as small as one"? Or does the "as small as one" refer to those receiving the confidence? I prefer to consider a secret to be information shared among a group as small as two. —Preceding unsigned comment added by RMHayes1954 (talk • contribs) 03:36, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Clarification **

secrecy built into biology
I removed this sentence: "One reason for sexual reproduction and speciation may be to allow members of a species to share genetic improvements without those improvements becoming available to competitors." There was no source for it, and I don't see how the origin of sexual reproduction or of a species can be explained through the need to prevent other species from obtaining a population's genetic improvements. Gary (talk) 07:03, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Furtiveness?
I have never once in my life heard this word and do not see any reason for why it should be part of the article when people can look it up in a thesaurus if they want a synonym for secrecy that noone ever uses. The word secrecy is adequate. Atheuz (talk) 23:55, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Secrecy by Obscurity
Isn't this a well known way of keeping a secret, by releasing it freely inside a bulk of other, non-vital information? Haha, underage kids buying porn mags at the store comes to mind. "Milk, Bread, Butter, Pornmag, and a few of those buble gums, please!" And then there is of course misdirection. Kebman (talk) 04:40, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

No continuity
Why in this article it says "A military secret is secret information that is purposely not made available to the general public and hence to any enemy, by the military in order to gain an advantage or to not reveal a weakness, avoid embarrassment or to help in propaganda efforts." But in articles about "conspiracy theories" they don't mention this statement. This statement pretty much guarentees that some portion of a conspiracy is true. A cover up is a cover up no matter what the purpose is. This is why almost every government thing is a cover up in some form and then proves that almost all government actions have a legitimate "conspiracy theory" type idea to it. There arn't any crossover talk pages for connecting various wikipedia articles so not sure where this statement should go. --24.94.251.190 (talk) 09:11, 27 September 2010 (UTC)