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Obdicut posted:It's hard to think up a way our current economic system could be crueler and more hosed, but 'attention economy' sounds like it. Hopefully, there would be a way to differentiate between positive and negative attention without bothering admin-politicians and making them even more into an elite capable of influencing the entire economy in their preferred direction. Even then, it's a bad method of recognizing severity of the problem, because it prefers more flashy and noticeable issues.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:20
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Obdicut posted:The primary problem for heroin addicts is that they're addicted to heroin. I'm asking how the attention economy can fix that problem. Or any problem. I have received no answer. What you are now saying is that we basically already have an attention economy. Great. Well, this isn't the place to debate harm reduction, but most of the damage comes from risk of overdose and needle-sharing, both of which can be significantly reduced. quote:Or they fake attention at their job because they're required to in order to get paid. Or they fake attention so that they're not caught paying attention to the thing they're actually interested in. Or a lot of other reasons people would fake attention. Um, this is confusing because you're basically just playing semantics with possible uses of the word "attention" with no regard for if and how it has been defined in the context of this discussion.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:20
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Hodgepodge posted:Well, this isn't the place to debate harm reduction, but most of the damage comes from risk of overdose and needle-sharing, both of which can be significantly reduced. Why isn't this the place to debate harm reduction? And how would the 'attention economy' help with the risk of overdose or needle-sharing? In addition, heroin has actual harms beyond those of overdose and needle sharing. quote:Um, this is confusing because you're basically just playing semantics with possible uses of the word "attention" with no regard for if and how it has been defined in the context of this discussion. No, I'm not. I'm using his definition: What people are actually, physically, sensorially, paying attention to. I'm not playing any semantic games at all. If you believe I am, them demonstrate it instead of asserting it. My simple contention: If someone pays attention to something, it may be for a huge number of different reasons. No matter what definition of 'attention' you use, this would be true. Can you address that problem, or are you going to simply claim it's semantics and hand-wave it away?
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Dec 1, 2013 23:24
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Hodgepodge posted:Well, this isn't the place to debate harm reduction, but most of the damage comes from risk of overdose and needle-sharing, both of which can be significantly reduced. The most of the damage comes from the fact that heroin addict has his brain screwed up to crave heroin. That's where the overdose and needle-sharing comes from.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:26
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Obdicut posted:Why isn't this the place to debate harm reduction? Well we wouldn't want an Eripsa thread to become overly broad in scope. Gantolandon posted:The most of the damage comes from the fact that heroin addict has his brain screwed up to crave heroin. That's where the overdose and needle-sharing comes from. Those actually come mostly from the prohibition of the drug, rather than from addiction itself.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:29
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Obdicut posted:Why isn't this the place to debate harm reduction? And how would the 'attention economy' help with the risk of overdose or needle-sharing? In addition, heroin has actual harms beyond those of overdose and needle sharing. To me, it seems as if the problem of heroin use is secondary to the attention economy debate and a bit of a red herring. I'm not sure what the other harm done by heroin use is, unless you are referring to the drug trade and drug war. And that lots of time is wasted in a chemically-induced fog of bliss which eventually fades into boring routine use, mainly to prevent withdrawals. quote:No, I'm not. I'm using his definition: What people are actually, physically, sensorially, paying attention to. I'm not playing any semantic games at all. If you believe I am, them demonstrate it instead of asserting it. Well, if we can measure attention to that degree, we can presumably also parse attention patterns fairly easily. And the semantics comes in when you say literally "attention doesn't mean anything" and then present three different usages of the word attention. I'm not sure why you think we can't interpret data such as attention patterns, though. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 23:34
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SedanChair posted:Those actually come mostly from the prohibition of the drug, rather than from addiction itself. People are doing the same with alcohol which is legal. You just need to substitute using infected needles with methyl poisoning. Edit: Hodgepodge posted:To me, it seems as if the problem of heroin use is secondary to the attention economy debate and a bit of a red herring. I'm not sure what the other harm done by heroin use is, unless you are referring to the drug trade and drug war. And that lots of time is wasted in a chemically-induced fog of bliss which eventually fades into boring routine use, mainly to prevent withdrawals. No, it's just a legitimate example where attention-based economy fails. Heroin, after all, gets a lot of interest from its user. Gantolandon fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 23:39
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Gantolandon posted:People are doing the same with alcohol which is legal. You just need to substitute using infected needles with methyl poisoning. Why yes, if you change the subject, suddenly the terms of the debate do change. Good for you.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:41
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Hodgepodge posted:To me, it seems as if the primary problems of heroin use are secondary to the attention economy debate and are a bit of a red herring. I'm not sure what the other harm done by heroin use is, unless you are referring to the drug trade and drug war. And that lots of time wasted in a chemically-induced fog of bliss which eventually fades into boring routine use, mainly to prevent withdrawals. I'm asking how the attentoin economy would impact something I chose at random. We can choose anything else, but clearly the attention economy can't do jack here. How about the obesity problem. How would the attention economy interact with our obesity problem? I'd conjecture that, if we allocate resources based on attention, our obesity problem would increase. quote:Well, if we can measure attention to that degree, we can presumably also parse attention patterns fairly easily. Why would you presume that? Measuring and parsing are light years apart in difficulty. I can recognize that someone is looking in a certain direction fairly easily, being able to tell why they're looking that way and what they feel about what they're looking at is much harder. Do you really not think so? quote:And the semantics comes in when you say literally "attention doesn't mean anything" and then present three different usages of the word attention. Yeah, I showed three different, contradictory things that attention could mean, which is a proof that attention, on its own, carries no meaning. What don't you get about that? Knowing that X is paying attention to Y doesn't tell you if X like Y, hates Y, has simply been distracted by Y because it's designed to capture his attention. It provides not clue as to resource distribution, and the argument is that the attention economy quote:I'm not sure why you think we can't interpret data such as attention patterns, though. I didn't say we can't, I said that that's another layer onto this. Without interpretation, the attention is meaningless. The interpretation is the important part, not the measurement of attention. So, to attempt to ground this in reality: Lots of people pay attention to the Kardashians, very few people pay attention to horribly burned veterans. So, in a straightforward attention economy, this means we'd give 'resources' to the Kardashians, and not to the horribly burned veterans. If not, what other steps are needed to interpret that information? Sometimes lack of attention is a sign of a problem, sometimes it's not. The interpretation is everything, the attention is meaningless on its own.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:42
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Obdicut posted:No, I'm not. I'm using his definition: What people are actually, physically, sensorially, paying attention to. I'm not playing any semantic games at all. If you believe I am, them demonstrate it instead of asserting it. There's no worry about what reasons people have for attending to the things they attend to. That's the point of it being prejudgmental; it isn't the result of a conscious, deliberative decision, it is an immediate reaction to perceived importance. The flow of attention is a direct indicator of what people immediately perceive to be important enough to devote their cognitive efforts towards. That importance is value-neutral, as in the case of the car crash and the rubber necks. The mere fact that attention has been attracted to the crash doesn't say anything about whether people like crashes or what more or less of them. What it does do is demonstrate where attention is being directed, and that change in the flow of attention is, I claim, sufficient for mobilizing resources. The fact that attention is being directed towards the crash suggests that something needs to be done. Amplifying that signal in a functioning economy of attention ensures that the persons most appropriate for handling the event are made aware so they can be dispatched properly. This isn't some crazy theory. Waze uses gps to get sensor readings on the flow of traffic, and can extract from that data important traffic information, like where the trouble spots are. This information is enough both to get emergency services to the scene, and to inform everyone else to avoid the area and route traffic around. The point is that amplifying the signal, in the context where everyone has a role and know how to respond, will allow the system to self-organize around the trouble and attend to it appropriately. What counts as appropriate in this situation depends on what you are doing and what your goals are. If I'm just trying to get across town, then a traffic accident means I should plan a new route. But if I'm an emergency responder, I'd treat that signal in an entirely different way. The point isn't force people to follow the flow of attention, or restrict people to act in any particular way. The point, instead, is to provide them with the proper information to be able to decide for themselves where their services are best rendered, and how best to accomplish whatever goals they have. That's exactly the treatment I gave of the heroin case. You were perhaps looking for something about treating heroin addicting itself, or the drug problem generally. So you think I'm avoiding the problem entirely, or just waving my hands and passing it off to community responsibility. In fact, what I was describing was a procedure by which different communities might weigh in and collaborate about certain problems they face, and how their activity around these problems is amplified into the domain of other communities who might be better suited to treat the problem. If the problem is just one heroin addict, then that problem probably doesn't rise above the communities to which that person belongs, and I described multiple ways in which the system I'm describing would provide resources for assisting at each level. I'm describing, ultimately a collective decision procedure. I'm not saying it guarantees the right results every time. I'm saying it accords with more basic principles of participatory feedback and self-organized consensus, and that these procedures open up methods for handling tasks that aren't available in the existing system, and is likely more suited to the problems at hand. Because seriously, the only problem with the heroin addict is the possibility of disease, and the burden they put on their own social networks. A heroin user who can manage these aspects responsibly and to community standards isn't a problem. Back to the faking of attention: you are worried about the kid facing forward in class with his hands folded, who appears for all the world to be engaged in the material, but in fact is daydreaming about unicorns. The kid is paying attention to something, just not what you think it is. I'm not sure why you think this is a problem for the view, any more than eye spots on butterfly wings is a problem for a theory of visual attention. The butterfly wings appear to be looking at things, but aren't. It might trick some of the creatures around it, but that doesn't imply there's any ambiguity over whether its eye spots are actually looking anywhere. There's no functionality that underlies that appearance of attention, and the difference will play out in behavior. Similarly the day dreaming kid won't do well on their exams because they weren't paying attention to the material. It is a difference that makes a difference.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:47
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That's nice, but if you read the article I posted earlier in the thread, you'll see that our corporate overlords are already making huge strides in analyzing this sort of information: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/ Despite the presentation by the OP, this isn't some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. People with actual power are keenly interested in gathering this sort of data in order to determine our future. Plugging your ears and shouting "lalalalala can't interpret data" doesn't someone annul technological change or power dynamics.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:48
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Hodgepodge posted:Why yes, if you change the subject, suddenly the terms of the debate do change. Good for you. What can I say? Heroin seems to have grabbed attention of many people here, so the thread economy followed. Isn't that how your model society works? On a more serious note, I have written a lot of things in this thread which were on topic and you haven't acknowledged them any way, so it's kinda weird that you are upset about a two-sentences long derail.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:50
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Gantolandon posted:What can I say? Heroin seems to have grabbed attention of many people here, so the thread economy followed. Isn't that how your model society works? I think you might be confusing me with the OP.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:51
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Gantolandon posted:Heroin, after all, gets a lot of interest from its user. But there's no reason to think that heroin use will become an all-consuming passion of the entire population. I would expect that a population given unrestricted access to the drug, other things being equal, would find some steady level of use that would stabilize over time. Environmental conditions can drive up drug use, especially when the environment is unstable or unstimulating. In rats, at least, we know that use of cocaine will stabilize in environments rich with other forms of stimulation. I see no reason for thinking that human use of drugs will be any different.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:53
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Eripsa, I'm honestly worried that you are going to cause some damage in this world. You're just the man to put a techno-utopian shine on some capitalist's brain-chipping ambitions. You're going to find a patron eventually--tech moguls seem to have a bottomless appetite for flattering bullshit--and you'll earnestly set about convincing idealistic young people that enslavement is a new freedom. Please retire from the world of ideas.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:54
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RealityApologist posted:There's no worry about what reasons people have for attending to the things they attend to. Yes, there is. I made the 'worry' explicitly clear. Attention tells us nothing without interpretation. quote:That importance is value-neutral, as in the case of the car crash and the rubber necks. The mere fact that attention has been attracted to the crash doesn't say anything about whether people like crashes or what more or less of them. What it does do is demonstrate where attention is being directed, and that change in the flow of attention is, I claim, sufficient for mobilizing resources. This is the claim you're not backing up. And 'mobilizing resources'-- which resources? To do what? quote:The fact that attention is being directed towards the crash suggests that something needs to be done. Amplifying that signal in a functioning economy of attention ensures that the persons most appropriate for handling the event are made aware so they can be dispatched properly. And the people who are 'most appropriate' are determined how? quote:This isn't some crazy theory. Waze uses gps to get sensor readings on the flow of traffic, and can extract from that data important traffic information, like where the trouble spots are. This information is enough both to get emergency services to the scene, and to inform everyone else to avoid the area and route traffic around. The point is that amplifying the signal, in the context where everyone has a role and know how to respond, will allow the system to self-organize around the trouble and attend to it appropriately. "Flow of traffic" and "attention" don't resemble each other at all. Flow of traffic is really useful information if you're concerned with the flow of traffic. Your claim is that 'attention' is something that's useful to measure. You haven't made a case for this. quote:What counts as appropriate in this situation depends on what you are doing and what your goals are. If I'm just trying to get across town, then a traffic accident means I should plan a new route. But if I'm an emergency responder, I'd treat that signal in an entirely different way. The point isn't force people to follow the flow of attention, or restrict people to act in any particular way. The point, instead, is to provide them with the proper information to be able to decide for themselves where their services are best rendered, and how best to accomplish whatever goals they have. Your claim is that we distribute resources using this system. But it turns out, in the end, you rely on everyone involved using the information (and somehow everyone is capable of paying attention to this firehose of information) perfectly. Magic hand-waving. quote:That's exactly the treatment I gave of the heroin case. You were perhaps looking for something about treating heroin addicting itself, or the drug problem generally. So you think I'm avoiding the problem entirely, or just waving my hands and passing it off to community responsibility. In fact, what I was describing was a procedure by which different communities might weigh in and collaborate about certain problems they face, and how their activity around these problems is amplified into the domain of other communities who might be better suited to treat the problem. If the problem is just one heroin addict, then that problem probably doesn't rise above the communities to which that person belongs, and I described multiple ways in which the system I'm describing would provide resources for assisting at each level. You hand-waved in communities solving the problem, you don't have a solution in the 'system' you're describing. quote:I'm describing, ultimately a collective decision procedure. I'm not saying it guarantees the right results every time. I'm saying it accords with more basic principles of participatory feedback and self-organized consensus, and that these procedures open up methods for handling tasks that aren't available in the existing system, and is likely more suited to the problems at hand. You haven't done a single thing, in any way, to show this collective decision procedure would produce good results, let along the right results every time. You rely entirely on people interpreting the information and doing the right thing; you hand-wave the solution in, every time, and the solution has nothing to do with 'attention'. quote:Back to the faking of attention: you are worried about the kid facing forward in class with his hands folded, who appears for all the world to be engaged in the material, but in fact is daydreaming about unicorns. The kid is paying attention to something, just not what you think it is. I'm not sure why you think this is a problem for the view, any more than eye spots on butterfly wings is a problem for a theory of visual attention. The butterfly wings appear to be looking at things, but aren't. It might trick some of the creatures around it, but that doesn't imply there's any ambiguity over whether its eye spots are actually looking anywhere. There's no functionality that underlies that appearance of attention, and the difference will play out in behavior. Similarly the day dreaming kid won't do well on their exams because they weren't paying attention to the material. It is a difference that makes a difference. This is you admitting that we wouldn't actually be able to track attention-- you say that you'd be able to figure it out long after the moment of attention, in the results on the exam. So thanks, I guess, for admitting that your attention economy idea won't work. Do you understand that this section is entirely arguing that, if the only way to tell if a kid is actually paying attention now is to go into the future and see how well he does on the test, that you're not actually figuring anything out by tracking attention-- that you're not actually tracking attention?
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Dec 1, 2013 23:56
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Obdicut posted:Yeah, that networks of mutual interest aren't in any way a useful thing to organize around Why in the world would you think this? Interest groups are one of the primary methods of social organization. If you include family relations as a kind of "interest group", it accounts for the vast majority of human social relations, and it is through these networks that most human social activity is propagated. One interpretation of the view being offered here is that interest groups will be more efficient at handling organizational problems that hierarchically imposed structures, since such tasks are often motivated by group membership alone. Heroin users have built-in incentives and experience in helping addicts recover from and manage their addictions.
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Dec 1, 2013 23:58
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SedanChair posted:Eripsa, I'm honestly worried that you are going to cause some damage in this world. You're just the man to put a techno-utopian shine on some capitalist's brain-chipping ambitions. You're going to find a patron eventually--tech moguls seem to have a bottomless appetite for flattering bullshit--and you'll earnestly set about convincing idealistic young people that enslavement is a new freedom. Please retire from the world of ideas. There's plenty of people in San Francisco with their head so far up their rear end they can see the daylight who have many crazier ideas than Eripsa does. Some of them even get funded. I don't think you have to worry about this particular antichrist is all I'm sayin'.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:00
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RealityApologist posted:But there's no reason to think that heroin use will become an all-consuming passion of the entire population. I would expect that a population given unrestricted access to the drug, other things being equal, would find some steady level of use that would stabilize over time. Environmental conditions can drive up drug use, especially when the environment is unstable or unstimulating. In rats, at least, we know that use of cocaine will stabilize in environments rich with other forms of stimulation. I see no reason for thinking that human use of drugs will be any different. Given the heroin potential to cause addiction, it can be another way of creating positive feedback that breaks the economy - push drugs to people, bask in their attention, use the resources and manpower you can now claim to promote heroin use even more. A lot of people will try to stop you, but they have a lot of other things to care about, while you just need to reduce the dosage and your customers will devote all their interest to you. Hodgepodge posted:I think you might be confusing me with the OP. Nope, I was just curious why you are upset about a minuscule derail.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:04
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RealityApologist posted:Why in the world would you think this? Interest groups are one of the primary methods of social organization. If you include family relations as a kind of "interest group", it accounts for the vast majority of human social relations, and it is through these networks that most human social activity is propagated. Then it's just a tautology. Interest groups are just organizational groups. I'm saying that 'interest groups', defined in the way you've been doing it as 'people paying attention to whatever' don't select for people able to actually help fix whatever. This goes back to 'attention economy' actually being a marketing concept that you've decided to take and ridiculously apply backwards to the economy. People paying attention to things is useful if you want to sell them something, it is not useful if you want to solve a problem, except in the absolute bare minimum that some (but by no means all, or even a majority) of problems have people pay attention to them. quote:One interpretation of the view being offered here is that interest groups will be more efficient at handling organizational problems that hierarchically imposed structures, since such tasks are often motivated by group membership alone. Heroin users have built-in incentives and experience in helping addicts recover from and manage their addictions. Can you explain the built-in incentive for a heroin user to help addicts recover or manage their addictions, please? Can you explain why an interest group would select for people of actually helping to solve the problem? To move it to a 'positive' problem, say that the people in a town pay 'attention' to the fact that they need a new bridge. Let's skip over that this isn't really something measurable by 'attention', and that your system completely fails from the start because of it. Let's pretend there's some system that can measure their 'attention' to the lack of a bridge, and having to drive four miles around. How does this interest group spontaneously generate people who can solve the problem? If it doesn't, then how are 'interest groups more efficient at handling organizational problems'? serewit posted:There's plenty of people in San Francisco with their head so far up their rear end they can see the daylight who have many crazier ideas than Eripsa does. Some of them even get funded. I don't think you have to worry about this particular antichrist is all I'm sayin'. Yeah, at worst Erpisa is making some students miserable while they try to figure out how the gently caress to please him, but he's so desperate for his ideas to be embraced he's probably a pretty soft grader. They are getting a little cheated out of a decent education but at least thinking about why he's crazy wrong would be useful for them. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would grade students badly if they pointed out the huge, gaping holes in what he's saying, he'd probably just be glad that--hah--they were paying attention. The people in SF I can't stand are the surprising large 'HIV doesn't cause AIDS' brigade. They're really loud and obnoxious. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 00:06
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SedanChair posted:Eripsa, I'm honestly worried that you are going to cause some damage in this world. You're just the man to put a techno-utopian shine on some capitalist's brain-chipping ambitions. You're going to find a patron eventually--tech moguls seem to have a bottomless appetite for flattering bullshit--and you'll earnestly set about convincing idealistic young people that enslavement is a new freedom. Please retire from the world of ideas. The only thing I might say in response is that I keep coming here to share my thoughts and to argue them out with people who at times viciously disagree with me. I'm not the kind of person who seeks out filter bubbles that only serve to reinforce one's existing beliefs. Furthermore, my views aren't just practical or technical; I'm talking about principles and values at an explicitly philosophical level. I'm largely informed by American pragmatists like Dewey, Quine, and Rorty; my positions are liberal in Rorty's sense, and inspired by my work with anarchist communities and digital networks. It's probably no consolation, but I'm not just a yes man. I believe my views differ significantly from the libertarian and singularity ideologies that pervade the popular discussion. To the extent that it is unique, and that it represents values and science that are worth defending, then I'd be just pleased as punch to find a patron that can support this work. I'm worried about the other side of it, actually: not that I get supported, but that someone runs with these ideas without my support. I have contacts at DARPA, and avenues through which I might work to secure funding through them. I also know they are working on projects very close to the ones I've proposed. I do worry that this work contributes to projects that don't represent the values and goals I have, and that improper implementations of the techniques could contribute to the violence and suffering at the hands of the state.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:14
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Gantolandon posted:Nope, I was just curious why you are upset about a minuscule derail. Because you were trying to change the subject while pretending not to. Alcoholism isn't an identical problem to heroin addiction, and trying to treat them as interchangeable the moment it becomes clear you know gently caress all about the latter doesn't speak very well about your priorities or intellectual honesty.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:15
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RealityApologist posted:The only thing I might say in response is that I keep coming here to share my thoughts and to argue them out with people who at times viciously disagree with me. I don't really 'disagree' with you, I'm more saying that you're saying a ton of bullshit, waving your hands at problems, and in the end aren't actually saying anything coherent or real. What you're saying is close to some genuinely interesting stuff, but there's a deep gulf between you and that interesting stuff.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:20
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Hodgepodge posted:Because you were trying to change the subject while pretending not to. Alcoholism isn't an identical problem to heroin addiction, and trying to treat them as interchangeable the moment it becomes clear you know gently caress all about the latter doesn't speak very well about your priorities or intellectual honesty. I love how you interpreted my sperging over details as a deliberate attempt to change the subject, especially while I continued to debate on topic in later posts. Edit: RealityApologist posted:Furthermore, my views aren't just practical or technical; I'm talking about principles and values at an explicitly philosophical level. I'm largely informed by American pragmatists like Dewey, Quine, and Rorty; my positions are liberal in Rorty's sense, and inspired by my work with anarchist communities and digital networks. This is the thing that frustrates me the most: you produced a lot of content to only glance the topic. Reading the first post was like trying to eat a nourishing meal while having been given a barrel of Skittles. Ir's infuriating to read through several screens of condensed text and be rewarded with nothing substantial. Gantolandon fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 00:23
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Gantolandon posted:I love how you interpreted my sperging over details as a deliberate attempt to change the subject, especially while I continued to debate on topic in later posts. This discussion is already all over the place without red herrings, so yeah.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:34
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Gantolandon posted:Given the heroin potential to cause addiction, it can be another way of creating positive feedback that breaks the economy - push drugs to people, bask in their attention, use the resources and manpower you can now claim to promote heroin use even more. A lot of people will try to stop you, but they have a lot of other things to care about, while you just need to reduce the dosage and your customers will devote all their interest to you. My assumption was that there is some "natural" rate of heroin use in a population, and that artificially tampering with the demand for heroin will result in a hit to functionality elsewhere, which will in turn raise concerns from other interested parties to escalate the discussion. I don't think the heroin case is a red herring, but it is a complicated example that is difficult to treat given the existing discourse around drug use. Obdicut seems to think that addiction is a problem with an individual, and is looking for solutions at that level, but I'm trying to argue that there are environmental aspects that make the issue a much larger problem of social organization. I'm trying to point to facts about how human communities self organize, in order to suggest ways of leveraging those dynamics in favor of resolving these sorts of problems. And this is all meant as an example of my more basic claim, which is that these organizational dynamics are better suited to handle the problem than centralized, hierarchical, representative government. But the normative implications of drug use make the heroin example is too complicated to make the larger point clear. I think Obdicut might want to reflect on how extreme and unclear his objections are in light of my responses; it might perhaps help him extend a bit more charity when interpreting my frustrated attempts at articulating my own thoughts. Again, this is a REALLY BIG THEORY, and it covers material all across the web of knowledge, from facts about politics and values to the mathematics of dynamical systems. We shouldn't expect it to be easy. More importantly, there really aren't any theories on the table that can adequately handle this range of phenomena, so we should remember that we're blazing trails, and be more understanding of the mistakes we make along the way. So let's start more abstractly with less complicated examples. The heroin case is an instance of a general kind of worry about the attention economy: 1) The worry that people are too attracted to bad things This might be distinguished from the other basic kind of worry, 2) The worry that people will not be attracted enough to good things So on the one hand, you have everyone following celebrities or using heroin or otherwise making bad decisions, because the things they want to do are dangerous or stupid or otherwise not thing things that should be done. And on the other hand, you have all the important but dirty jobs that no one wants to do, like mine minerals and pick strawberries and clean shithouses and so on. We talked a lot about the latter case in the original marble thread, if anyone is interested they might go back and read it. Part of the problem with the heroin example is that I don't think heroin is a bad thing, and perhaps Obdicut and I differ there. In any case, I'm not merely equating "good things" with "the things people are attracted to". Some things are genuinely stupid or dangerous, like car crashes, and people are attracted to them anyway. Other things are genuinely good and healthy and should be encouraged. I'm not just defining these problems away. But there is, nevertheless, a problem for how to determine what these good or bad things are, and also for how to deal with it. The traditional method is to select some governing body that is fewer in number, and less ideologically diverse, and have them make the decisions. They might not be the best position, but it will result in some decision, and that's at least a resolution, and in most cases that's enough. But there will be some problems, especially those concerning the social welfare, that can't adequately be addressed by this method because it requires incorporating voices into the decision making process that are explicitly ruled out by the procedure. So I'm proposing a new sort of organizational procedure that will let decision making emerge naturally out of the overlapping activity of self-organized communities of interested agents. In this procedure, each community has their own distinct values for judging things to be "good" or "bad", and they are free to cultivate these views as they see fit. A car crash can be good or bad in a thousand different ways, depending on who you are and what you're interested in doing. A safety engineer's criteria for a "good crash" might be totally different from a nascar fan's, and that's fine; there's no need to resolve these inconsistencies in the general case. But they might arise in the case of solving specific tasks, and will of course need to be resolved in that instance. So let's go back to the heroin example; hopefully the above discussion makes the structure and importance of the example more clear. So here's one problem someone might have with the heroin addict: if I'm an addict too, I'd have a problem if the other one (let's call him Spud) used all the heroin without leaving enough for me. But is this claim reasonable? That is, is Spud doing a bad thing? Well, an attention economy would allow us to, for instance, compare that user's habits against its historical patterns, to see first of all if Spud is using unusually more than he would normally use, and second against the habits of all other users of the drug, to see if Spud's use is abnormal generally. This information will let anyone know if Spud's use is abnormal compared to other users. If Spud is using twice as much as everyone else, then maybe that is a good reason to figure out what's going on with Spud and take the objections to his use seriously. This is the heroin user's built-in incentive at handling these community problems: because I'm a user too, I'm a member of that community and I have an exiting interest in dealing with its structure because it has direct implications for my identity. If we don't do something about Spud, then we won't have any heroin left. So far this has been all describing intra-community dynamics, where the values of the community itself determine the response the community takes to perceived problems. The judgment of "good" or "bad" has all been according to standards within the community itself, and not compared to potentially hostile communities elsewhere. The attention economy resources aren't solving the problem directly, they are instead supplying the resources for the users to resolve the problems themselves, without appeal to some higher legal authority. But you might imagine a different intra-community problem, where the community picks on Spud by falsely claiming he is taking more than his share, and using this as an excuse to give spud less. In other words, communities aren't always supportive, and can also be hostile to its members. But Spud isn't just a heroin addict, he's also members of many other networks. An external humanitarian effort monitoring the activity of heroin users, using the same attention economy data on use and other behaviors, might observe or even anticipate this bullying situation, and step in on behalf of Spud to correct the wrong to ensure that Spud gets his fair share. In this case, the measure of "bad" came from external to the community. The humanitarian effort wouldn't need authority to engage in this monitoring, and "stepping in" need not be the product of some grand political effort. These communities can engage each other directly, in the context of potentially many other communities and interested parties getting involved. Presumably heroin users don't want any of that poo poo, which gives them an incentive to stabilize their activity into a normal pattern of behavior that won't raise these triggers for escalating their signal across the wider community. I can keep going on with the example if you'd like and consider other cases of dispute and resolution, but I'll cut the wall of text here. and let the thread catch up.
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Dec 2, 2013 01:26
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RealityApologist posted:
No, I don't. I think it's a societal problem, but that it exists at the level of individual, like every other goddamn societal problem. That's why I asked how your system would deal with a heroin addict: i was looking for a solution at that higher level, but you offer none. The rest of your post: The problem isn't that Spud will use up all the heroin. First of all, that's not possible. Second of all, if Spud did, the problem would quickly self-correct in that Spud would be very happy and very dead. This bit is basically your whole handwaving bullshit in a nutshell: quote:An external humanitarian effort monitoring the activity of heroin users, using the same attention economy data on use and other behaviors, might observe or even anticipate this bullying situation, and step in on behalf of Spud to correct the wrong to ensure that Spud gets his fair share. In this case, the measure of "bad" came from external to the community. The humanitarian effort wouldn't need authority to engage in this monitoring, and "stepping in" need not be the product of some grand political effort. These communities can engage each other directly, in the context of potentially many other communities and interested parties getting involved. Why would an external humanitarian group monitor the activity of heroin users? Why wouldn't, say, an external group of heroin-user haters be monitoring it? How would 'stepping in' work--this is you waving your hands and declaring a magical solution. quote:Presumably heroin users don't want any of that poo poo, which gives them an incentive to stabilize their activity into a normal pattern of behavior that won't raise these triggers for escalating their signal across the wider community. Heroin users already have an incentive to stabilize their activity into a normal pattern of behavior that doesn't raise triggers for escalating their signal across a wider community. They don't, however, because heroin is a highly addictive drug and it's difficult to regulate your use of it, and heroin users don't collaborate on decisions. So that's another thing you're hand-waving in--the ability for people to collaborate on decisions. This would require first defining the group that would collaborate, and then some mechanism whereby decisions are reached. You don't have this, you are assuming it would exist. Let's list your problems in discrete order: 1. Attention paid to something tells us nothing about the importance of that thing. Nothing. Not a drat thing, at all, in any way. It doesn't even tell us if the attention being paid to it is wanted or not. 2. Even if we magically have the ability to sort real attention from fake attention, there are lots of problems that exist precisely because nobody pays any attention to them. 3. Even if somehow people are paying attention to important things only, then this in no way marshals or organizes the resources necessary to fix that problem. An interest group's existence has absolutely no bearing on whether that interest group has people with the resources to solve that problem, as in the bridge example above. 4. Even if you assume the interest groups somehow magically are 'observed' by outside groups that have the resources to solve the problem, where the gently caress did those people come from? You claim this isn't a hierarchical system, so how do they get the authority to step in? 5. Your whole system depends on everyone being able to access all relevant information to them constantly, as in the person changing their path across town because of a traffic problem. How do they access all this information simultaneously, or is there some sort of process that sorts what's relevant to them--is there yet another magical interpretation layer you're handwaving into existence? Obdicut fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 01:41
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Obdicut posted:Attention paid to something tells us nothing about the importance of that thing. This is false. It tells you the importance it has to the system paying attention. That doesn't mean it has any more importance than that. When there is a flash in my peripheral vision because of the sun through the window, it grabs my attention but isn't all that important and loses your attention quickly. But the same flash might have been a grenade, and that would have been important and required more sustained attention. So when you pay attention to something, your brain is saying it is preparing to direct its resources that way. It is making a prejudgment that more attention and resources may be required. And that's also what's happening when people rubberneck and slow down around a crash: they are making the immediate prejudgment that something interesting is going on here that requires more resources. The fact of their directed attention is at least prima facie reason to suspect that something interesting is going on. Your objections are stronger than are warranted by what I am writing. Humanitarian groups might watch over heroin users because that's the sort of thing they are interested in doing, and those are the groups people would trust in handling humanitarian issues. The heroin haters might be monitoring also, but presumably they will have more of a challenge in escalating their complaints to the attention of the general assembly because people expect a normal amount of vitriol and accusation from them. But there's lots of ways these things might go depending on the particular problem and the particular parties involved. I'm not hand waving these problems away; there's just a lot of cases to potentially talk about and I'm trying to be clear and concise and not just post walls of text. I was going to talk about disputes that might arise between the population of heroin users and the wider opiate users generally; it may be the case that the general consensus of people determine that medical uses of opiates deserve priority over the heroin users, so that a "fair" distribution of opium is weighted towards the former. But these details are all just speculations on how the dynamics might play out from different perspectives. I will say that none of this depends on everyone making the right decisions with exactly proper use of their tools. It just requires that the tools themselves are genuinely useful and available, and that people do they best they can with what they've got. There's discussion in the human computation community of dealing with unreliable human sensors that feed bad data; these things aren't trivial, but they can be managed.
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Dec 2, 2013 01:57
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If the Silicon Valley were to become a sovereign nation does that mean we can wipe it off the face of the Earth? I'm in favor of doing this.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:01
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RealityApologist posted:This is false. It tells you the importance it has to the system paying attention. No, it really doesn't. I don't know why you persist in this belief, when it's so easily demonstrably wrong. I may look out the window and watch the traffic while I think about something. I might only pay a few minutes of attention every day to my liquid nitrogen canisters even though they are absolutely, completely, and utterly vital to me. Attention does not measure importance, and this is trivially demonstrable.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:08
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Gantolandon posted:The system breaks even more hilariously when you consider marketing and advertising industry, which becomes even more powerful in such economy. If you gather enough attention, you are able to divert more and more resources into promoting whatever you do, which - of course - gives you even more people that are interested in what you do. It's capitalism 2.0, except that you don't even need to actually sell your product, just advertising it is enough. It doesn't matter if you are just an idea guy who never did anything tangible, you are able to become rich just because you made a really convincing description of your future masterpiece. This is mostly right, except it's important to emphasize how loving awful marketing and advertising are at handling attention resources. I'm shown irrelevant ads all the time that obstruct my ability to function smoothly with my environment; the point of these ads isn't just to sell me the thing, but also to imprint the brand and consumer identity in my mind through repeated exposure. It is effective at turning people into little brand-tribes as a regular source of consumption, and is quite a lot like the way we harvest fleece from a flock of sheep. Domesticating consumers is a really super effective at making money. But in terms distributing all the things properly, the whole system isn't very smart about it. As it works now, advertising is a middleman strategy for connecting users to find services, but ideally we'd want the middleman to get out of the way entirely, with direct connections to services at the user's command If we imagine a world without money, advertising stops being a matter of consumption, and turns purely into identity politics. Why should I as an outsider trust humanitarian group A over group B to step in on Spud's behalf, especially when they differ in their techniques? Advertisement becomes a way of getting users to make decisions like these.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:18
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Obdicut posted:No, it really doesn't. I don't know why you persist in this belief, when it's so easily demonstrably wrong. I may look out the window and watch the traffic while I think about something. I might only pay a few minutes of attention every day to my liquid nitrogen canisters even though they are absolutely, completely, and utterly vital to me. Attention does not measure importance, and this is trivially demonstrable. If I'm comparing some arbitrary moment of your life to some other arbitrary moment, then perhaps I can't tell the difference of importance. But if I'm looking over the full profile of your behavior, I'm bound to see a difference if there is one. Every day you might hit the same light switch in your room, but those interactions are momentary and at regular intervals, and probably compare normally to the light switch behavior of other people. The fact that you engage with nitrogen canisters at all is probably abnormal for the general population, and already specializes and contextualizes your behavior by having them in your network. Presumably for most people that interact regularly with nitrogen canisters, it plays some important roll in their lives. And again, you might be able to distinguish different forms of typical nitrogen-canister behavior; the profile of a canister delivery person probably looks quite a bit different from yours, etc. In other words, there are sophisticated ways of handling attention dynamics that don't simply reduce to the question of "what do you spend the most time touching" as a brute one-dimensional quantity. Again, the claim isn't that attention dynamics magically solve every problem, but that it provides a basic tool around which solutions are able to self-organize. You seem to accept on principle that a a representation of your attention behavior is irrelevant to the things that are important to you, but it simply isn't the case.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:33
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RealityApologist posted:If I'm comparing some arbitrary moment of your life to some other arbitrary moment, then perhaps I can't tell the difference of importance. But if I'm looking over the full profile of your behavior, I'm bound to see a difference if there is one. Every day you might hit the same light switch in your room, but those interactions are momentary and at regular intervals, and probably compare normally to the light switch behavior of other people. The fact that you engage with nitrogen canisters at all is probably abnormal for the general population, and already specializes and contextualizes your behavior by having them in your network. Presumably for most people that interact regularly with nitrogen canisters, it plays some important roll in their lives. So in other words, it's not attention that shows the importance, but the qualities of the thing itself. In order to know how important it is that someone is paying attention to something, you have to know everything about that thing. Again, you're showing how what you're saying is wrong, and yet you don't realize it. You're making the argument against attention showing things that are significant, and instead arguing that the actual qualities of those things show that they're important. quote:Again, the claim isn't that attention dynamics magically solve every problem, but that it provides a basic tool around which solutions are able to self-organize. You seem to accept on principle that a a representation of your attention behavior is irrelevant to the things that are important to you, but it simply isn't the case. A representation of my attention behavior is very mildly related to things that are important to me. It is an absolutely dysfunctional representation of what should be important to me, unless I'm a really well-adjusted, well-organized person. As with the objects-- liquid nitrogen canister vs. light switch-- you have to know everything about me to interpret my attention representation. This is your magic hand-waving. Somehow, the system is able to figure out the importance of nitrogen canisters to me based on outside information, not on attention. Once you know that I own nitrogen canisters, the attention bit is a tiny side point. A few other pieces of this perfect information would allow you to know why I have them, and again, this information would have nothing to do with attention. In this system, attention does not actually generate any useful information, instead it depends entirely on an external, perfect set of information. Hell, just to analyze people's verbal input would require you solve the goddamn natural language problem first.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:42
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The autonomous vehicle future is here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU
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Dec 2, 2013 02:49
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RealityApologist posted:If I'm comparing some arbitrary moment of your life to some other arbitrary moment, then perhaps I can't tell the difference of importance. But if I'm looking over the full profile of your behavior, I'm bound to see a difference if there is one. Every day you might hit the same light switch in your room, but those interactions are momentary and at regular intervals, and probably compare normally to the light switch behavior of other people. The fact that you engage with nitrogen canisters at all is probably abnormal for the general population, and already specializes and contextualizes your behavior by having them in your network. Presumably for most people that interact regularly with nitrogen canisters, it plays some important roll in their lives. And again, you might be able to distinguish different forms of typical nitrogen-canister behavior; the profile of a canister delivery person probably looks quite a bit different from yours, etc. In other words, there are sophisticated ways of handling attention dynamics that don't simply reduce to the question of "what do you spend the most time touching" as a brute one-dimensional quantity. In other words, only by applying copious amounts of ad hoc analysis after the fact can you tease out the actual importance of anything. So much so that the "attention" part of the equation isn't even relevant anymore except as a jumping off point for your justifications.
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Dec 2, 2013 02:50
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Cicero posted:The autonomous vehicle future is here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU This implementation really hilights how far reaching drone technology could potentially be. And it makes me wonder how the government will clamp down on it via regulations and operational licenses.
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Dec 2, 2013 03:03
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FilthyImp posted:This implementation really hilights how far reaching drone technology could potentially be. And it makes me wonder how the government will clamp down on it via regulations and operational licenses.
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Dec 2, 2013 03:08
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Cicero posted:Yeah, like right now this is just an experiment for Amazon (Bezos apparently has said even 2015 for a commercial rollout is "optimistic"), but on the other hand this or something like it is probably inevitable in the long run. Maybe on a very limited scale, but it's not likely to ever see widespread use. Flying vehicles have to fight gravity with constant energy consumption, and they're very maintenance-intensive (with catastrophic results from any non-recoverable failure). Plus, small vehicles can't lift much. This might be viable in the same sense that helicopters are viable personal transportation - sure, if you're super-rich or in a massive hurry to get to the hospital, it's a useful solution. But, the personal helicopter as day-to-day transportation for ordinary people is an idea left behind in the science fiction of the 50s and 60s for a good reason. This is likely to turn out the same way. The additional cost of this over 1- or 2-day delivery, where your package can hitch a ride with a bunch of others on a jet, and then depend on ground vehicles for the last mile, is only worth it for a tiny fraction of users. Drone delivery might replace some courier services, but that's about it. FilthyImp posted:This implementation really hilights how far reaching drone technology could potentially be. And it makes me wonder how the government will clamp down on it via regulations and operational licenses. Drones are already very heavily regulated. Hobbyists get away with a combination of operating under R/C flight rules (which require a direct line of sight to the vehicle, and preclude totally autonomous operation), and authorities looking the other way so long as they're not doing anything dangerous. If you go from "hobbyist experimenting in the middle of nowhere" to "for-profit company operating a large network in a populated area," though, the regulations get (rightfully) difficult very quickly.
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Dec 2, 2013 03:42
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Space Gopher posted:Maybe on a very limited scale, but it's not likely to ever see widespread use. When delivering a bunch of lightweight, expensive electronics, the extra costs aren't really that much. I saw it mentioned that Amazon could use this in combination with autonomous vehicles. Pack a bunch of drones onto autonomous cars, and use software to find the most efficient combination of service to deliver what are mostly small, light packages. Drive to a neighborhood and do individual stops for large stuff, and simultaneously deploying drones that are delivering the small packages. The drones could then recharge while driving to the next area.
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Dec 2, 2013 04:02
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Cicero posted:Yeah, like right now this is just an experiment for Amazon (Bezos apparently has said even 2015 for a commercial rollout is "optimistic"), but on the other hand this or something like it is probably inevitable in the long run. Remember when he leaked about the Segway, and was so vague about it people thought it was going to fly?
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Dec 2, 2013 04:23
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