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RealityApologist posted:My argument has always been about leveraging the existing organizational dynamics in populations in favor of generating the solutions we want. Does this actually mean anything? It reads like the worst sort of management-speak bullshit. quote:The attention economy is a theory of how to use the dynamics of attention that already exist in the population and extract meaningful computational work from that behavior. Just because a theory exists doesn't mean its of any use whatsoever. Theories can be and frequently are quite ludicrously wrong or misguided. For all your hundreds of words about the attention economy, all you've done is convince everyone else that if it was implemented as you describe, the results would make the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s look like a far superior alternative. quote:That's why it's important to talk about self-organizing dynamics and take them seriously, and contrast them with the existing structures of control, even if we know that "self-organization" isn't some godsend solution to our problems. This may be true but you can't even explain the concept well enough to show how its connected to anything you've said, at least as far as I can tell. quote:I'm only arguing that it's an alternative theoretical model of political behavior, and its obviously loving true even if the science is still under developed. Nobody denies it's an "an alternative theoretical model of political behavior". Of course it is. The Aristotelian Model is an alternative model of how the Solar System functions. Guess what? It's about as useful as your "attention economy". And stop pretending there's actual science in your ideas. quote:Nevertheless, the science is clear enough that we can start taking seriously the questions and issues being proposed in this thread, and seriously start thinking about human computational systems and what real organizational work we can get them to do. We can, we have. Regardless of this fact, your model is unrealistic, impractical, unworkable, technototalitarian garbage. quote:Again, people solve the "what's important? what's meaningful?" question continuously as they go about their lives, and with enough data points we will start constructing full scale models of the big-v Value of all the things, for all the people. No, you can't, because "what's important? what's meaningful?" IS IN NO GODDAMNED WAY A SCIENTIFICALLY-RESOLVABLE QUESTION. quote:It will give us more data from which to make our decisions, more channels through which feedback might reverberate through the network, and more opportunities to specialize and address all the problems at all the scales that effect humanity. More data does not equal more informed. It never has. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 00:34
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Earlier I asked you:quote:In addition to Captain_Maclaine's questions above I'd like to ask why you think why self-organized groups have greater organizing capacity for very large groups? Like all the evidence I've seen indicates otherwise: self organization only works up to a certain sized group, after that you need hierarchical structure. "A billion people on facebook" doesn't indicate much, those people are sharing photos and stupid jokes with their friends, not making and executing decisions about much of anything. At best it helps people plan parties (note however that facebook events have owners who control the page). A better example might have been wikipedia, but as we all know that website requires a hierarchy of moderators in order to keep things under control as well. Can you point to an actual example of a self-organized non-hierarchical group the size of a modern nation state? A question you completely ignored. This is curious since organization on this scale is critical to your thesis, as you yourself claim: RealityApologist posted:The primary advantage of a digital society is that it allows for collective self-organization at large scales. Human brains are really good at self-organizing in small groups, where they display a natural predisposition towards cooperation and altruism that is exceptional even among the social mammals. Our new digital tools have made it just as natural and productive for human beings to organize at far larger scales, while supplying the same immediacy, feedback, and control that humans find rewarding from working in small groups. These allow changes in the organizational structure of human society that haven't been possible for generations. In other words, the primary virtue of digital communities is that they allow us to overcome the alienation and disenfranchisement that is characteristic of industrial age society. A digital society can achieve a form of solidarity and consensus at scales that has never before been possible. Please point out these digital, large scale self-organized groups which don't simply reproduce the aspects of everyday government you deride.
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Dec 5, 2013 01:09
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RealityApologist posted:I'm a huge fan of Dennett, and it's obviously inspired a lot of my work. So your claim isn't that we should self-organize things to find the optimal solution, but only that existing self-organizational systems may find better solutions? Either those are basically identical claims, or your claims are functionally meaningless and useless. You really really really really really need to elaborate on the actual differences between the two phrases I bolded in the quote, because they are extremely similar and you're not really bothering to make the details clear. That's not the only place, either. You have a really bad habit of saying "Hey, I'm not saying *phrase* and it's ridiculous that anyone's accusing me of that, when I've said like fifteen times that my claim is actually *the same phrase worded differently with liberal use of thesaurus*". You really, really, really need to elaborate on the specific, detailed differences between what you think you're saying and what everyone else is hearing, because you are not good enough at expressing things to clear up all misunderstandings in one single sentence like you keep trying to do. ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Does this actually mean anything? It reads like the worst sort of management-speak bullshit. I think Eripsa's point ultimately boils down to "let's design society around actual human behavior and preferences (as analyzed by a ludicrously complex data-mining AI) rather than relying on elites and experts to run our society the way they think human society should operate", which is still a little ridiculous but almost sane enough to maybe be discussable. It's just impossible to tell because instead of just straight-out saying it, he has to couch everything in the jargon he invented himself and drench it in an unhealthy dose of utopianism so "maybe let's analyze human activity to determine what's really important to society" becomes "the attention economy of self-organizing systems comes up with better solutions than top-down organization, just look at Indian traffic patterns and Thanksgiving dinner".
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Dec 5, 2013 02:16
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Main Paineframe posted:I think Eripsa's point ultimately boils down to "let's design society around actual human behavior and preferences (as analyzed by a ludicrously complex data-mining AI) rather than relying on elites and experts to run our society the way they think human society should operate", which is still a little ridiculous but almost sane enough to maybe be discussable. This is basically my point, except I think I'm also adding substance in terms of the procedures and values that should motivate the discussion. quote:It's just impossible to tell because instead of just straight-out saying it, he has to couch everything in the jargon he invented himself and drench it in an unhealthy dose of utopianism so "maybe let's analyze human activity to determine what's really important to society" becomes "the attention economy of self-organizing systems comes up with better solutions than top-down organization, just look at Indian traffic patterns and Thanksgiving dinner". I'm not a great writer. Nevertheless, the trouble you are having interpreting my writing is mostly the result of the deliberately hostile interpretations and echo chamber in this bandwagon thread.
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Dec 5, 2013 03:03
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not a great writer. Nevertheless, the trouble you are having interpreting my writing is mostly the result of the deliberately hostile interpretations and echo chamber in this bandwagon thread. Ah yes, it's everyone else's fault that the majority of people who engaged with your words find them overly complex and insubstantial. I guess that is technically true. How would you leverage organizational dynamics to prevent this situation in the future?
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Dec 5, 2013 07:18
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Ah yes, it's everyone else's fault that the majority of people who engaged with your words find them overly complex and insubstantial. I guess that is technically true. Clearly, as everyone has paid attention to the flaws in the way he said everything as opposed to the (nonexistent) content of what he said, that's the most important thing for him to fix according to his own theory.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:21
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Kalman posted:Clearly, as everyone has paid attention to the flaws in the way he said everything as opposed to the (nonexistent) content of what he said, that's the most important thing for him to fix according to his own theory. Well, HE doesn't necessarily fix it, but whoever is supposed to fix incoherent posts is supposed to see all this attention going into his posting that we labeled using RFID chips somehow, and fix this problem. Would the something awful report function be a small scale version of the attention economy?
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Dec 5, 2013 07:27
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DrProsek posted:Well, HE doesn't necessarily fix it, but whoever is supposed to fix incoherent posts is supposed to see all this attention going into his posting that we labeled using RFID chips somehow, and fix this problem. Actually, yes, report functionality is a legitimate attention economy concept. Reporting assumes that people will pay attention to things that are problematic and uses that attention to direct privations and bans. Of course, it relies on people flagging things and mods reviewing them and making decisions which, mods being human beings, will tend to reflect the biases of the mods. You know. All the limitations we keep bringing up.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:33
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not a great writer. Nevertheless, the trouble you are having interpreting my writing is mostly the result of the deliberately hostile interpretations and echo chamber in this bandwagon thread. Realtalk: if you want to be an academic, writing skills are loving crucial. Seriously, get yourself into some writing classes stat because if you want your job to be to writing and speaking on difficult topics, you better be able to write and speak better than the average person.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:36
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Cream_Filling posted:Realtalk: if you want to be an academic, writing skills are loving crucial. Seriously, get yourself into some writing classes stat because if you want your job to be to writing and speaking on difficult topics, you better be able to write and speak better than the average person. Yes. If your reaction to people calling out your poor communication skills is to shift the blame then holy poo poo you're going to get eaten alive once you're not a grad TA.
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Dec 5, 2013 07:41
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not sure exactly what you are asking for. Emergency services is probably a bad example, because the functional requirements of the job don't really change no matter who is in charge. What would change is simply the authority under which they act, but that probably wouldn't manifest itself in the situation we're working with. You've said that you study philosophy. I'm trying to to use an analytic philosophic methodology to understand how you came to your conclusions. I would apply this methodology to some of your larger posts, here or on your blog, but I can't follow them well enough to do so. If you're not familiar with analytic philosophy I found a decent, if somewhat over optimistic, explanation of it by Bertrand Russell on Wikipedia: Bertrand Russell posted:Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, in comparison with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble. So far what I understand of your argument is that we can and should utilize the information gathered by (distributed? personal?) information technologies in novel ways in order to solve problems. In the example of emergency services a technology such as Waze could be used to augment 911 calls in determining how to distribute the resources of said emergency services. What I don't yet understand is how we get from the emergency services example to the radically changed society that you're talking about. I'm not attached to the emergency services example, although I think it's provides a good demonstration of the benefit of utilizing information technologies in the ways that I think you're suggesting. And since most people agree that effective emergency services are an unmitigated good it avoids the murky ethical pitfalls, such as those that caused several pages of derailment with the heroin example. RealityApologist posted:A better example for "replacing social structures" would be cases where institutionalized services can be replaced by public open models. I like the example of voting best; we can predict election results from watching twitter behavior. I'd love to see a small town somewhere experiment with dissolving the city council in favor of some directly democratic system run online, where major decisions are made through the facilitation of debate and discussion by community members on a public and open website. That's not too many steps because, on its face, it's accomplishable with current technologies. However, unlike the emergency services example, I don't see how this will improve civic engagement or better the community, nor do I really understand how it is supposed to work. There are some security and accessibility issues that I see with the online component of your example, but I'll ignore those for now because my big concern is this, "dissolving the city council in favor of some directly democratic system run online". Even more specifically, "some directly democratic system". Unless your main point is that online voting and/or discussions of local civic life are possible then the nature of the system that replaces the city council is crux of your argument. I need to know what this system will be and how it will work. The thing that made your emergency services argument convincing was that the main components of the system we explained. The emergency service collects information from both traditional phone calls and distributed smart devices. It uses the information from the smart devices to discover potential emergencies that haven't yet been reported. There are implementation details such as who's collecting the information and how it gets to the emergency service, but those, like the accessibility and security issues in your current example, aren't important to your central argument. Your central emergency services argument being that we have the technical capability to collect and analyse enough information to provide a useful supplement to 911 calls for certain types of emergencies, such as vehicle accidents. RealityApologist posted:I'm not sure what you are looking for with your question. I am trying to understand your ideas. Your posting has been broad, high level, somewhat scattered, and very light on some important details. In your current example you're replacing an average town council with "some directly democratic system". How does that system work? Are current or developing information technologies central to your system, or could it work with town meetings instead of a town message board? How is the town message board set up, or is that not important (they'll figure it out isn't an acceptable answer)? Wouldn't the administrators and moderators of the message board be analogous to the town council? If not, why not? If so, how are they chosen? Without an explanation of what replaces the town council and how it is better than the town council you haven't said anything meaningful, or I've completely missed your point (in which case we'll have to start over from the beginning).
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Dec 5, 2013 08:44
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Mentioning Bertrand Russell is massively triggering to Eripsa, probably because studying that man's life lets you know just how much detail work is involved in coming up with an entirely new system for observing the world. But Eripsa, Russell would have assessed your communication skills and your intellectual depth, and he would have advised you to get on board with humanism and egalitarianism, systems for observing and indeed changing the world that have already been developed and work really well. You don't need to waste time pretending to come up with new systems, you don't have the depth for it. I don't either. We're not saying that we are smarter than you. I mean there are people posting in this thread who are way smarter than you or I, I feel comfortable saying that. I am not any smarter than you. But when I took mushrooms to the point of breaking with consensus reality, I rolled with my impressions of amazement at the interconnectedness of all humans, then I sobered up and realized that I didn't have anything too new or profound to communicate. Astonished, I continued to preach ideals of fairness, justice, representation and equality, because those are ideas people understand and I have come to terms with the fact that I do not have any new ideas. You don't have any either.
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Dec 5, 2013 10:00
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SedanChair posted:Mentioning Bertrand Russell is massively triggering to Eripsa, probably because studying that man's life lets you know just how much detail work is involved in coming up with an entirely new system for observing the world. But Eripsa, Russell would have assessed your communication skills and your intellectual depth, and he would have advised you to get on board with humanism and egalitarianism, systems for observing and indeed changing the world that have already been developed and work really well. You don't need to waste time pretending to come up with new systems, you don't have the depth for it. I don't either. This gets at a point which I think gets glossed over sometime. Working out the details is really, really, really hard work. Bertrand Russell worked himself into total and complete exhaustion and had a nervous breakdown when writing the Principiae, and that entire work was about showing that you could derive mathematics from simple logic, while avoiding a paradox that he himself devised which had completely stumped Frege's previous attempt. The final result of his life's work was that 0+1 = 1 (simplifying a bit). It gets worse - even after you spend several years of your most productive period on a masterpiece, someone can prove you incorrect, like Godel did to Russell, and Russell did before to Frege. On the other hand - instead of being a detail oriented, obsessive thinker, you can be the equivalent of a Zizek, who enjoys playing the role of a media buffoon, and avoids saying anything concrete or meaningful, but offers his speculation about absolutely everything. Nobody will ever be able to prove that Zizek is completely wrong about something, mostly because he doesn't say anything, but also because he can always claim he was speaking figuratively or metaphorically, and he is being interpreted in bad faith. In short - work out the exact, precise details of everything you are saying on a small scale in incredible precision and discuss those. It's much harder, much less satisfying, but it's the only way we will ever get scientific progress. iFederico fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 14:04
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Yes. If your reaction to people calling out your poor communication skills is to shift the blame then holy poo poo you're going to get eaten alive once you're not a grad TA. Frankly, I'm a little surprised he hasn't been torn limb from limb even at the grad TA level. Lord knows if I'd handed in anything comparable to what he's posted here, I doubt they'd have even advanced me to comps, let alone ABD status.
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Dec 5, 2013 16:38
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Frankly, I'm a little surprised he hasn't been torn limb from limb even at the grad TA level. Lord knows if I'd handed in anything comparable to what he's posted here, I doubt they'd have even advanced me to comps, let alone ABD status. Your professor could always simply despair of dealing with this sort of nonsense irl and just hope the dissertation board deals with it.
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Dec 5, 2013 16:43
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Cream_Filling posted:Realtalk: if you want to be an academic, writing skills are loving crucial. Seriously, get yourself into some writing classes stat because if you want your job to be to writing and speaking on difficult topics, you better be able to write and speak better than the average person. Really it's any field that you need to make reports; industry would tear this guy up alive as well.
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Dec 5, 2013 16:51
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not a great writer. Nevertheless, the trouble you are having interpreting my writing is mostly the result of the deliberately hostile interpretations and echo chamber in this bandwagon thread. If you can't manage to get a single person defending your technofetish 'ideas' on an internet forum you really need to start re-evaluating this idea that it's everyone else's fault and not that you are a terrible writer with bad ideas.
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Dec 5, 2013 16:54
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evilweasel posted:If you can't manage to get a single person defending your technofetish 'ideas' on an internet forum you really need to start re-evaluating this idea that it's everyone else's fault and not that you are a terrible writer with bad ideas.
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Dec 5, 2013 17:11
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Eripsa, I am going to try and charitably unpack this as I suspect I think I know what you are aiming at. You seem to be making a more radical variation of an argument advanced by individuals like Elinor Ostrom in terms of the economy, public choice, and the commons. It seems you think that decentralized groups of individuals can and do manage their resources in at least a constrained form of rationality and overall do a good job at resource allocation and decision making on their own without any external computational resources. From what I can gather, you think that behavioral excesses and misallocation of resources occur due to hierarchies and especially rigid hierarchies being propped up in society. Is this a fair summary? The radical part comes in because you seem to think that access to external computational resources will help this already existent phenomenon along in a meaningful way, making what was once primarily only applicable to small groups of individuals into a more cohesive phenomenon at the macro level. Or, in other words, you think that resources can be managed in a decentralized manner by stakeholders already, but that this external computational surplus can make this a more powerful process and at least marginally better than what we have developed at present and historically. Would you say this is more or less what you are arguing?
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Dec 5, 2013 18:13
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Listen, guys, sorry if I'm not going to start taking writing advice from a pack of hyenas that have spent the last 14 pages smearing me with fallacies and insults. If I was given a supportive discursive environment with interlocutors who were genuinely motivated by the subject and I still failed to capture interest, then I might take the failure personally. But the cast of morons who spent two pages bullying me for a simple, accurate, and reasonably illustrative example don't get any credit for refuting my claims. This thread is not an example of my academic work, and since almost none of you bothered to even read my posts in this thread I'm afraid the critique of my professional abilities feels rather empty. It's kind of finny, the poor arguments and empty claims coming from you all accusing me of doing the same. But its mostly just boring noise making this thread look more interesting than it really is. I really am trying to discourage it by talking about real things, but there are too many trolls and not enough moderation in this thread. My academic work is very specific and technical work in a narrow subdomain of philosophy, like any other academic work. I teach introductory classes that don't get anywhere close to this kind of material. It again shocks and amazes me that you all expect a discussion in this thread to rise not only to the level of professional academic writing, but moreover expect it to meet the standards set by one of the most influential thinkers in the history of English philosophy. Apparently if I'm not writing with the clarity and precision of Russell, then I'm not fit to say a drat word. Nevermind that none of you are holding yourselves to anything like the same standards. The sloppy interpretations, the repeated fallacies and insults, and the brute ignorance about basic issues in the discussion are all to be found far more times in posts other than mine. I admire Russell a lot, but if anyone here has actually read his History of Western Philosophy, you'll know quite well how far even he is willing to step outside his area of comfort, and how embarrassing the results can. His discussions of 18th and 19th century European philosophy are pretty much dismissed as anything other than a historical curiosity, but of course the topics are also outside his specialization so his poor interpretations are to be expected. When someone aspires to be prolific, it's bound to happen no matter how smart they are. For what it's worth, I also think he's wrong that analytic philosophers aren't system builders. Carnap is a good example; in many ways, he's a much better figure to compare what I'm doing here. Carnap took the formalisms of Russell and other logicians and claimed that they could be used to resolve all future metaphysical disputes. It was a bold claim with far-reaching implications, and Carnap's work influenced quite a number of thinkers in his time (including Quine). Today it's taken for granted that Carnap and the logical positivists were wrong. They are sometimes taken as a paradigm case of scientism gone awry. On the other hand, I don't think the full scope of the positivist project was sufficiently realized in the 20th century, given the underdeveloped state of the science and technology. We still have several decades to go before some fields (like neuroscience) fully mature to the point where we can give the spirit of Carnap's proposal another serious shot. The sciences of complexity that have developed over the last 30 years, all after Carnap, have given new reasons to think that the project of developing formal models has a shot at working in the comprehensive way Carnap imagined. The idea of axiomatizing (for instance) the global climate into a useful logical formalism is absurd if we tried to do it by hand. But today we build massive computer simulations of the climate, and in some important ways our very future depends on the success of those formalisms. Maybe iFederico will understand the comparison to Carnap better than others in this thread. I'm actually most shocked at the hostility he's shown, given the many discussions we've had over the years concerning the philosophy of mind. I would have though he knows where my expertise and academic positions lie. My professional research has always been on artificial intelligence and the philosophy of technology. This research has naturally led me to interests in organization theory, multi-agent dynamical systems, network theory, and cybernetics, but also in digital culture, the Internet of Things, ant colonies, anarchy, and political activism. Moreover, I think I see a clear way these interests fit together as a coherent picture of the world that is distinct from the one we have now. It is a picture that doesn't yet exist as a fully articulated narrative in the popular discourse, but I think I understand it well enough to try and talk about it with the goons. I've spent literally years (since the occupy threads) putting together the research and resources that will help bring the view into high enough resolution that you all will take it seriously. In some ways, the bullying and social jockeying that took place around the marble metaphor and so on is what also helped to accumulate enough shared history and points of contact that I can show up out of the blue and continue the conversation. We're not there yet, but we're doing better. Maybe in a few years when we're all wearing HUDS like it's always been normal, we can have a mature conversation. I have no ambitions for providing that narrative to a purely academic audience; I'm not a good enough thinker for a project like that, and it's not my interest anyway. My interest is in advocacy, as a participant in the popular discourse. That means trying to start discussions in popular fora like this, and on G+. I'm not doing this because its my job, I'm doing it because I'm passionate about the topic. Now, I can try to talk about specific technical details of the view, as best as my knowledge allows. In fact, I have done that many times before, with the thread on complex systems theory a few months ago, and hundreds of threads on AI and philosophy of science and technology over the years. But I think it's also reasonable to talk about how the whole picture fits together as a grand narrative, because, as I said in the OP, it let's us see more clearly exactly where our goals lie, and what trouble there awaits. A grand narrative is not a single solution, or even a single set of solutions. A grand narrative is the story we tell about ourselves, so that we understand what we're doing and what our place is in history. A grand narrative is the cognitive social model we share as a population so that we understand what we're all doing and coordinate our behavior. The grand narrative we have now, at least as produced in the West, is basically what's left of the Enlightenment narrative of the Free European Great White Rational Male, after it's taken about 300 years of wear and tear by a global population that don't always play nice with the story. All the laws and customs and institutions we have today are basically implementations of that narrative, with lots of epicycles thrown in to help it fit within the range of acceptable plausibility for the everyday experience of at least some of the people. Every discussion we have, about freedom and rights and property and government, takes place within the constraints of this paradigm. The narrative fits some places better than others, and it has its advantages and drawbacks. But more importantly, nearly all of the currently conceivable solutions to our dysfunctions are solutions within the space of this narrative. I'm trying to suggest a different grand narrative, not as a scholar but as a person and to a community of potentially interested people. The narrative overlaps in some ways with the existing one-- it must, if we are to take it seriously as a goal-- but it is obviously different. I don't have the complete story worked out myself because no one can work such a thing out in detail themselves, just as no one person can anticipate all the laws and all the circumstances to which they might apply. I'm not saying this narrative offers a solution to our dysfunctions, although I do think it gives us a different way of thinking about our problems that don't get caught in the same pools and eddies that our existing system seems mired in because the mechanisms by which power would be balanced is so utterly different. The question "how do we keep our government free of corruption?", on my narrative, turns into the question "how do we keep our boards free of spam?" That's perhaps not an "easier" question, but it is certainly a different question, with different political inflection points that will result in different kinds of discussions and methods for resolution. In the OP I suggested that governance, on my view, turns into a kind of system administration. That's not an unqualified "good", but there's certainly a reasonable case to be made that it's "better than what we have now", at the level which interested laypeople like you and I can talk about it reasonably.
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Dec 5, 2013 18:41
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RealityApologist posted:I really am trying to discourage it by talking about real things, but there are too many trolls and not enough moderation in this thread. And yet you wrote 8 paragraphs complaining about them and playing the victim instead of answering simple questions about your ideas, like the one I've asked you twice now, or the post just preceding this one.
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Dec 5, 2013 18:52
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Your ideas are not being attacked because you have not formulated them to "the level of professional academic writing". It's that they're meaningless garbage. They are attacked because they're meaningless garbage that is meaningless word salad and your responses never actually address any flaws in your understanding of the world and instead try to define them away. Your writing is not being attacked because it does not meet the standard of Russell: it is being attacked because it is garbage that ignores the remotest interaction with detail and Russell is being used as an example. Every time you make something approaching a testable statement, someone tests it and finds what you've said is garbage and you retreat into a "not intended to be a factual statement" mode. You attempt to be a high-minded philosopher offering "meta-solutions". But you're clearly not: you don't understand any aspect whatsoever of any solution. Every time you try you fall flat on your face. As a result it's clear your "meta-solution" is meaningless garbage: it's either meaningless words that have no application and can be ignored, or there's a single testible thing in there - except every time someone finds one and proves its nonsense you suddenly assert that's not a Your ideas have no connection to the real world. Every time you try to connect them, it turns out you have no idea how the world works and your assumptions are garbage. Once you discover this, rather than rethink them you simply reword whatever point you were making so it is meaningless (you have redefined "self-organization" into covering any aspect of human behavior whatsoever rather than realize you are simply wrong). After enough of this people just start mocking you because you don't say anything that can actually be rebutted. People either agree with you, in which case you deem them smart and contributing and spout more meaningless words, or they disagree and explain why in which case you simply respond that the incomprehensible mass of words you wrote was not intended to have any statements that were testable and they've missed your metapoint.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:00
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:Eripsa, I am going to try and charitably unpack this as I suspect I think I know what you are aiming at. You seem to be making a more radical variation of an argument advanced by individuals like Elinor Ostrom in terms of the economy, public choice, and the commons. It seems you think that decentralized groups of individuals can and do manage their resources in at least a constrained form of rationality and overall do a good job at resource allocation and decision making on their own without any external computational resources. From what I can gather, you think that behavioral excesses and misallocation of resources occur due to hierarchies and especially rigid hierarchies being propped up in society. Is this a fair summary? This is a charitable reading, but I have a few qualms. My argument isn't just that the hierarchies are excessive or unnecesssary (I'm not a minarchist in principle), but also that ridigity makes a system both fragile (susceptible to changing conditions) and unjust (exclusive to a diversity of perspectives). It's not just that we come to a better solution to the resource allocation problem, but that we do it in a better way. It's a minor point, perhaps, but I want to make clear I'm not just arguing on libertarian grounds that all government is bad. If the future equivalent of reddit were occupying the role of government, I wouldn't be surprised if it took huge teams of people to manage and moderate the activity, perhaps even comprising more of the overall human labor compared to what it takes to the operate the government today. I wouldn't take that to be undesirable, given the system otherwise operated correctly. I also think the "radicalization" is more than just the suggestion that such a thing is possible, but is also a discussion of the particular procedures by which we might do it, so that we can talk directly about the politics and ethics of those procedures. I'm particularly inspired by Kocherlakota's Money is Memory, and the claim that all financial transactions are ultimately a method for recording in the social memory the transactional history of all the agents. It suggests that improved methods for recording transactional history will enhance the collective memory capacity of the population, allowing for more and more elaborate organizations to develop. This is essentially the role that the "marble economy" was meant to play, and is much better illustrated in science fiction by authors like Bruce Sterling in The Caryatids: quote:When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they'd been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. VVV They were bullying me for having used an example, not by requesting one. I'm talking about the military example. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 19:04
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RealityApologist posted:If I was given a supportive discursive environment with interlocutors who were genuinely motivated by the subject and I still failed to capture interest, then I might take the failure personally. But the cast of morons who spent two pages bullying me for a simple, accurate, and reasonably illustrative example don't get any credit for refuting my claims. Oh god what unreasonable requests these people have. Simple, accurate examples? Truly bullies. Also I'm chortling here at the thought of you comparing yourself to Carnap.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:05
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also when you try to support your points by referencing your academic background as a sort of appeal to authority your personal insanity and your inability to meet the standards of that academic background become fairly relevant
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Dec 5, 2013 19:06
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RealityApologist posted:I have no ambitions for providing that narrative to a purely academic audience; I'm not a good enough thinker for a project like that, and it's not my interest anyway. My interest is in advocacy, as a participant in the popular discourse. That means trying to start discussions in popular fora like this, and on G+. I'm not doing this because its my job, I'm doing it because I'm passionate about the topic. Now, I can try to talk about specific technical details of the view, as best as my knowledge allows. This idea that being a subpar thinker who doesn't actually understand the material is "good enough" to be an "advocate" is utterly toxic and horrible. What the hell can you do beyond regurgitate press releases and engage in breathless speculation without actual knowledge or expertise or at the very least the ability to think and write clearly? RealityApologist posted:The question "how do we keep our government free of corruption?", on my narrative, turns into the question "how do we keep our boards free of spam?" It's called the banhammer. We're running an experiment called GBS 2.1 maybe you should go there for a while instead and we can see whether they can self-organize you out of there too.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:14
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Science fiction.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:14
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There's no shame in being a bad writer - nobody's born a good writer. But getting all huffy and blaming others when they can't understand your bad writing? Bad. Not making any effort to improve when it's a skill critical to your future profession? Bad. Hiding behind the excuse of being a bad writer to excuse your bad thinking? Sad.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:19
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RealityApologist posted:I have no ambitions for providing that narrative to a purely academic audience; I'm not a good enough thinker for a project like that, and it's not my interest anyway. My interest is in advocacy, as a participant in the popular discourse. That means trying to start discussions in popular fora like this, and on G+. I'm not doing this because its my job, I'm doing it because I'm passionate about the topic. Now, I can try to talk about specific technical details of the view, as best as my knowledge allows. In fact, I have done that many times before, with the thread on complex systems theory a few months ago, and hundreds of threads on AI and philosophy of science and technology over the years. But I think it's also reasonable to talk about how the whole picture fits together as a grand narrative, because, as I said in the OP, it let's us see more clearly exactly where our goals lie, and what trouble there awaits. "I'm just here to preach my gospel to as many audiences as possible, not defend it" is certainly a novel debate tactic but I don't expect it to work out well for you. Working out some details is actually pretty important, because it's going to be pretty difficult for this to become the future if it's hilariously impractical even over long-term timescales or if you can't convince people it would actually be better than the status quo. Here's the problem: it's not particularly difficult to come up with ideas! I guarantee someone's come up with your exact idea before. The reason it's not widely discussed isn't because it needs more evangelism, but rather because you don't make a decent case for it being either practical or desirable. By blindly assuming that it will necessarily be better than the current system and that it will somehow be practical, you're just driving people away because you're not giving them any real reason to be interested in it, and people are already sick of wildly impractical "technology will save human society" screeds from the singularity idiots.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:35
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RealityApologist posted:This is a charitable reading, but I have a few qualms. One of the major criticisms of direct democracy is that it's usually bad at protecting minority groups. How on earth do you believe that reddit will be a better or fairer government than the current system? This is an utterly ahistorical and facially unreasonable claim that requires a hell of a lot more justification than your blithe assumption that "tech + democracy = good." You know what would probably happen? A majority interest group with lots of funding, real-world power, and strong leadership organizes to seize positions of formal power and can muster large volumes of individuals to win anything decided by majority while ordinary people stand around doing nothing. Enemies will be crushed by weight, other groups will make alliances in order to gain favor and power, and members who step out of line will be disciplined internally to maintain policies set by the group hierarchy. You see this in the development of controlling cliques in wikipedia, reddit, etc., as well as in regular politics at basically any scale. This is what self-organizing human behavior looks like - group formation, hierarchies, bullying, bootlicking, and in-group favoritism. How are you going to beat or trick human nature? That's what your tech solution will have to do. Maybe not an impossible task, but you're going to have to explain how you're going to do it. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 19:35
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HappyHippo posted:Please point out these digital, large scale self-organized groups which don't simply reproduce the aspects of everyday government you deride. Facebook is a large-scale, self-organized group, and it's not just a bunch of isolated communities. The average distance between nodes on facebook just dropped below 4, and it's probably going to shrink more, and that's something it's doing all by itself. And, in fact, facebook is being used actively to make all sorts of billions of dollars worth of decisions about products and services and has had a real impact on the economy in terms of advertising and analytics. Twitter has also, you know, been organizing public protests and demonstrations for years now, and is as important as it has ever been in amplifying otherwise unheard voices and giving local events a global platform. These aren't trivial events, and they are in the news every day. The quote you are raising a question from presumes that "organization" and "hierarchy" are mutually exclusive aspects, and that a system is either one or the other. In fact, every example I've given has made explicit how complex the relation between the two are. Instead of simplifying the example in order to make a neat rhetorical point, I've given deliberately complex examples that clearly illustrate the point put challenge conventional wisdom. There really are genuine ways in which the modern military allows more flexibility and responsiveness in its individual units, but there are nevertheless complex hierarchical relations, governed by often subtle rules and conventions, that nevertheless constrain each interaction. This isn't an either/or phenomenona. So yeah, Wikipedia uses a system of moderators with various levels of hierarchical power, and they have some level of control over how the encyclopedia develops. There is lots to say about the benefits and drawbacks of their implementation, and the impact it has on the quantity and quality of contributions. But that's a different discussion from the one about how Wikipedia's model is different from Britannica's expert-generated for-profit model, which is different again from a state-generated propaganda model that might be generated by, say, Soviet Russia. While Wikipedia does have certain elements of hierarchical organization, for better or worse, it is clearly operating according to a different set of power dynamics than the others, and should be met with different expectations in quality and precision. None of these claims amount to an assertion that Wikipedia is the one true system that will solve all future epistemic worries. Nevertheless, Wikipedia does serve as a model of how a group of coordinated, self-motivated individuals can come together to produce amazing things. And despite it's flaws Wikipedia is seriously one of the most awesome things humanity has ever built. As an example of one of our earliest efforts in the digital age, it is absolutely inspiring, and blows open our expectations of what might be possible with these tools.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:41
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Yes, the building up of factionalism in the absence of some kind of overriding governmental (though not necessarily strictly governmental, it could be anything) framework to try and attempt to unify the factions and curb the crushing of minority voices is a serious concern that you have yet to address, Eripsa. I think the primary issue you are having with people in this thread is you have proposed a fairly contentious alternative framework that you argue will at least be superior to what we have currently in a marginal sense but have yet to elaborate on some really important particulars. There isn't anything stopping the formation of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's vision of society from emerging alongside the mechanisms you are proposing, for example. It could very well be the case that the computational surplus could be hoarded and highly hierarchical factions emerge that set about limiting entrance to groups they dislike while simultaneously rationing out the computational surplus so that elites form on the basis of unrestricted access to the network. To put this simply, there isn't anything yet stated internal to the proposal itself that will not simply convert the present state of poverty into an altogether different but perhaps more savage form of poverty with potentially even less recourse than the disadvantaged have today. I think if you offered some details on how these kind of behaviors could be ameliorated or prevented entirely then people would ease up on their derision of your proposal and your person.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:48
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RealityApologist posted:It suggests that improved methods for recording transactional history will enhance the collective memory capacity of the population, allowing for more and more elaborate organizations to develop. This is essentially the role that the "marble economy" was meant to play, and is much better illustrated in science fiction Why not do the same here? Set aside the metanarrative and Friedmanesque jargon, and just consider in detail one of the cases that's been raised in the thread (traffic control, Twitter, restaurant ordering, bathroom attention-allocation, import/export trade, etc). Refer back to framework concepts (self-organized! task-oriented! gamification!) only in the context of a specific real-world example thereof. Ideally, invoke two examples for each such reference (e.g. one which is self-organized and one which is not - negation of a concept can help the audience to understand its boundaries). Let people argue technical details about data availability, use cases, complexity, and decision flow. Arguing minutiae may be a non-optimal use of your time, but some people simply can't grasp a huge world-changing concept holus bolus; they need to build up an understanding by exploring the consequences of the new system. If someone raises an objection (e.g. "the programmers in this system will tend to be rich white guys who will incorporate their biases into the software architecture" or "improvements to the software which disrupt attention-credit allocation will be resisted by any individuals or groups who will be impoverished by the upgrade") then accept and acknowledge the criticism (to the extent that it has any actual merit) before presenting a rebuttal or explaining why the problem need not concern us. There's no guarantee that people will agree with you, but at least there's a chance that they'll end up disagreeing with specific aspects of your idea rather than attacking you personally.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:50
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RealityApologist posted:Facebook is a large-scale, self-organized group, and it's not just a bunch of isolated communities. The average distance between nodes on facebook just dropped below 4, and it's probably going to shrink more, and that's something it's doing all by itself. And, in fact, facebook is being used actively to make all sorts of billions of dollars worth of decisions about products and services and has had a real impact on the economy in terms of advertising and analytics. Pretty sure the distance between nodes is dropping because giant mega-corps have facebook pages with millions of followers. Oh boy I'm connected via "McDonalds I'm Lovin' It join group for coupons" with a welder in North Dakota, truly the world has gotten smaller. Facebook also is not really organized at all because there's close to no directed or organized activity that most facebook users actually engage in beyond retarded chain-email style "YOU HAVE JUST BEEN HUGBUSSED QUOTE THIS TO 20 USERS OR ELSE U'LL DIE OF HUGS" and playing facebook games. RealityApologist posted:So yeah, Wikipedia uses a system of moderators with various levels of hierarchical power, and they have some level of control over how the encyclopedia develops. There is lots to say about the benefits and drawbacks of their implementation, and the impact it has on the quantity and quality of contributions. But that's a different discussion from the one about how Wikipedia's model is different from Britannica's expert-generated for-profit model, which is different again from a state-generated propaganda model that might be generated by, say, Soviet Russia. While Wikipedia does have certain elements of hierarchical organization, for better or worse, it is clearly operating according to a different set of power dynamics than the others, and should be met with different expectations in quality and precision. Wikipedia is honestly an awfully governed organizaiton and anyone who's spent time there knows that it's mostly ruled over by a cabal of hyper-territorial spergy idiots with no lives. Wikipedia is an excellent example of how poorly random internet people allocate resources, unless you think Sonic the Hedgehog characters are more important than every other artist in history.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:51
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Cream_Filling posted:This is what self-organizing human behavior looks like - group formation, hierarchies, bullying, bootlicking, and in-group favoritism. How are you going to beat or trick human nature? That's what your tech solution will have to do. Maybe not an impossible task, but you're going to have to explain how you're going to do it. The point is not to beat it or trick it, the point is just to use it in our favor. Let groups form around whatever circle-jerk they want, but within environments where their activity can be harvested for useful computational work. And then specify very clear guidelines and procedures whereby outside communities might intervene on these circlejerks where appropriate, in the nested fashion I've indicated: the heroin addicts are also people, so fall under the scope of humanitarian efforts to do things like distribute clean needles and whatever. Instead of centralizing the hierarchy, control can be distributed in a regular and consistent way that allows for independent implementations of the same justice system.
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Dec 5, 2013 19:52
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RealityApologist posted:The point is not to beat it or trick it, the point is just to use it in our favor. Let groups form around whatever circle-jerk they want, but within environments where their activity can be harvested for useful computational work. And then specify very clear guidelines and procedures whereby outside communities might intervene on these circlejerks where appropriate, in the nested fashion I've indicated: the heroin addicts are also people, so fall under the scope of humanitarian efforts to do things like distribute clean needles and whatever. Instead of centralizing the hierarchy, control can be distributed in a regular and consistent way that allows for independent implementations of the same justice system. This already happens, it's called normal life. Walking around freely associating with people and groups is a thing normal humans do right now. What are you going to bring to real life that improves it? How are you going to establish these "very clear guidelines and procedures" for behavior and how will they be enforced? You mean like laws? Maybe some people with democratic permission to write the laws? And a separate group to enforce them? Again, this is all utter nonsense. It's like listening to libertarians talk about how they'll self-organize their own government that happens to work exaclty like the existing government but man, it'll be much better because OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 19:58
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GulMadred posted:just consider in detail one of the cases that's been raised in the thread (traffic control, Twitter, restaurant ordering, bathroom attention-allocation, import/export trade, etc). Refer back to framework concepts (self-organized! task-oriented! gamification!) only in the context of a specific real-world example thereof. Ideally, invoke two examples for each such reference (e.g. one which is self-organized and one which is not - negation of a concept can help the audience to understand its boundaries). You are asking me to do science fiction, which other people in the thread are mocking me for even mentioning. I can't please everyone here on everything. I'm doing the best I can. It is hard. In the gold-mined thread, I actually did start to write out a short piece of science fiction. It was essentially an extended example of a person attempting to change a burned-out light bulb, and the various elements of their society they engage with as they went about their task. I got about 9 pages in and then stopped; I know it got posted in the original thread but I didn't bother to look where and I don't have search. But if you are interested: http://goo.gl/8bZYO6
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Dec 5, 2013 19:59
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RealityApologist posted:VVV They were bullying me for having used an example, not by requesting one. I'm talking about the military example. We weren't bullying you. We were explaining that it was a lovely example that was also wrong in several important respects and you kept ignoring those criticisms. The fact that you perpetually refuse to listen to people who know something about a subject you think you understand (but actually don't) is why nobody is responding to you with the sort of afternoon tea civility that I guess is a hallmark of a web forum where the fitness subforum is called You Look Like poo poo and one of whose admins once accused a woman of making heaven to crowded because she had multiple miscarriages. And that's all ignoring the fact that your main thesis has been shown over and over again to be technofetishistic garbage. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 20:01
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RealityApologist posted:The point is not to beat it or trick it, the point is just to use it in our favor. Let groups form around whatever circle-jerk they want, but within environments where their activity can be harvested for useful computational work. And then specify very clear guidelines and procedures whereby outside communities might intervene on these circlejerks where appropriate, in the nested fashion I've indicated: the heroin addicts are also people, so fall under the scope of humanitarian efforts to do things like distribute clean needles and whatever. Instead of centralizing the hierarchy, control can be distributed in a regular and consistent way that allows for independent implementations of the same justice system. Well this highlights some of the problems I am talking about. Specifically, there is some amount of centralization in built to a system based on computational surplus or otherwise founded upon sufficiently sophisticated technology. Manufacturing billions of google glasses or whatever the future equivalent is requires large manufacturing facilities and a non trivial amount of resource extraction. The extensive computer architecture necessary for the implementation also requires a large degree of centralization born out of similar lines, with the extra incentive towards centralization on the grounds of consistency and reliability that is demanded from something that has become a pillar of the civilization. I think it would be helpful if you could elaborate on ways that prevent hierarchies and class based rationing systems emerging from the structural necessities your proposal demands. I think it is also the case that even if you were to decentralize the necessary components you run into the problem that decentralized tyrannies are still tyrannies, so some robustness needs to be built in to the system that prevents the simple emergence of private tyrannies in the event you can resolve the aforementioned problem.
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Dec 5, 2013 20:04
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Cream_Filling posted:One of the major criticisms of direct democracy is that it's usually bad at protecting minority groups. How on earth do you believe that reddit will be a better or fairer government than the current system? This is an utterly ahistorical and facially unreasonable claim that requires a hell of a lot more justification than your blithe assumption that "tech + democracy = good." He's operating from the basic assumption that the current structure of society doesn't match what people really want it to be, and therefore there's unjust/unpopular laws and stuff because (in his view) government acts as an externally-imposed constraint on human behavior. In his attention economy, all of human society would be based on computer analysis of what humans actually do and like, so the resulting governmental apparatus would be so efficient at patterning laws after actual human behavior that we wouldn't really even need laws or rules because the new self-organized laws would only prohibit things no one does anyway (this is what his "laws != code" poo poo meant) and various groups would self-regulate to prevent any deviant behavior on the part of their members (refer back to heroinchat). As for minorities and unpopular groups, he seems to feel that humanitarian groups would spring up to help any unfortunates who end up underserved by his system, and even if some people fall through the cracks, well, he thinks it probably wouldn't be worse than current society treats them! Essentially, it just boils down to the same old libertarian screed buried under a heavy layer of technofetishism. Notably, he takes as a manner of faith the idea that society would fundamentally change in major ways if we just dissolved all existing governmental, social, and cultural systems and let everyone just build a new society from the ground up. I don't buy that - it'd end up somewhere between "basically what we have now" and "dystopian Libertopia". The US government isn't that great at implementing what the people desire, but it's not so bad at it that letting Reddit run the country would create change as fundamental and new as he's expecting. Besides, people have been raised in this society, and that socialization is going to remain with them; any new society set up by the members of this society is going to be similar in most major ways to the society we live in now, so the dramatic improvement he takes for granted doesn't seem realistic. RealityApologist posted:You are asking me to do science fiction, which other people in the thread are mocking me for even mentioning. I can't please everyone here on everything. I'm doing the best I can. It is hard. I haven't gotten to mocking you about the science fiction you mentioned yet, but I wasn't going to mock you just for mentioning science fiction, I was going to mock you for basing your vision of the future on a writing that predicts that in the post-apocalyptic future, men will be unable to function in any sort of society until they are made to fight over power tools in order to restore their respect and honor in order to restore any sort of drive to their meaningless lives while women busily work the fields in exchange for an aura of glory, which is used as currency. Are you just so desperate for examples that you're willing to ignore the author's sheer insanity, or do you honestly not see how ridiculous that passage is?
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Dec 5, 2013 20:06
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