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Main Paineframe posted: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). Yeah I think the fundamental difference is that when I think of "what humans actually do and like," I think of tribal warfare, greed, and cruelty.
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Dec 5, 2013 20:16
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Main Paineframe posted: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). This is basically an accurate representation of the position. I won't engage with the rest of your post, which is just inflammatory rhetoric. I just want to mark a point of shared understanding, for the sake of the coherence of the thread. If there's some more realistic model than science fiction, I'd love to hear it. I'm talking in this thread about reddit and twitter because I want to keep the discussion limited to technologies that will be available in the next decade. But there is certainly prior art on the topic, most of it in a genre that tends towards the dystopian. That doesn't mean that any discussion or implementation if it will conform to those genre conventions, and it's frankly lazy to just assume that conclusion as the basis of an objection.
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Dec 5, 2013 20:25
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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. The point here is that you've claimed in this thread that: 1) The organizational capacity of our present (hierarchical) systems of government and commerce is being outstripped by global population growth (an assertion that you haven't actually demonstrated by the way). 2) That large scale, digital based systems of organization represent an alternative. What I'm not seeing here is a coherent argument as to how this represents an alternative. On the one hand if large digital organizations are reproducing those same patterns of hierarchical organization that we see in government and the "real world" then they don't represent an alternative, just the same thing in a new wrapper. On the other hand if they aren't reproducing those same patterns, then they would represent an alternative, but then we have the pesky problem that no such organizations seem to exist. You've retreated somewhat by admitting that "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. ... This isn't an either/or phenomenona." (Although that isn't really what I claimed but whatever) So now we're basically left with the claim that digital systems are still hierarchical but that they somehow incorporate more leeway or flexibility to individuals within the system. The problem now is that you've retreated to a claim so vague as to be unfalsifiable and nearly meaningless. How do we tell if this is really the case? How do we quantify the "flexibility" of a system? What is it about digital systems that makes them more flexible, and why would this not translate to more traditional structures using the same technology (in other words, is it the degree of connectivity that you claim makes these systems more flexible? And if so why wouldn't a traditional government using that same communications technology be able to obtain the same benefits?) In other words: SedanChair posted:It's OK because hierarchical societies are self-organized as well, because everything is true at once. "There's room in the model for good and bad." Precursors to the model include "it's all good" and "everything is everything."
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Dec 5, 2013 20:42
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Eripsa just stop with the pity party. You're quite insane enough without obsessing about how persecuted you are. By your standards you don't appear to have a single sympathetic reader in this thread (though I would argue that continuing to listen and engage with your "ideas," however insultingly, is an almost superhuman act of toleration and sympathy), so why keep bitching to us about how we're treating you? We're just "jackals" after all, why would we stop because you're complaining? You mentioned your academic work in the field of philosophy, and how it's worlds apart from the gargle you keep vomiting into your own thread. Well let's see it! It sounds so good that a jackal's teeth would slide right off of it. I suspect, however, that you are garbling your way through the academic world no more capably than anywhere else for the simple reason that it's more awkward to call a person crazy to their face than it is to do so over the internet. Main Paineframe posted: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? Sterling is awesome, not least because he doesn't pretend that any of this poo poo is ideal or desirable.
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Dec 5, 2013 20:48
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Cream_Filling posted: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. Which I guess is a bit like how people see this system Eripsa is proposing. (Setting aside the feasibility question) A lot of resources spent on useless poo poo, some on actual usefull stuff that flies under the radar or is inoffensive to the people calling the shots (in whatever form they end up taking), and a whole lot of issues getting ignored. (willfully or not)
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Dec 5, 2013 21:11
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RealityApologist posted: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. RealityApologist posted:This is basically an accurate representation of the position. I won't engage with the rest of your post, which is just inflammatory rhetoric. I just want to mark a point of shared understanding, for the sake of the coherence of the thread. Why do you keep doing this? You acknowledge that I finally understand what you're proposing (which took me 14 pages of reading your posts to figure out, and which I'm conveniently summarizing because most people still can't make sense of your scattershot posting) but then refuse to respond to my actual criticisms of your points because it's "just inflammatory rhetoric"? Granted, I'm not being especially nice, but you've been outright refusing to acknowledge anyone who disagrees with you by this point, so I was mostly just pointing out the major flaws in your reasoning for other people.
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Dec 5, 2013 21:25
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Make sure to vote 5 and let this thread be goldmined for future generations to appreciate.
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Dec 5, 2013 21:39
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Turns out the community of people who would read "The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > A world run by software" don't particularly like the idea of a world run by software. Since community agreement is the best problem solving method, I guess we should reject a world run by software. That, or the community is full of idiots who don't know what they are talking about, and actually the best way of doing things isn't determined by community agreement!
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Dec 5, 2013 22:30
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We need another trial to check this idea out, wouldn't want sampling bias. Try this theory out with YOSPOS.
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Dec 5, 2013 22:35
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Main Paineframe posted: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). RealityApologist posted:This is basically an accurate representation of the position. This is pretty much how I have always understood your position and why I don't think it is computationally accomplishable. Or if it is simplified into a form that a supercomputer cluster could handle, will produce anything that reflects society better than the human managed government we have now. The way a brain prunes all the irrelevant factors in order to do things like organise a group dinner or determine traffic rules can not be meaningfully exploited by a computer algorithm for more generalised decision making. Each person has a different way of understanding the world and making decisions, how would a computer process the considerations a person has independant to any other person. E.g. Three people are tasked to independently come up with a dinner menu for a gathering. Each person takes into consideration something that the other two overlook. One takes allergies into consideration, another person makes sure to have a range of mild-spicy dishes and the final person ensures that each dish is nutritionally balanced. How would a computer take the dinner menus each person creates and determine be able to understand what makes a good dinner menu? It doesn't know the motives and factors behind each individual's reason for putting something on the menu, or that any combination of the dishes will satisfy the average person's criteria for a good menu. It might bias towards unhealthy, spicy meals that contain peanuts which could make 80% of people happy but make the other 20% sick. Each person has a set of 'hidden variables' that nudge them towards producing a balanced menu, that a computer does not have access to. 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. So I agree that something like facebook is an example of how you can write a program, people use it, and you get some data of user behaviour. The issue is that often the quality of the data is inversely proportional to its volume. Each user is four degrees from each other user, but that is due to facebook's design of making it really easy to friend people. A friend relation does not necessarily mean that each person is a friend, someone they just met, someone who accepts all friend requests or some other unintuitive circumstance. The average person has around 250 friends, and to be four degrees from any of the billion accounts; each person would need to have 177 friends which each have another unique 177 friends (4th root of a billion). Certainly friends will overlap between users, but the minimum average friends is lower than the actual average; so its not actually a surprising conclusion that people are closely connected. For six billion people to be related by four degrees that number rises to 280. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that if everyone used facebook, everyone would have an extra few hundred friends. Unfortunately each friend data point is low value because it doesn't tell us anything explicitly about that relationship. Contrast that with the more traditional government census. It might only take place every ten years, but contains vastly more accurate and useful information. The data is accessible to the public in a form that is useful for planning at a local level. In fact many people make use of this data to decide where to build businesses, buy a home, determine the distribution of religious communities and so on. Government records on births, death and marriages are more accurate and useful than a facebook status but is due to the checks and balances used in updating and maintaining those records. If someone kept reporting everything they were buying as a dildo, but it turned out when a census of adult toy businesses that dildo sales have been flat. It might be able to determine that low quality user data is wrong, but in the years between the business census the town was jammed packed with dildos.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:29
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Main Paineframe posted:That was my point, really - it's possible to design a road system with enough capacity that there's no slowdown even during rush hour unless something like a tree falling on the road happens, but we usually don't. This is not because of a failure of top-down organization, as 1337JiveTurkey suggested, but rather a result of deliberate decisions taken by the top-down organization that intentionally result in the road not having enough capacity to handle rush hour traffic, with cost being one of the biggest reasons. The reason rush-hour traffic exists is precisely because top-down organization decided a certain amount of congestion was acceptable in order to save (usually a very large amount of) money I was apparently doing a really bad job of trying to say something completely different. Traffic engineers only have control over some variables in the overall system. Handing control of those variables to a distributed computer program that manipulates them based on attention isn't going to enhance the level of control without the addition of new variables or enhanced control over the variables available. The distinction between the two is ultimately meaningless since the system as a whole exhibits self-organizing behavior either way in the form of the patterns of traffic congestion that form, dissipate and propagate through the network over time. Even supposedly top-down actions like changing the traffic laws still affect the system by affecting the behavior of the individual drivers which is what ultimately drives the changes to the system as a whole. The same per-driver behavioral changes effected by a "self-organized" distributed computer program would have the same result.
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Dec 6, 2013 05:58
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I've still yet to see what relationship attention has to utility. Most people do not pay attention to poo poo that is super important until it breaks.
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Dec 6, 2013 06:21
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Hey Reality! gently caress you, you dirty diseased oval office. Answer my god damned questions.Hairy Marionette posted: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). I'm not being mean to you by asking questions. You're proposing a radical idea. The onus is on you to explain it. You loving admitted that you are such a bad writer that you can't present your ideas coherently. Being the charitable and sympathetic sod that I am I figured I'd ask some questions in an attempt to draw out the reasoning behind your confusing walls of gibberish. So stop being a whiny little bitch, man the gently caress up, work for your glory, and answer my god damned questions you oval office faced bitch ho. If you can't do that then crawl back inside your mother's vagina and cry yourself to sleep. gently caress! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 6, 2013 06:26
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N. Senada posted:Make sure to vote 5 and let this thread be goldmined for future generations to appreciate. Hey little tip here, when you're trying to corner the Attention Futures market it doesn't do you a bit of good to tell other people how to manipulate the Attention Futures market. Here's some reading material.
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Dec 6, 2013 06:30
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rudatron posted:I've still yet to see what relationship attention has to utility. Most people do not pay attention to poo poo that is super important until it breaks. In the past, he has described it (over the course of thousands of words that only indirectly attain some semblance of meaning) as "attention == what people want / care about!". Unfortunately when presented with the failings of such a definition (ie, people often don't recognize and care about things vital to their day-to-day lives, like the sewer system), his response is that "algorithms will fix it". When pressed for details, he gets huffy that we aren't getting it at all---it's not about what people want at all (since that's hard to both determine or even just define), but instead about what they are paying attention to (which is super easy to measure, obviously, and algorithms!). Having returned to the beginning, this loop will repeat every 15 pages or so.
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Dec 6, 2013 06:46
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I'm also curious, Eripsa: why, after being banned for throwing a tantrum, didn't you just rereg? Why are you using your friend Jon's account instead?
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Dec 6, 2013 07:03
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Also for idle speculation: The combination of self driving cars (so the occupants don't have to pay attention to the road) and the possibility that drawing more attention to one's car will in the long run help them get to their destination more quickly will be nothing if not spectacular. It'll start with lurid colors and eyecatching designs of new cars, followed by increasingly provocative bumper stickers and combinations of humorous or shocking images. At some point someone's going to bite the bullet and cover their car in printable thin-film OLED displays instead of paint so they can up the ante with animation. Those will start as amusing GIF loops and blossom into full fledged short films on rolling movie screens. Then P-day. The day after which the world would never be the same when someone started showing pornography on their car since if that doesn't get attention, nothing will. Everyone else forced to keep up the arms race moves to increasingly hardcore content and since most of the attention is on the video more than the car, the system decides that people must want more porn. A lot more porn. Otherwise everyone wouldn't spend four hours a day watching the stuff on increasingly neglected and gridlocked roads to their jobs where they produce said porn because that's what everyone wants. Eventually the economy collapses and the vast rivers of holographic orgies finally start to blink out one by one. Their former occupants had long since having expired, worn down by a lifetime of increasingly unspeakable acts and bizarre augmentations. Finally humanity's twilight turns to night as the last flickering image of a triple-dicked half-robotic dragon comes down from his last orgasm and gasps a sigh of relief. Even if the words aren't there, maybe some alien civilization will some day understand the meaning behind it: "It's over. Thank God it's finally over." T.S. Eliot posted:This is the way the world ends
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Dec 6, 2013 07:07
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1337JiveTurkey posted:I was apparently doing a really bad job of trying to say something completely different. Traffic engineers only have control over some variables in the overall system. Handing control of those variables to a distributed computer program that manipulates them based on attention isn't going to enhance the level of control without the addition of new variables or enhanced control over the variables available. The distinction between the two is ultimately meaningless since the system as a whole exhibits self-organizing behavior either way in the form of the patterns of traffic congestion that form, dissipate and propagate through the network over time. Even supposedly top-down actions like changing the traffic laws still affect the system by affecting the behavior of the individual drivers which is what ultimately drives the changes to the system as a whole. The same per-driver behavioral changes effected by a "self-organized" distributed computer program would have the same result. By this definition, there is no such thing as a "top-down" system - every kind of system, whether biological or not, requires the individual components of the system to respond to the manipulations passed down from the source of control. You might as well say that flicking a light switch isn't really issuing a top-down command to turn on a light, since you're just connecting a circuit, which affects the behavior of the individual electrons which then proceed to self-organize themselves right into your lightbulb which is what ultimately drives the change. rudatron posted:I've still yet to see what relationship attention has to utility. Most people do not pay attention to poo poo that is super important until it breaks. When your super important poo poo does break, though, you pay a lot of attention to it. The super AI notes that you don't like that thing breaking, and after a sufficient number of people flip out because that same important thing broke, the super AI concludes that the thing is probably important to people and that they don't like it when that thing breaks, and allocates resources to making sure it doesn't break. Really, "attention economy" is just an incredibly misleading term and Eripsa probably needs to abandon it in these layman discussions, since his theory really has nothing to do with attention specifically and is more of a general analysis of overall human behavior (including but not limited to active attention) and the phrase "attention economy" drags in a lot of connotations that he doesn't intend. Of course, that doesn't help the people who already had the thing break, but that's basically because it's a super-technologized version of the libertarian "if company sells shoddy/dangerous products, people will boycott them and they'll go out of business" fantasy - except that instead of people needing to exchange information and individually boycott, a mega-AI notices the distress that the product has caused people (by either analyzing their behavior directly or reading their Facebook posts about it) and automatically carries out an enforcement action. I assume the super-AI would allocate resources to fix/replace the poo poo of those who have been injured already, if it feels that the people with broken poo poo have contributed sufficiently to society lately, but if irreparable damage has already been done to a person's life then I can't see how it'll remedy the issue. It becomes a question of the same old flaw in the non-technological version of that libertarian fantasy: if people boycott a company selling an unsafe product because it killed a whole bunch of people, the fact that enforcement action was taken is little comfort to the people that are already dead. I suppose Eripsa would argue that since people consider the safety of themselves and those around them to be pretty important, the AI would prioritize this and somehow ensure safer products than the current system of inspections, but that just seems like technological handwaving and I don't see how it's compatible with the fact that people love to cut the "bureaucratic red tape" of ensuring product safety.
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Dec 6, 2013 07:39
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SedanChair posted:Eripsa just stop with the pity party. You're quite insane enough without obsessing about how persecuted you are. By your standards you don't appear to have a single sympathetic reader in this thread (though I would argue that continuing to listen and engage with your "ideas," however insultingly, is an almost superhuman act of toleration and sympathy), so why keep bitching to us about how we're treating you? We're just "jackals" after all, why would we stop because you're complaining? I like him and I enjoy his posts. He's absolutely right to feel persecuted, as everyone has been piling on him and openly insulting him. Did you ever consider the possibility that the reason his posts are less than coherent at times is because he's trying to engage too many people in debate? You sound like a complete jerk, by the way.
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Dec 6, 2013 08:43
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HappyHippo posted:What I'm not seeing here is a coherent argument as to how this represents an alternative. On the one hand if large digital organizations are reproducing those same patterns of hierarchical organization that we see in government and the "real world" then they don't represent an alternative, just the same thing in a new wrapper. On the other hand if they aren't reproducing those same patterns, then they would represent an alternative, but then we have the pesky problem that no such organizations seem to exist. The claim isn't that this is such a radically new alternative as to be inconceivable in the existing system, but just that it is a substantive alternative to the existing order. Although large digital populations like Facebook and Twitter do have huge self-organized populations that do occasionally have real economic and political impact, they have virtually no formal political power whatsoever. Whatever power they do have is the result of being influential enough for the representatives that DO have power to be somewhat responsive to their claims. I'm arguing for systems where the existing order is slowly and systematically replaced with digital equivalents that can perform similar functions but in a radically distributed way. As you rightly point out, this will involve at least some existing biases to be carried over into the new system, and therefore isn't completely disconnected from the existing order. This is a good thing for my position in terms of plausibility; it means there's some path from here to there that we can take, instead of requiring a ground-up solution that demands abandoning everything we've already built and spontaneously changing everyone's beliefs. That's not going to happen, and we shouldn't expect it to. The questions you ask in your second paragraph have to do with the difficult we've been having in this thread for understanding the distinction between organization and order, and it deserves more discussion in the abstract, which I will continue in later replies. But I'll start here, and everyone should hopefully understand that these comments apply more generally to other objections being raised in this thread. Orders (or "orderings") are structures within an environment that puts constraints on the systems that might develop within it. These constraints aren't only "top-down", but can come from anywhere. The size of the deer population is a constraint on the size of the wolf population, etc. A system is going to be faced with any number of constraints from any number of directions; if it is to be a persistent system, it's job is to organize within those constraints. So when we're talking about "freedom", we're talking about what actions they are allowed to take within that environment. Extreme constraints limit the range of freedom of the agents in the system. Loose constraints allow agents more freedom to act in more diverse ways. A system is self-organized when it exhibits system-level dynamics that emerge from the activity of its agential components. So functional differentiation (ie, a division of labor) might be one of these organizational features that emerge from semi-independently acting parts. We might achieve functional differentiation through agents that are acting rather freely. But we might find other organizational structures that are the result of extreme constraints. The extreme constraints put on military soldiers (by their hierarchy of command, group pressure, whatever) imposes limits on what actions the agents might perform, but in so doing also expands the possible activities performed by the company; the company as a whole is able to do more things well because of the constraints imposed on the agents. If the goal is to quantify flexibility, then it will be in terms of the constraints on individual action, and what consequences that has for the overall behavior of the system. More constraints on individuals might have both positive and negative consequences for both the individual and for the overall system. My argument isn't that less constraints are always good, but only that we should be thinking about organizational dynamics in those terms. The existing government structure defines a set of constraints on individual agency, at least relative to the dynamics of politics, so that individuals get to vote for representatives, and representatives have their own procedures and customs (read: lobbying and corruption) for making their decisions. Since all these politicians have benefitted from precisely the exclusion and selectivity of this process, there are no incentives whatsoever for the political class to open up political power to a wider array of voices. Even if they have the means of appealing to and checking that data, there simply are no conventions (formal or otherwise) for integrating that data into the political process. That's why the white house petitions have been a complete joke, and you see Obama making tweets like this: 
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Dec 6, 2013 19:17
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RealityApologist posted:The claim isn't that this is such a radically new alternative as to be inconceivable in the existing system, but just that it is a substantive alternative to the existing order. Although large digital populations like Facebook and Twitter do have huge self-organized populations that do occasionally have real economic and political impact, they have virtually no formal political power whatsoever. Whatever power they do have is the result of being influential enough for the representatives that DO have power to be somewhat responsive to their claims. I'm arguing for systems where the existing order is slowly and systematically replaced with digital equivalents that can perform similar functions but in a radically distributed way. None of this really has anything to do with digitalism, though. It's not that "large digital populations" don't have formal political power, it's that "large populations" and "the population" both have zero political power, because the whole point of our republican democracy is granting formal political power to representatives to govern on our behalf. This is, to a large extent, intentional, because sometimes acting in someone's interest means doing something they don't want that will help them tremendously and therefore someone needs to make the hard decisions that the population might reject - for example, imposing taxes people don't want to build roads they do want. And what do you mean by "digital equivalents"? If they were actually equivalent, then they'd just be "exactly what we have now, except allowing Congressmen to vote over the internet instead of coming in directly", so I suspect that was actually a misuse of the word and you actually meant "replacement by something that is not equivalent". That, again, is your shaky writing making an absolute mess of what should be a very simple point: "digital equivalents that can perform similar functions but in a radically different way" reads, to me, as "basically the same as the current system, except that it's digital and something about it functions in a radically different way", which is incomprehensible and almost certainly not what you mean. Again: details, details, details. RealityApologist posted:Orders (or "orderings") are structures within an environment that puts constraints on the systems that might develop within it. These constraints aren't only "top-down", but can come from anywhere. The size of the deer population is a constraint on the size of the wolf population, etc. A system is going to be faced with any number of constraints from any number of directions; if it is to be a persistent system, it's job is to organize within those constraints. Now this, on the other hand, needs to be explained a lot more, because right now it's pure word salad gibberish. You're still basically assuming that everyone understands and shares your jargon, basic views, and theories, and therefore bouncing on from point to point without really bothering to link them together or explain what the gently caress "functional differentiation" has to do with "extreme constraints" or why we would want to "quantify flexibility". The only thing I'm really getting from this whole quote is that by your definition of "self-organized", I literally cannot think of a single system of any kind anywhere that isn't "self-organized". My fingers are typing these words in response to electrical signals generated by my brain, and therefore these system-level dynamics manifested in my agential components mean that the act of typing this post is not controlled by a top-down organization but rather was self-organized by my fingers.
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Dec 6, 2013 20:44
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quote:Would anyone be interested in participating in a live, broadcasted youtube hangout on this topic? I'd be happy to field questions live. It'll probably help with a lot of the miscommunication, and it might be interesting. Any takers? I would provided you can prepare a detailed answer for what I plan on asking about real problems, like: How will the attention economy handle the production of child pornography, the viewing of child pornography, the dissemination of child pornography, and living made by people who prop up this child pornography economy? These are all separate issues with different motivations, parties, power, and modes of interaction and execution; so don't do your proposal a disservice and handwave them away with a broad solution involving humanitarian interest groups, as I'm really trying to understand what you're suggesting here. What algorithm will handle r/jailbait and its proponents? What about other self-organizing groups like terrorist cells? How will it respond to subjective accusations of persecution if this group of people's desires and pursuits are 'constrained' by the system? How will it weigh those against those of the children or victims of more obvious 'rights' violations? What rights are going to be hardcoded? Am I wrong to assume that they will reflect our American views of what count as rights, or will the system determine a new set of rights based on the data? What entities are going to design and then implement this system? What incentives exist to not design the system in their favor? How is this system going to keep powerful and monied interests from colluding to control it, assuming they aren't the ones building it (they are)? How does this begin to mitigate the ills brought on by increasingly liberalized law and trade rather than amplifying them pre-complete implementation and then casting them forever in stone? Are there areas of the world that will be outside of the scope of this system? tldr: How does this system avoid a power imbalance in favor of those who either design or administer it? From what I gathered, the system will be taking human input as variable in its processes and decisions and therefore it will adapt to its changing populace. How will this avoid manipulation by interest groups through psy-ops campaigns? Is there a place for human psychologists in the resultant society? The system's AI sounds like it would do a statistically better job than a person given its intimate knowledge of the human psyche. I threw you some concrete questions along with some broad and wider reaching ones to help you focus your response, but please respond to the former with the fervent verbosity that you respond with to the latter.
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Dec 6, 2013 22:05
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Tokamak posted:Each person has a different way of understanding the world and making decisions, how would a computer process the considerations a person has independant to any other person. You are correct that everyone has individual preferences. The point isn't to predict them from scratch, but to anticipate them from models generated by their past behavior. If I have the history of the meals you've eaten over the last year, there will be patterns that emerge that will allow us to predict what you will likely eat next year. This is why I've emphasized the importance of human computation in this thread, because these problems can be (and are routinely) solved by brains, and that reduces the computational load that is carried elsewhere. So let's try something different. You've raised the correct and challenging point that sorting out the "Thanksgiving Dinner" problem is computationally hard. Let's look at how some different decision-making systems would address this problem: The strong dictatorship (aka, Dad's house, Dad's rule): Dad carves the bird and serves the turkey. He also serves every other course, on an individual basis one at a time, so everyone stands in line waiting for their turn. Advantages: The decision making apparatus is simple, as are the rules everyone has to follow. Disadvantages: Slow and potentially unresponsive to individual needs. You might suggest your preferences or restrictions to Dad when it's your turn for a plate, and he might follow those suggestions or he might not, and there's little you can do about it. His house, his rules. The weak dictatorship (aka, the Traditional American Thanksgiving): Dad carves the bird and serves the turkey, but the rest of the dishes are laid out on a table in a first-come, first-served kind of way. This is a mixed system, with some things being decided by the elite few, and everything else left for the guests to figure out for themselves. The free-for-all table is minimally constrained, by the arrangement of items on the table and how many people can gorge themselves around it. Advantages: Even simpler decision apparatus than the strong dictatorship, since Dad has even less to decide on his own. Therefore, it is also faster than the strong dictatorship. Individuals are also given more say in what they eat, at least for the side dishes. Disadvantages: Still biased, still slow, and there's a chance you'll get the short end of the stick in the free for all and be left with no good side dishes. The central planning authority (aka, the Soviet dinner): Individual plates and portions are decided and prepared for days in advance by Dad, Mom, and a few powerful Aunts. Advantages: Potentially faster and more egalitarian than a strong dictatorship, since advanced preparation means less time spent serving food while people are waiting in line, and potentially more consideration over who gets what. Disadvantages: Heavily biased by whatever makes it easier for the central planning authority to prepare all foods. Good luck getting your individual dietary needs met, since you'd have to submit requests weeks in advance. Potentially much, much slower than any form of dictatorship, since if Dad, Mom, and the Aunts don't get along the whole thing grinds to a halt. The representative democracy (aka, death by committee of salesmen): Family members convene once a year in early November to elect a coalition of representatives, who are then tasked with operating something like the central planning authority. In practice, the result is a mixed system that looks more like a weak dictatorship from the perspective of individual choice. The representatives take strict control over some dishes, but others are left in an unregulated free for all and guests must fend for themselves. There is little rhyme or reason why certain dishes become disputed from year to year, and voting becomes less about "who will make the best dinner" to "who will gently caress it up least". Advantages: Potentially more egalitarian than a central planning committee, since guests have some say who gets onto that committee. Disadvantages: Slow, ad hoc, and introduces petty political fighting among dinner guests. The every-man-for-himself (aka, libertopia): Guests are responsible for bringing their own meals, which are all placed on open tables on one side of the room. Then, to make it "fair", everyone is gathered at the other side of the room and there's a countdown to a musket shot that signals dinner, at which time everyone rushes at the tables to grab whatever food they can. Advantages: No collective planning whatsoever. Mildly entertaining. Disadvantages: The competitive nature of the dinner makes the first ones at the table grab far more than they'll eat, which they gorge on like pigs. Anyone in a wheel chair or with asthma gets no food at all. Most people don't even get the food they brought. The anarchist collective (aka, how small groups actually work): Some guests bring their own meals prepared, but most of the guests come ready to cook together and bring whatever resources and labor they have to contribute. When the meal is ready, everyone shares. Advantages: This is basically what our brains spent the last hundred thousand years learning to do. Disadvantages: Doesn't scale well, and is susceptible to cheats that eat the meal but never contribute to its creation. Preparing the meal doesn't take much collective planning, but all the planning time for the group is devoted to the issue of how to keep the cheats out: namely, planning who to invite next year, discussing who did a lovely job this year, etc. This group preening is meant to keep the group small and the dinner manageable among cooperators. The attention economy (aka, the turkey singularity): For the past five years, the creepy uncle has been taking multi-camera recordings of the Thanksgiving festivities, which has allowed him to make obsessively detailed records over which sides and portions are eaten by each dinner guest each year. The uncle notes not just what sides are given by that year's authority, but also what items were taken in any potential free for all scenario, and also what items were given but uneaten. Using this data, the uncle obsessively builds a model that predicts how much of each course will be needed each year to best fit the aggregate patterns of the guests, and then uses this data to build that year's menu. The menu, and all the collaborating data, is then passed around to all the years guests a few weeks in advance, where they might make suggestions or corrections to the menu. Someone might mention, for instance, a new medical restriction that will change the amount of gravy they'll be consuming this year, or a grievance about the previous year's distribution of food, and the model can be tweaked to fit whatever new information is raised in this stage. Finally, guests can claim responsibility for preparing some portion of that year's menu, with unclaimed but necessary tasks potentially being automatically assigned as the dinner approaches. And then everyone simply follows their chosen or assigned role for the dinner, where they can each take as much as they like for themselves, while trusting that there will be enough for everyone. The model might take a few years to calibrate, but eventually the menus it produces begin to converge arbitrarily close to the total of what everyone likes, within an acceptably small margin of error, and with little excess food produced. Advantages: an exact solution to the problem without computing all the factors that inform the decisions of each individuals. Everyone has opportunities to provide feedback in the calibration process, and can be sure that their individual concerns are taken into consideration in the planning process. This system also can't be cheated over the long run: we'll know if any of the food you took was wasted, and it doesn't particularly matter if you didn't contribute anything as long as all the work was assigned. Disadvantages: While it's not a purely technological solution, it does require some serious technological infrastructure that has to be maintained (presumably in the same open, collaborative way in which the menu is produced). In order to perform well, it also has to assume that people will actually take advantage of the system by providing feedback to the model as required during the planning stages. So beyond the time that goes into the meal preparation itself, this solution also requires some work from everyone to support the organizing infrastructure to support the model. It involves more work from some people than they might have to do in other models, but less than in some others. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 16:58
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It looks like we can double-underline politics on to the list of things eripsa knows very little about. Seriously, you start out talkign about serving without dish selection but all of a sudden menu selection is the topic as you go down the list. You can't even keep your piss-poor example consistent for a seven-item list. There's internet 'humor' sites that can do this. PS when choosing an example to illustrate distribution of scarce resources, don't choose a traditional feast day where there is almost never any scarcity of food and the ubiquity of leftovers is a cultural touchstone. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 17:13
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Cream_Filling posted:It looks like we can double-underline politics on to the list of things eripsa knows very little about. Seriously, you start out talkign about serving without dish selection but all of a sudden menu selection is the topic as you go down the list. You can't even keep your piss-poor example consistent for a seven-item list. There's internet 'humor' sites that can do this. I love that he really does his little-champ best to think up 'cons', but overlooks the most obvious one: System is gameable as gently caress. But that doesn't matter, because he's assuming infinite resources, thus making his entire thought experiment completely garbage as a model of solving resource distribution. Basically, assuming infinite resources, you don't have to obsessively track poo poo--which also may vary wildly from year to year based on, like, the actual quality of that particular meal--you just have to email everyone and ask what they'd like to have. That's the actual important step, which he refers to as 'tweaking'. The whole creepy uncle bit is pretty pointless to the solution, just ask people what the gently caress they want to have if that's the main deal. In addition, the task-assignment is complete hand-wavey bullshit that also assumes infinite resources, and that everyone can do whatever task is assigned to them, or that they'll make that dish in the way that X likes, etc. I love this bit: quote:Preparing the meal doesn't take much collective planning, but all the planning time for the group is devoted to the issue of how to keep the cheats out: namely, planning who to invite next year, discussing who did a lovely job this year, etc. This group preening is meant to keep the group small and the dinner manageable among cooperators. My dad contributes zero to thanksgiving dinner, as a bad cook and a forgetful guy who can't be trusted with shopping. So loving what? We have more than enough good cooks in the family, it's not a big deal. Who the hell thinks of Thanksgiving in terms of 'cheats'? We always invite a bunch of people and don't expect them to do anything, if they bring a bottle of wine that's cool.
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Dec 7, 2013 17:30
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The attention economy: For the past five years, the creepy uncle has been taking multi-camera recordings of the Thanksgiving festivities, which has allowed him to make obsessively detailed records over which sides and portions are eaten by each dinner guest each year. This allows the creepy uncle to tell the fat girl exactly how much of a fatty she is, extrapolate that her sister is a terrible cook, and also notice that the husband has excused himself early for three straight Thanksgivings and is probably having an affair. Advantage: awesome if you're the creepy uncle. Disadvantage: the fat girl is on the Toothpaste Council and retaliates by hauling the uncle in for questioning about his massive toothpaste expenditures. Possible/preferable alternative models: The Singularity: A wonderland indistinguishable from magic where replicators do all the work. Advantages: replicate whatever you want, possibly easier to implement than the attention economy Disadvantages: GLADOS does not like cake very much so dessert is out The time machine: everyone goes forward in time (going forward avoids pesky paradoxes) to a distant future where gigantic turkeys have evolved and one thigh feeds the entire household. Advantages: no need to clean up as the robot butlers will do it for you Disadvantages: still tastes like turkey The zombie apocalypse: Zombies slaughter the household and feast on each individual member, one to a zombie. Advantages: no decisions or preparation required Disadvantages: probably the last Thanksgiving ever
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Dec 7, 2013 17:52
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Adar posted:inspiring words The attention economy: For the past five years, the creepy uncle has been taking multi-camera recordings of the Thanksgiving festivities, which has allowed him to make obsessively detailed records over which sides and portions are eaten by each dinner guest each year. Since the data is highly stochastic, only pseudo-patterns form, since what people ate during each meal was contingent on the quality of the dishes, the perceived amount other people wanted, what they'd eaten already, and whims of appetite that day. When at that Thanksgiving, people's choices don't fit the predictions very well, even with the 'tweaking' he did, the Uncle retreats to his shed to work on his algorithms. Surely, he thinks, night after night, there must be a true pattern here, discernible by software. Perhaps he needs to take into account seating position. He begins tracking that, too, and adds in factors like the weather. He demands to know the medications everyone is on, how much they're smoking, to improve the algorithm; his kind family provides the increasingly-intrusive information, and yet every Thanksgiving, every loving thanksgiving, there they are, taunting him with their bulk: Leftovers.
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Dec 7, 2013 18:07
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Obdicut posted:assuming infinite resources, The task that Tokamok proposed a few pages ago was a task that presumed infinite resources. quote:You can use a computer to solve what a group of people should eat at a restaurant, which makes everyone happy. There are perhaps 20 people, and 50 menu items and each person has a few preferences and one restriction. I assumed, in my question, that the resources were available, and that everyone would contribute whatever role the system ascribed them. The problem being addressed was just the computational problem of distributing the food to meet the people's needs. My response is completely appropriate to addressing the question of resolving the decision problem. Obviously the discussion has to change when considering other cases, but I can only deal with one thing at a time.
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Dec 7, 2013 18:19
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RealityApologist posted:
No, you're not just talking about the problem of distributing the food, you're also talking about preparing the food. And you're assuming everyone actually does the task assigned to them. You're also assuming, for whatever reason, that there are actual patterns in what people want at thanksgiving, and that those patterns are somehow independent of who's actually making the food. As usual, your thought process cannot survive contact with reality. Leftovers.
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Dec 7, 2013 18:31
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rudatron posted:I've still yet to see what relationship attention has to utility. Most people do not pay attention to poo poo that is super important until it breaks. For the individual, attention is the result of the brain's immediate judgement about where its cognitive resources should be allocated. The relationship to utility is between the reallocation of resources and the utility gained from that reallocation; attention is the mechanism for determining the reallocation. A flash of light in the corner of your vision attracts your attention not because it is the best thing for you, but because it is potentially the most urgent thing that needs addressing. This might result in both false positives and false negatives. If the flash of light is no big deal, then the cognitive resources devoted to the flash by your attention system will (other things equal) eventually judge that it's no big deal, and turn those resources elsewhere. But if the flash of light was an explosion, then maybe you have to do something about it, and the increased cognitive resources attending to the issue will serve your next moves well. Again, attention is a prejudgmental system, designed to turn resources towards an issue so that it can be processed by more specialized systems of discrimination and judgment. The point isn't to do whatever the attention system says, but more simply to let the attention system help us figure out what to do.
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Dec 7, 2013 18:43
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RealityApologist posted:For the individual, attention is the result of the brain's immediate judgement about where its cognitive resources should be allocated. The relationship to utility is between the reallocation of resources and the utility gained from that reallocation; attention is the mechanism for determining the reallocation. Are you about ready to admit that there is no point to the entire system you've created? Or should I say, the as-yet-unexplored-and-undeveloped system that you have alluded to, are too stupid to create yourself and feel that it's important for someone else to create?
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Dec 7, 2013 18:53
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^^ No one in this thread has given me even the slightest whiff of a reason for thinking I should. Obdicut posted:No, you're not just talking about the problem of distributing the food, you're also talking about preparing the food. And you're assuming everyone actually does the task assigned to them. You're also assuming, for whatever reason, that there are actual patterns in what people want at thanksgiving, and that those patterns are somehow independent of who's actually making the food. As usual, your thought process cannot survive contact with reality. The problem was simply: we have a lot of food. How do we put it on plates so that everyone is happy? The solution to this problem might come at many levels of organization, including ones that involve differences in preparation methods: everyone bring their own plates is a potential solution to the problem. Others involve redistributing the food as a mass quantity without regard for who prepared it. So I gave details as appropriate, and to make it slightly more interesting than a giant wall of text. The question of how to motivate people to play a role is distinct from the question of what food goes on what plate, so I didn't treat it here. Didn't you tell me explicitly to deal with a single problem in detail at a time? Yes, I'm assuming that people settle into regular eating patterns. However, I don't assume they are independent of who is making the food, and I'm not sure why you think I've made that assumption.
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Dec 7, 2013 19:03
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1337JiveTurkey posted:Then P-day. GIS results for "Burning Man Art Car" The future is way, way more awesome than your smutty little brain can imagine. VV It has no relevance with anything, but here's the first quarter of one of the chapters from my diss: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2013/10/lady-lovelace-and-autonomy-of-machines.html (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 7, 2013 19:06
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Still waiting on that heavy-rear end philosophy writing you've totally done and received academic recognition for, by the way.
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Dec 7, 2013 19:19
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RealityApologist posted:^^ No one in this thread has given me even the slightest whiff of a reason for thinking I should. Leaving out parts of the problem is not dealing with the problem in detail. You didn't give a solution the problem. You assumed a solution. quote:Yes, I'm assuming that people settle into regular eating patterns. However, I don't assume they are independent of who is making the food, and I'm not sure why you think I've made that assumption. You did assume they were independent of who is making the food, because you are using past data on what people will eat combined with a system whereby people choose what to prepare. So you can get a system where X really loves turkey, but, it turns out, not when Y makes the turkey. Yet your system allows Y to volunteer for turkey-making. These are really hard questions. This is something that someone with a trivial CS knowledge should know. The traveling salesman problem is incredibly difficult, despite appearing easy, and you are attempting to solve much harder problems--actually, you're not trying to solve them at all, you're simply asserting, based on gently caress-all, that the 'attention economy' or 'distributed decision making' or 'human computation' or 'a world run by software' or whatever is your totem in any given post will help with the problem. You don't actually engage with the problem to figure out what is appropriate to solve: you have a hammer, and see a world full of nails. Except you don't even actually have a hammer, you have the idea of a hammer, and it's actually not a very good concept of a hammer. And you have leftovers.
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Dec 7, 2013 20:47
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RealityApologist posted:VV It has no relevance with anything, but here's the first quarter of one of the chapters from my diss: You're the one who brought it up because you thought we weren't taking you seriously. But don't worry about the fact that you're contradicting yourself, I'm used to it.
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Dec 7, 2013 20:52
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What the gently caress? Seriously, you're deconstructing Thanksgiving dinner to best advocate your pet theory? I listed some real, actual problems that maybe your system might provide real, actual solutions to; so maybe we can move towards discussing how and why you think your proposal would be a better solution to the system we have now, aka your thesis: the world would be better run by software. Literally holding your hand here. Do your students hand in superfluous waxing du jours about the singularity to flatter you? You are completely missing the point of starting a thread to defend an argument, and it is frustrating. Do you understand why people who come into the thread, asking legitimate questions, only to have them magicked away while you go off on a tangent are getting impatient with you? salisbury shake posted:I would provided you can prepare a detailed answer for what I plan on asking about real problems, like:
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Dec 7, 2013 21:06
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salisbury shake posted:What the gently caress? Seriously, you're deconstructing Thanksgiving dinner to best advocate your pet theory? Calm the gently caress down, jesus. I'm only one person, and I am addressing questions raised in this thread as best I can. It's a shame that I'm the only person defending these ideas in this thread; all the hostility directed at me is also preventing anyone else coming forward and defending these ideas. Who would, with such a hostile crowd?
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Dec 7, 2013 21:44
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RealityApologist posted:Calm the gently caress down, jesus. I'm only one person, and I am addressing questions raised in this thread as best I can. It's a shame that I'm the only person defending these ideas in this thread; all the hostility directed at me is also preventing anyone else coming forward and defending these ideas. Who would, with such a hostile crowd? Are you sure you're in academia? "Hostility", or criticism, should be something you want, for your ideas. You shouldn't be looking for flat acceptance, you should welcome people having criticisms, and you should be able to respond to them coherently and well. I mean, that's why you send papers and poo poo out, for critique. Your ideas are highly critiquable, because they're a goddamn mess, and you need to do a lot of work to fix them. You really, really don't sound like you're engaging with this academically. This is more an ideological thing for you.
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Dec 7, 2013 22:02
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RealityApologist posted:The attention economy (aka, the turkey singularity): For the past five years, the creepy uncle has been taking multi-camera recordings of the Thanksgiving festivities, which has allowed him to make obsessively detailed records over which sides and portions are eaten by each dinner guest each year. The uncle notes not just what sides are given by that year's authority, but also what items were taken in any potential free for all scenario, and also what items were given but uneaten. Using this data, the uncle obsessively builds a model that predicts how much of each course will be needed each year to best fit the aggregate patterns of the guests, and then uses this data to build that year's menu. The menu, and all the collaborating data, is then passed around to all the years guests a few weeks in advance, where they might make suggestions or corrections to the menu. Someone might mention, for instance, a new medical restriction that will change the amount of gravy they'll be consuming this year, or a grievance about the previous year's distribution of food, and the model can be tweaked to fit whatever new information is raised in this stage. Finally, guests can claim responsibility for preparing some portion of that year's menu, with unclaimed but necessary tasks potentially being automatically assigned as the dinner approaches. And then everyone simply follows their chosen or assigned role for the dinner, where they can each take as much as they like for themselves, while trusting that there will be enough for everyone. The model might take a few years to calibrate, but eventually the menus it produces begin to converge arbitrarily close to the total of what everyone likes, within an acceptably small margin of error, and with little excess food produced. How is this any different from the "strong dictatorship?" All you've done is provide the dictator uncle with absolute surveillance powers that would make the Stasi jealous, and assumed that he's going to act ethically. There is no open, collaborative decision making; it's simply a dictator allocating resources with the aid of a predictive system. And, of course, your example completely fails to address what might happen when there aren't enough resources to go around. It's easy to allocate resources when you have as much as anybody could want; what happens when you catch a whiff of triage? Who decides who goes without? How is it enforced? The Sterling parable you posted earlier is actually a great example of how this sort of thing might play out in practice. Target the most vulnerable populations possible: refugees who have no choices but "submit to the new, peaceful order" or "live in a deadly and chaotic environment." Once they're coerced into the system, they're required to wear "spex" that track every action they take, and mediate their interaction with reality. Some invisible system, and its administrators, keep this system running, and select people who fit certain criteria to do the "right" jobs. Through the magic of fiction, this leads to the most productive possible society we could ever imagine, all from the humble beginnings of a refugee camp. It's almost like that one other sci-fi story where intelligent refugees adopt the author's ideology and become the most productive geniuses in the world. The title was something about an old Greek god casting off a load, I think.
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Dec 7, 2013 22:05
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