[It] does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or other purpose, in this view it is seen as an evolutionary accident.

Update: Bitch | Lab points out that dualism is not a new explanation:

The thing is, Mary Douglas, among many others, was already on about this. The whole theory of religion as beginning with the fundamental dualism, and supporting Freudian theoretical frameworks which explore the way this dualism operates and shapes our psyches, this is nothing new. It’s all right there, in anthropological theory, and it’s been developed, too, by feminist theorists.

Yes, but I think what is new and novel here is that Boyer and Bloom are tying this into what we have learned about the structure of the brain:

1. We’ve evolved local optimizations for many behaviors: facial recognition, pattern matching, predicting how animate and inanimate things will behave.
2. But those optimizations bleed over boundaries.

This stark separation of the world into minds and non-minds is what, according to Bloom, makes it eventually possible for us to conceive of minds (or souls) without bodies. This explains beliefs in gods, spirits, an afterlife (we continue without bodies), etc. The other thing that babies are very good at, is ascriptions of intentionality. They are very good at reading desires and intentions in animate objects, and this is necessary for them to function socially. Indeed, they are so sensitive to this that they sometimes overshoot and even ascribe goals and desires to inanimate objects. And it is this tendency which eventually makes us animists and creationists.

It’s a cognitive illusion, one of the same class of effects that make a batter perceive a fastball as rising instead of falling.

If you’re interested in cognitive bias, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds is a good introduction to the subject.

Though, telling someone that they missed a fastball because of how our brains work may not be as shocking as telling them that their religious beliefs are due to local optimizations in our hominid ancestors’ brains, and that the soul is just another rising fastball.

Things that jumped out at me

• “Classes of errors unrelated to the mode of production.”
• “Who can categorize?” Everyone, at least everyone you care about.
• Tagging is an ongoing operation: not something that happens in the cataloging department once and for all time

I missed the first 15 minutes of the talk because I was coming up from Cupertino to Fort Mason.

Classification and it’s Discontents

• 1000 to 10000 items in a kitchen
• not everything is labeled however
• items hard to ‘see inside’ are labeled since a can of tomatoes weights the same as can of chickpeas

Seeing ‘inside the can’ is magnified in the library

• classification systems roll up
• how do systems adapt

• 200 Dewey Religion

  • fine grained for Christianity,
  • but everything else is shoved in 290
  • Seattle’s library directly reflects the dewey classification system it’s a continuous ramp.

• Library of Congress, a bigger namespace

  • Balkans, Asia, and Africa are given equal ‘weight’ in the scheme
  • Not designed to be biased
  • Design was an optimization for the number of books on each area
  • History gotcha: category DK still covers everything in the former Soviet Union
  • Re-shelving costs prohibit exploding the category.

• How do you history-proof this?

Books aren’t inspect-able, you need labels.

• Yahoo

  • Originally a list of links
  • Then they needed lists of lists soon after.
  • Hired a staff ontology.
  • Pointers: under entertainment, books and literature are a pointer to a node in the tree under humanities
  • They still needed to add the shelf back in.

• Google

  • Dispense with the shelf
  • Look at what points at what.
  • Only the links are what’s ‘real’.
  • They bought DMOZ, the open source version of Yahoo.

What Has Been Lost

• What is a fertility symbol?

  • Venus of Willendorf
  • Is it a ‘magical object’ or just porn?
  • We can’t read it.

• Several examples of things we don’t ‘read’ any more.

  • Ancient writing and calculating systems (Rongo Rongo, Linear A, etc.)
  • Hieroglyphs were almost lost as a written language until we found the Rosetta Stone
  • Three different scripts: common Egyptian, Hieroglyphs, Greek

• Degeneracy

  • More than one way to do things.
  • If you lose one
  • Christopher Alexander: the city is not a tree, on city planning
  • Cities are degenerate in the sense they have overlap.
  • The world’s non-convex.

• A question of economics: is the money spent on classification systems worth the money?

  • you current system may be a future person’s rosetta stone

• Flickr

  • something happens, I go look for it on Flickr
  • type in “mermaid parade”
  • thousands of photos, hundreds of photographers
  • everyone tags photos with “mermaidparade”
  • no coordination, no ontologies, no hierarchies
  • relations and clusters allow you to determine the parade’s on Coney Island in Brooklyn

• oh and del.icio.us too

  • “linksys router”
  • “making a paper airplane”
  • “CSS vista”
  • different distribution of tags — some things have consensus others float at the interaction

• Oh hell, RDF

  User asserts Tag describes Photo

  User asserts Tag describes Website

Information Architecture is Social Architecture

• tagging systems exist in a flat namespace

  • no sense of hierarchy
  • take three random LJ users
  • hierarchy is a second order effect of tagging

• tag clouds over time example

  • • Social Quakes: communities of practice
  • JJG’s article on Ajax grows a tag cloud asserting it’s about “AJAX”

Clay’s Questions

• how can tagging identify communities of practice
• how should we handle the thesaurus problem
  • you have to get off the ‘thesaurus bus’ (gay politics is not “gay agenda”)
• can we apply this to navigation
  • the VP wants a link
• what, if anything, should we do about popularity risk
  • overwhelming other voices
• can we detect “concept rot”
  • the “Ajax” tag adoption curve
  • things that die start to stink
• what can we do about spam
  • we will face a well-funded and

Q&A

• Attention tracking — when people stop tagging
• Latent Semantic Analysis augmented with intelligence: Mechanical Turk
• Links age and die
  • help find links that are broken and save them from the caches (Archive.org, Google)
  • RSS feeds are a latent resource for preserving content (on all those copies of NNW and FeedDemon)
  • what’s the germ line?
• The whole distribution matters
  • the top five tags have the social weight
  • the rest drive the ecosystem
  • internal shelves: noise or other ‘communities of practice’
• how does tagging deal with factions
• how does tagging deal with spam
  • edit wars — that thesaurus problem
  • bump up the relative frequencies of the top five tags
  • return of metatag spam
  • watching obscure tags
  • friends of friends tag clouds?
• on Wikipedia
  • classification systems aren’t as important
  • tagging is the first great post search interface
• associative clustering is how biological memory works, is the web thinking (Kevin Kelly)
  • we don’t know how we think
  • it’s more of a tool than a brain
• anything from history that would had predicted the importance of tagging?
  • we knew that hierarchical systems were brittle
  • usenet: rec.pets.cats — attractors for other things, including flamewars as antagonists have the usenet subject (cats, SF) in common (Cynthia’s LMB list)
• how do we forget things we don’t ‘remembered’?
  • don’t want a global delete button
  • Stewart Brand’s “You Own Your Own Words” policy caused a storm on Well
  • But you can’t take back a public discussion, other people heard it and may not want to forget it
  • don’t want to accidently lose data either (I thought you were blogging this?)
  • Stewart relates the experience of the “delete everything I said” button
    • also happens on LJ
  • DRM makes things hard to remember (don’t have the magic software/hardware dongles)
  • Conversations are downloaded
• how to add stink to software?
  • institutional fallbacks
  • a golden month to find in global and local caches
  • resource allocation
• storage is free, what’s the cost of preservation?
  • falling storage cost increases the problem
  • there’s more
  • real options theory, how much to pay to postpone a decision
  • the 90 year window after which, stuff becomes interesting to us — if storage costs are low, easier to keep stuff over that bridge
  • the tag cloud also makes it easier to find the old stuff and the time series is of interest to itself
• digital isn’t durable yet, when is it a solved problem?
  • it’s a wicked problem
  • only local solutions
  • always a social layer
  • a fork b/w open and closed culture — Times Direct
  • attack vectors for opinion: Wingnut Daily is free, Times Direct isn’t. Guess what’s linked.

These are little musical compositions created by running a one-dimensional cellular automata, then taking a slice, rotating the slice, and mapping a musical scale to the result.

You tweak the result by playing with the generator’s initial conditions, changing the instruments, tempo, and musical scale.

Save your experiments in in a menagerie, and for $2, you can send one to your phone to use as a ring tone.

Some examples:

• Lush and swoopy
• A ringtone
• Bright, busy electronica

People don’t tag multiples: Using tags like folders is like drawing Venn diagrams with no overlapping circles — possible, but so destructive of the value of the system as to make the effort pointless. — Clay Shirky

Analogies

LC subject headings apply as many as are appropriate for later retrieval

Tagging’s an overloaded operator

• later retrieval
• collaboration
• publicizing
• categorization
• hard to get people’s head wrapped around the idea

Technical barriers

• People don’t know about pinging for indexing.
• Using feedburner to automate pinging
• You have to understand RSS, search, pings and the rest of the Web 2.0 technologies
• Hard to get photo sharing users to cognitive shift
• Need a tagging tool for HTML adverse writers. Blummy a good approach.
• IE7 restrictions on bookmarklets.
• Tagging UI’s intimidating Furl’s sucks, but not intimidating
• LJ shift from memories to tags confused and angered users

Functional tagging

• Flickr and Technoratti tags for publicizing
• Tags for retrieval
• Gutenberg Project around tagging
• Tagging gap – economic/cultural
• Portablity of attention data
• emotional tagging
• snark tagging

Power dynamics

• Maintaining privilege — you’re not Glenn Reynolds, Xeni Jardin, or Atrios, how do you get heard.
• iTunes sharing in workplaces — selective sharing to establish idendity, then the boss looked in, and everyone shut up.
• the universe of taggers is full of young white men
• tagusablity for these conversations

ETA Marshall wrote with a corrected attribution to the ‘venn diagram’ quote. Thanks!

When software shows up at my door with a beer, watches What not to Wear with me on my sofa, then gets me laid afterward, that will be social software.

Jonas on stage at Webzine 2005, arguing that Social Software really is Community Software.

Oh, and don’t use the term “long tail” around him, unless you’re talking about your pet lemur.

He also asks, if you are talking about the long tail, please be prepared to answer the following:

• What is Zipf?
• Who was Pareto and what did he did?
• What’s the formula describing a Zipf distribution?

Technorati: webzine2005

A couple of days ago, a coworker asked me if I’ve been able to apply any of my economics training in my current profession.

Well, for one thing, I could had told you that pay-per-click creates perverse incentives for people to behave dishonestly in order to generate clicks.

And the pay-per-click people have no incentive to prevent click-farming:

FindWhat [the pay-per-click firm] has a policy prohibiting certain activities of this type [click-farming], and will likely terminate any affiliate account reported to them for abuse. However, terminating the account only means that FindWhat benefits from the hijacker’s activity without having to pay the hijacking affiliate. It’s a win-win situation for them.

Meuon declares: The real meat of the story is that the internet is not safe or trustworthy. As long as you pay for traffic, and deflect the cost of creating the traffic onto other users, yes.

If the companies hiring pay-for-click outfits wrote contracts specifying that they don’t pay for traffic generated by affiliates gaming the system, you remove the incentive for pay-for-click firms to look the other way while their system’s gamed.

I have never seen a use case that starts with a proposition like “Greta wants to sneak out and meet her lover Patrick, without making her husband Bertrand suspicious.” Or “Kenji wants his private contact information to be more available to his close friends than the random boys he picks up clubbing.” Or “Claudia wants to IM and play games on her computer at work, while making it seem as if she’s busy getting things done.”

And yet, experience tells us that’s just what people do with technology.

Greenfield mentions an instance where providers have anticipated this sort of deceptive use pattern — the “Escape A Date” service.

So I’m bothered by EscapeADate.com replacing the informal pattern (“Joe, call me at 8:30 so I have a way of bailing out if my date is terrible”.) Even though both are lies.

Does your ditched date implicitly understand that she’s been blackballed? What happens when both you and your date’s phones ring at 8:30.

Do you want to have a discoverable credit card record of a charge for EscapeADate sitting around when the next girl you meet calls a friend at US Bank and asks them about what you buy? Yes, that’s illegal, but apparently everyone’s cheating these days.

The “yes, everyone cheats” so let make it part of our business plan idea bothers me. I’m not saying it out of sense of superiority, but out of utopian, nerdish frustration that humans favor little lies over brute honesty. And a worry that taking our little lies into the the internet, phone, and banking systems, where trails are left, will make little lies into big problems.

Besides the fault lines between use cases and actual use, technology exposes another: the one between our human nature and what our cultures expect of us.

Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs.

Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now Foundation at the Fort Mason Center. We had planned a quiet evening at home, watching Brian DePalma and Robert Altman, but Bruce gives great lectures, and after his recent talk at Microsoft I didn’t want to miss what could be a great talk. Thanks Cyn.

The talk can be found as an audio stream in Ogg and MP3.

Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation introduced Sterling. The topic was The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. Brand observes are discontinuities are potholes for group that’s planning for the next 10,000 years of human history.

The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!

Sterling starts with two definitions of The Singularity:

• Von Neumann to Ulam:

An unpublished speculation on the condition where the rate of change exceeds human control and comprehension.

• Vernor Vinge, a professor of mathematics in San Diego

The 1993 paper on the singularity is the cannonical defintion.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Fred Moulton reminds me that there’s been some philosophical papers in the past few years questioning if an emergent AI would decide to murder us all. Sterling didn’t mention these in his presentation.

However, Sterling’s not impressed with AI’s track record so far. He is not convinced that we’ll see ‘emergent’ AI.

He detours before heading to his next topic and discusses how the idea of the ‘singularity’ is a hard for SF writers to grapple. The technological singularity is impossible to communicate across, and thus the first way to read the title of his talk.

Dismissing Vinge

Sterling then puts up one of Vinge’s slides from his stump speech on the singularity. I can’t find these on Google or on Vinge’s site at San Diego State.

The slides are trend lines for computational power of machines compared to biological entities. A late 1990′s Mac is akin to a nematode. But while the Vax is a museum piece, the bacterium it supposedly superannuates still thrives.

He also has questions about Vinge’s definitions. Vinge talks about machines becoming self-aware, or ‘waking up.’ Biology does not, as of 2004, have a answer to what self-awareness is, so we cannot say if networked computers, ants, or a forest can or will have ‘woken up’.

There’s the matter of enhancing human intelligence, and Sterling’s open to that as being plausible. He then lays out alternatives to being super-smart. For example the psychologist Howard Gardner suggests we have multiple intelligences: cognition, emotional, physical, etc.

So instead of becoming some sort of human computing machine as the Mentats in Dune, enhancements might make us more able to be mindful, empathic, and realize what horribly rude people we are. One would hope they have good Prozac after that singularity.

Previous Singularities

Sterling lists three events that have singularity nature:

1. The Atomic Bomb
2. LSD
3. Computer Viruses

All three have changed the world, but only briefly.

Obsolescese and the Singularity

Sterling suggests the future will be a glut of undigested technical riches.

He continues with a new slide, Gartner Research’s Hype Cycle, a five-phase life-cycle of technology adoption. How ‘grown ups’ think about technology.

Of course, he adds, Gartner won’t tell you your business is dead as long as you have a budget for consultants.

The ‘S’ or logistic curve was the earlier form of Gartner’s hype cycle.

Returning to obsolescence, he asks the audience if we’d bother to pick up a copy of Windows 3.0 we found at the curb.

“The street didn’t pick up on the singularity.”

“There aren’t factions in the singularity movement.”

“The singularity has no end users.”

Schools of Thought

• Just No Way
• Superbian Transhumans
• Rapture of the Nerds
• Apocalypse

Judith Berman

• Singularity Resisters

Bill Joy

Science Fiction and Singularity

It’s a great way to make plot, “we had a singularity blow through”.

Ken McLeod’s Engines of Light novels, The Stone Canal, and The Sky Road are all about people living in the ruins of singularities.

We May be on the Edge of Nothing Important.

But we may be edging towards something important.

Like virus writers, the infrastructure of the singularity makers are well-contained. If you lock-up, bomb them, or take away their funding, they go away long before they produce anything self-sustaining.

There’s a large following for the singularity, but that crowd does not actively try to bring it about. This is the “geek rapture” crowd for whom Vinge is the equivalent of Left Behind.

They don’t imagine that a singularity could be monopolized, like the Biblical Fundamentalist version, or that it may be short lived: “And you have burned so brightly Roy.”

Science doesn’t reward thinking through consequences. We reward scary science that gives us things like hydrogen bombs, even the moral titans of science: Einstein, and Sakorov did their heavy lifting in the WMD area.

Containment

He suggests commercialization and broad patenting might stop a future singularity, but technologies with the biggest threat potential may pay off well in the market.

He suggests that two NGO superpowers may emerge who will attempt to marginalize the “kooks” on either side.

The conservative/religous opposition to stem-cell research may be an example of one of these new ‘superpowers’. The President’s Council on Bioethics’ report Reproduction and Responsiblity, talks about a biological singularity and opposes it.

Then there’s force. Sterling asks why wouldn’t a government ready to wage endless war on terrorism declare endless war on the singularity. The ‘nowhere to hide’ rhetoric of President Bush may extend from caves in Afghanistan to labs in China.

At this point, I must give a shout out to the Global Frequency, the sort of NGO one might want to have in this circumstance.

What Can We Say, Pace the Singularity

1. Posthuman is a soundbite.
2. Not just one singularity.
3. The posthuman condition is banal from a post human’s point of view.
4. Messy, embarassing, reversible singularites are preferable to the alternative.
5. It’s hard to be just a little bit dead.

Going back to Judith Berman, Sterling closes with the observation that the most adept political actors in the world right now are people who blow themselves up.

To get past that, we must go back to treating the future as process and not a destination.

The MindMap project is trying to find clusters of Live Journal users. It’s also distributing the processing load across volunteers’ computers.

• Movable Type’s mass-editing interface.
• NASA’s Martian Crater sorter.
• iTunes playlists.

You’ll get back a list of all the Live Journal accounts that the user has ‘friended’, along with the links to their FoaF and Journals.

You can also get syndication feeds at http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss and http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/atom.

So you have enough to start building an interesting application with all that data.