Mind Mob

Re: bonjour de Tahiti

2005-07-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Firstly, I've added new pictures since I set sail from Tahiti:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindmob/sets/625529/

I'm writing to you from the turquoise waters of Opunohu Bay on the
island of Moorea. Compared to bustling Tahiti, Moorea is far more the
archetypal image of the quiet Polynesian island: stunning sharkstooth
mountains of black volcanic rock, all dressed in green rainforest and
standing high above sleepy villages, white sand beaches and coral
lagoons swimming with sea life.

In the past few week here, I hiked across and over the rim of the
ancient volcanic culdera -- now abundant in agriculture, especially
pineapple -- and I climbed 2998 ft. tall Mount Rotui (I made it about
2600 before the rain turned me back). High above the little island I
could see the North and South coasts simultaneously. It was a sight
that could give a landlubber like me chills of isolation... But there
are whole worlds to be found in the convoluted folds of a mape tree,
sweating in the jungle on the side of Mt. Rotui; and I could spend
years wandering along the blue lagoon where coconut crabs scurry, a
few steps from the undersea kingdom.

There are three principal languages spoken in French Polynesia: the
official French (I've been working hard on my poor francais), the
Tahitian language (composed of 13 letters -- 5 vowels and 8
consonants), and the language of flowers. The latter is a subtle,
ingenious and effective method of nonverbal communication between the
sexes. These islands are covered in wildflowers of all varieties and
most Polynesians you see are adorned in one way or another with
blossoms. Mainly the language of flowers is a way to broadcast your
romantic status to potential mates. For instance, a tiare blossom
behind the left ear means you're taken; behind the right ear, you're
available. I wear a white hibiscus facing forward behind my right ear
and a violet orchid in my hair which says "I'm in a semi-committed
polyamorous group marriage with license to fool around." So far, no
takers.

Au revoir. Je vous aime.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindmob/sets/625529/

+ Daniel Steinbock
+
+ www.sonic.net/~daniel

bonjour de Tahiti

2005-07-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

Friends,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindmob/sets/625529/

This letter begins by the light of the Tahitian moon. Though she looks
the same as yours, the sea of stars through which she sails is all new
to me. In the South Seas, the Southern Cross stands in for the North
Star as the heavenly compass -- how fitting for these islands
colonized by mean bearing the crucifix. To this day, Tahiti and her
islands are French colonies and francais is the national language,
though most polynesians also speak Tahitian.

I'm anchored a quarter mile offshore and "civilization" is painted all
across the night island landscape in sodium streetlamps, spinning
carnival colors and the sound of Harley Davidson. Out to sea, the roar
of breakers on the barrier reef is never-ending, and I watch the
tenuous white line of surf draw and erase the horizon over and over.
Onshore, I can tell what year it is by counting the lights. Out there
-- time never started.

The mountains of Tahiti are conspicuously dark above the city glow. If
I had arrived three hundred years ago, like some white guy did, I
would have likely seen fires burning up there between the peaks. Back
then, the polynesians populated and cultivated the rainforested inner
valleys. Then white guys arrived en masse with Western ideas, clothes
and junk. Centuries go by and the fires flow downhill to the ship
harbor and its obligatory city, only now the flames don't flicker, and
the jungle is concrete. Leaving the mountains to dream the old dreams
-- the ones we don't remember when we wake up.

Dan

Check out my recent pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindmob/sets/625529/

--
+ Daniel Steinbock
+
+ www.sonic.net/~daniel

Blogging from the boat

2005-04-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

I just created a blog for my mom and her partner who are crossing the South Pacific. They have an email connection via single side-band radio so they can blog right from the boat. Plus there's a map at the top that tracks their current position via GPS.

Umbrella Man Has A Posse

2005-03-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

23, originally uploaded by EN in SC.

"Umbrella Man", a former NASA electrical engineer whose real name is Robert Steffen, has been a downtown fixture in Santa Cruz for years.

What you may not know is that he used to be a different downtown fixture some years ago: Mr. "Have a nice day" hidden in a tent of black garbage bags in front of Bookshop Santa Cruz, and pictured here in a rare revelation. Robert ran for president and had his platform prominently displayed in front of the bench on which he always sat, invisibly draped in his formless black plastic.

Nowadays, after a stay in a mental clinic, he has been resurrected as the colorful, beautiful, extroverted Umbrella man. I found two recent photos of him on Flickr, here and here. (If you know of others, let me know) The latter picture was taken this past Halloween, and you can see above that he now is once again a well-known icon of the Santa Cruz community. Maybe his bid for presidency is taking a turn for the better.

References: For a recent article, see "Mary Poppins He's Not" at this link. See also Metro Santa Cruz News July 12, 2000.

Walking On Water

2005-03-02T01:42:00.000-08:00

Walking on water is easy...

Saying goodbye is hard.

"How I Became The Google Blogger"

2005-02-12T02:49:00.000-08:00

Mark Jen's blog, 99 Zeros, which describes his personal experiences working for Google, recently received much attention after the blog's existence caused him to lose his job. I first heard about the story on slashdot and am now coming back to it after seeing it on the front page of Yahoo. Now Mark has posted his first entry describing what actually happened.

Granted, Google is probably on firm legal ground in actively discouraging the sharing of insider information by firing Mark. But Mark and others who have lost their jobs for blogging are bringing to light a critical issue around the legal relationship between blogs and the business world. Here is my message to Mark:

My honest opinion, Mark, is to ride the wave of your publicity. Many others have shared your same fate after blogging about work but you are now the poster child. This is your 15 minutes of fame. Take advantage of it:

Keep blogging. Give interviews. Be a public advocate for corporate blogging policies that are fair to both employees and employers. You are right that companies should be embracing blog technology and the first step towards that is establishing precedent for a legal business relationship to blogging. There should be a standard clause in corporate Non-Disclosure Agreements that accounts for blogging.

Ride the wave. Speak out. Refuse to be cowed. Start your own software company that provides your idea of revolutionary software solutions.

Adapting/Adopting Online Conversation

2004-12-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

You can't simulate human creativity--nor naivete--and you can't automate deliberation. I have no faith in any scheme which would substitute circuits for thoughtful minds. Tools merely augment a person's capabilities, as the bicycle and ballpoint pen extend our movements and our communications, respectively. Yet people are amazingly adaptive/adoptive. They learn to use tools and media for purposes they were not designed for. This is why anyone seeking to co-create wisdom inside social software needs the motivation, open-mindedness and willingness to embrace new communications media; it calls one to consider alternate world-views/word-views.

I think of "voting" in a general sense as any discrete action that expresses a perspective; it could, for example, be practicing "the Law of Two Feet" in an OpenSpace or raising a concern in Dynamic Facilitation. Choosing to speak or not speak, to listen or leave: these are discrete actions. It doesn't have to be numeric, and it need not have decision-making power. An alternative term to "vote" would be "feedback", a data source to let the group know what others are thinking. It could be non-verbal or verbal, a raised hand or a detailed solution. Attention may be the most telling form of non-verbal feedback. In my view, feedback is a major factor in Collective Intelligence.

Software is but the framework for an online community--as a Constitution defines the axioms of law-making but is open-ended with respect to law. People, especially young ones, are extraordinarily adaptive to the rapid, asynchronous, multi-threaded discussions typical of the internet. Just as dynamic facilitation uses tools for information-sharing (categorized lists on whiteboards) to support open-ended creativity, I have no doubt that creative people will adapt digital tools for the same purpose. Just look at the open-source software community or the blogosphere. The point is not to simulate face-to-face deliberation, but to discover new collective thought processes that take advantage geographical diversity, large participant populations, data-rich feedback loops, and the managed multiplicity of simultaneous threads of discussion. People are ingenious and persistent enough to create community anywhere, to extend themselves and their bright ideas into ever-wider circles of information-sharing. WE will all learn together, experientially, how to squeeze wisdom from the pulp of online "deliberation", just as we have to equally and effortfully strive for it in our daily face-to-face interactions.

One Citizen, One Vote

2004-11-29T18:20:00.000-08:00

It has long been a tenet of democracy that every citizen deserves one vote to express their opinion and influence the collective decision-making of the populace. Aside from exceptions like age restrictions, felon restrictions, electoral college, etc., the idea is more or less in practice. However, it occurs to me that this seemingly just ideal is in fact a reductionist approach to democratic decision-making. It imposes an artificial homogenization on the population, uniformly forcing all citizens to have an equal influence over collective choices. More accurately, since citizens are typically not required by law to vote, a one person/one vote system permits a citizen to have homogenized influence or no influence at all.

To understand why this is a serious flaw, it helps to convert collective choice by analogy into individual choice. The aggregation of preferences from a set of individuals into a single collective choice is equivalent to the aggregation of preferences from a set of criteria into a single decision. Now the homogenization I am criticizing is like making a multi-criteria decision but being forced to consider all criteria as equal. For example, if I'm choosing a new car to buy, there are various criteria which influence my decision, among them: color and cost. According to the color criterion, my top choice is, say, a BMW. According to cost, my top choice is, say, a Toyota. Clearly, a decision like this demands that the influence of each criterion be proportionate to its importance. The uneven weighting of criteria is known as second-order volition, which philosopher Harry Frankfurt says is essential to free will. Not only do I have preferences about which cars are best according to each criterion but I have preferences about which criteria are most critical to my decision.

So to return to one citizen/one vote... Since everyone's vote is mandatorily equal, our democracy lacks second-order volition and therefore free will. Clearly this is not in line with our ideal of self-governance. A collective should be able to express a nuanced collective will, one that reveals the most accurate reflection of a people's preferences, experience and expertise. The most common critique of direct democracy is that "there are too many idiots out there" who shouldn't be given a right which they may recklessly use. The solution to this critique is simple: let there be second order volition. In other words, let some people's vote be worth more based on merit.

And before you think I am advocating some sort classist meritocracy, let me point out there there is a way to preserve the spirit of equality behind One Citizen/One Vote and yet allow second order volition: peer delegation of votes. Let's discard the archaic centralized form of representative democracy where you only get to choose among a few aristocratic career politicians for your representatives. Let's institute a dynamic, distributed, direct democracy that gives every citizen (even the kids!) the right to delegate their vote to whomever they wish and the right to be a delegate for anybody. Personally, I would add transitivity so that you can delegate away votes that you receive from others. In this way, my vote can travel along a path of trust to end with someone who actually cares about a particular policy being decided on.

Collective Authority

2004-11-16T21:24:00.000-08:00

Wiki is a radically democratic form of online authorship wherein every user has equal power to add to, modify, censor, vandalize or delete any article. Of course, since every user has access to the entire version history, this includes the power to restore the document's text to any previous state. Presumably, the only power differential lies in the varying proficiencies of authors in using all the features of Wiki software.

A former Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica offers some good criticism of the Wiki approach, at least when applied to encyclopedia authoring as in Wikipedia. These include questioning the basic tenets of Wiki:

1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.

2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

He goes on to highlight the specific case of a Wikipedia article on the life of Alexander Hamilton, remarking that (in his editorial opinion) the quality of the article had actually diminished over time rather than evolved. Looking at the document history, early versions naturally had only a few authors; therefore the writing was factually and stylistically consistent (more or less). In later versions, many more authors made changes which tended to fragment the once-cohesive article. Of course, since receiving much public scrutiny as a result of this critique you'll find the article now in a much-improved state. Evolution in action, as usual.

Still, despite this one biased opinion of Wikipedia, which is in general an excellent information resource, there are serious drawbacks of a free-reign system. Here are my top 3 suggested features missing from Wiki. Rather than being a critique of the radical-democratic way, I think that these 3 are in harmony with the Wiki Way and can only serve to strengthen it.

1. Moderated Reputation. Give everyone power to rank everyone else on writing and editing abilities in general, and subject matter in specific.

2. Meta-Moderated Reputation. Give everyone power to rank everyone else on ranking ability.

3. Separation of Data & Presentation. Synonymous with separating Form from Content, this suggestion explicitly acknowledges the two-fold role of a Wiki:

facilitating a group thought and group writing process for identifying useful and relevant information on given topic; and
presenting the results of that labor as a human-readable document.

Currently there is a discussion page for every Wiki page which inadequately addresses this issue. Rather than being simply another group-edited document, this discussion page should be fully blown groupware for brainstorming, decision-making, and prioritizing edits/additions. A simple priority queue of discussion threads would suffice. My feeling is that the group thought process which precedes group authoring is the invisible "soul" of a Wiki. By creating a concrete form for that indwelling soul, we may more easily "step down" its wisdom into words.

Suggestions 1 and 2 are two more powers to give every Wiki author an equal share of. Slashdot already implements these. Combined with suggestion 3, these rankings plug in two critical components of a cognitive-collective: self-awareness (e.g. of skillsets) and collective learning (via adaptive weighting of "authority" based on the rankings).

Here I am imagining a form of non-linear online conversation for brainstorming and collective thought which optimizes the work flow of participants. It is analogous to the non-linear conversation in our own subconscious mind which elevates some ideas, perceptions and decisions to the level of conscious thought while others remain below that threshold -- irrelevant, forgotten or evolving until fit for service.

Social Choice and the "Group Will"

2004-11-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

The decision-making procedure used by a group can be thought of as a process intended to reveal the "group will". The question addressed by social choice theorists, starting with Kenneth Arrow's work [1951], has been: what procedure can a group use to aggregate the individual preferences of its members such that the resultant "group preference" can legitimately be said to represent the group's will? Much of social choice theory calls into question the very existence of such a procedure. Arrow's famous Impossibility theorem states that the only procedures capable of producing unambiguous results are a dictatorship or one where the range of allowed individual preferences are restricted. Clearly neither of these alternatives satisfies our intuitive notion of a group will. For this reason, many researchers have argued that Arrow's original conditions are sufficient but not necessary conditions for a "will-revealing procedure". Many have suggested certain relaxations of these conditions and shown that practical and powerful procedures are possible. It has even been argued that for a group to truly be considered self-governing, it must violate Arrow's conditions.

"In this view of self-government, public decisions must be plausibly understood by members of the collectivity as reflecting, expressing, or revealing a will that is authentically their own, and there must be least be social consensus on procedures for determining or verifying the content of this will, such that one can in principle assess the extent to which public action fulfills or deviates from it."
- from "The Possibility of Self-Governance"

Related articles:

Social choice theory and distributed decision making

Social Choice Theory and Recommender Systems: Analysis of the Axiomatic Foundations of Collaborative Filtering

Lies, Damn Lies & Statistical Maps

2004-11-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

Geographic representations of opinion populations are hopelessly misleading. Here's an only slightly better map of election results.

Throughout all the media coverage on and after election night, this was really bugging me, that all the networks and papers use maps of the USA to represent opinion. These psychologically mislead you to believe that the vast majority of America is pro-Bush. A simple pie chart will do, thank you.

The larger issue is that we as a society have inadequate means for being self-reflective--for explicitly representing the variety of opinions that exist so that society as a whole may behold them--to answer the collective's as-yet-unanswerable question: "what is on my mind?"

Welcoming

2004-10-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

beginning, dawn, open door

Greetings and welcome to a new home for thoughts. An idea depository where we recognize that nobody knows everything and everybody knows something. Feel free to let those stray ideations loose from your brain to mingle in the mind mob. Who knows who they'll meet or what magic may come of it.

Daniel

An even more perfect union

2004-09-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

extreme democracy, self-governance

I went to the Quakers to see how wisdom manifests in the presence of a truly intentional, deliberative group of people facing each other across a room. My dream is that such co-created wisdom is possible in the virtual communities that are now blossoming into early childhood on the net. I have carried with me for a number of years now a vision that resembles quite closely the notion of extreme democracy.

The tools are now arriving for a truly self-organized, self-governing society. I have a feeling that we are recapitulating the spirit of idealism and citizen empowerment that moved the founders of the United States to form a more perfect union, with the best social technologies available at the time. They strove to create an adaptive, counter-balanced system that could evolve in response to a changing world. But working at a time when the fastest message traveled at the speed of a horse, even they could not foresee our postmodern society that travels near the speed of light across networks of economy, culture and computer that wrap our world in a global embrace.

Now in our era it is our turn to create an even more perfect union. Luckily, you and I have some specific ideas about how to help these far-fetched dreams become a reality.