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LionKimbroNamedIdeas

Main page: LionKimbro

I often have ideas I want to share, name, and refer to, but I don’t quite want to write a whole page for them.

I’m putting those ideas here, rather than on my NamePage, to keep the NamePage focused on introduction & messaging and so on.

This said: If anyone shows interest in any one of these ideas, please feel free to comment on it, and we can even pull it out into a full page if there’s sufficient interest.

See also: AnchoredObjectsAsMicroContribution (by SamRose)

EmergentStructure

“How do we efficiently & semi-automatically identify emergent patterns (in ThinkTalkAct) within the unpredictable evolutionary environments of individuals lives, and the lives of collectives?”

TemporalCategories? / ZeitGeist concentrations, TagConcentration?, SuperTag? / ZeitGeistTag? / HigherOrderTag?, DiscriminationRecord?s: “In, Out, Undecided.” Link to Exploring Personal Media: A Spatial Interface Supporting User-Defined Semantic Regions

“Image the simple case of product x versions 1, 2 and 3. Further deployed in locations a, b, c, which also have products y and z. permutations and combinations start to get overwhelming, and the decision to create a set identifier, a molecule, that is treated a s single tag becomes very enticing. then the need to programaticly explode the molecule to it’s constituent atomic elemental tags becomes a necessity to provide the ability to find something based on it’s atomic tags. And the need to identify molecule tags as differentiated from atom tags. Whew - I’ve become an info chemist!
“The long and short of it is that information classification is fluid, and the tools for making it happen are embryonic. – comment by Randy Roberts on Jon Udell’s blog, emphasis by LionKimbro

Whether we’re thinking or reading, we start to group ideas together, and see the particular items as part of larger structures.

What those larger structures add up to is something that is invisible to us, but it needn’t be that way; By slow accumulation, deeper structures can become evident, … …if we go through the labor of connecting words to words, assembling a pyramid of knowledge.

Again, MixedAutomationAndArtistry becomes important: Because if a “seen whole” (SeeingTheWhole) is just a concocting a diagram for me programmatically, I get confused, lost, and everything looks more or less the same to me.

What I really need is to literally develop pictures of the world with the assistance of the computer. And I need to do it quickly.

I’m going to be sharing these pictures with others, so the artistry cannot be neglected.

EpisodicStructure

That is, these are structural elements, suggesting “<h2>”, and that stretch forward for some period of time, but that aren’t necessarily enveloping.

See Randy Roberts comment on Jon Udell's blog“The issue I keep running into is related to the decision process for tagging. Imagine the first email that shows up that is the very first of a new idea to be tagged - generally i don’t “get it” then. So after the 6-10th email it hits me - this a tag worthy set, so I go back to search and tag. so the first issue is recognition.”

vs.

EnvelopingStructure

An enveloping structure is what we more typically see on the web, in papers, and so on. I say “typically,” and I think I mean more like, “99.99% of the time.”

If you see an <h2> on a page, it’s probably part of some organized hierarchy of carefully placed thoughts on the page. Everything under that heading will be about that heading.

The section has a clear beginning (where the <h2> was,) a clear middle, and a clear end, and then when you see the next <h2>, you know you’re in the next section, that will similarly be clearly defined.

This is because the page was organized or arranged as a whole. It was NOT flowing, as from a live conversation, with message markers stuck like stakes into the ground.

A question for us who are interested in social software in the context of conversations between people that have a more “live” feel to them, is how to identify and properly attribute content into the episodic structures.

An example from email is the Subject line. It’s considered rude to change the subject line after it’s been started, a social norm that has evolved over time to help preserve the episodic structure.

In wiki, we don’t have norms much like it, though, and it’s certainly not something we can intelligently search on, visualize, and so on.

I’m not aware of anything that I can think of, where you can say, “Okay, show me the dialog as a ream of text, and then show me the major markers in the episodic structure that emerged out.”

We may well require more namespaces for addressing parts of conversations, and more sophisticated visualization technology, in order to see the conversations as things, and the markers in the conversations as part of a roadmap.

SimulationEnvironment

.. and SimulationWeb? – An outliner. TheBrain. A video game. Word (the desktop editor.) FireFox. I’m calling these all “simulation environments,” rather than “interactive applications,” because I want to think of these simulations as background rather than foreground. We tend to think of these things as “full,” I want to think of them as “empty.” I want to view Word as an annotation space, rather than as a space where documents are written. I want to see these things as simulation environments that you can live in, rather than as tools that you use. From here, I want to imagine re-purposing applications into simulation environments first. Turn Doom into a collaborative editor. Hang web pages in mid-air. Load world configurations from the web. Hyperlink from simulation to simulation. The SemanticWeb is the data. The SimulationWeb? is where you see and use that data. Why can’t we hit “Save” in the web browser, again? (Connected with Radomir’s idea about a rogue-like / adventure game browser / editor / game.)

Connect with recent Alan Kay work, “Exploratorium,” rather than “Desktop,” and Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming, and work in DSL’s by Charles Simonyi. [1] [2]

SellingSupport

It’s easy to know how to sell software: You just put it on a disk, stick the disk in a plastic bag, stick a sticker on the bag, write a price on the sticker, and wallah– you’re selling software. But how do you sell software support? If we truly are interested in writing OpenSource software and selling support, this is probably something we should learn about.

AttractorWords

…aka…

TagsForTags

– originally a joke, I think this is actually useful: I often times make one tagged item have a bunch of extra “mnemonic” tags, and then when I find the real tag, click on that, and I get my nicely focused super-specific results. (see: TagsVsMnemonics) I'm not the first to think of this, but I think this is really worth mulling over. (And mulling is something that happens on this wiki. :) ) Note that even the joke-author recognizes the value in this. Tag with “tagsfortags” or “attractorwords.” Potential implications for interactive question-and-answer programs.

SemanticRegion

– work in categorization, implications for SVG and potential SVG regions, “SemanticSvg?,” … Exploring Personal Media: A Spatial Interface Supporting User-Defined Semantic Regions – consider crossed with DashboardDisplayNews?.

InlineWordDefinition

– something we’ve experimented a little with here on CW, though (miraculously) without even talking about it! Defining hyperlink points casually as new words are introduced in ordinary speech. (That is, you don’t have to make a new page, or even a new section– just link to the definition in the middle of the original speech act.) All of these hyperlinked terms in here should be link targets, for example, until pages are made, and these disassembled.

ArticulatingMentalExperience

I’d be interested in formal articulations of internal mental experience. I believe it’s called phenomenology, or something like that. The question is: “What types of experiences are there?” Can we establish code-points, a basic map “from the inside?” Has anybody done this? What points would be of interest? There are subjective feelings and sensations and experiences during memorization, for example. There is the feeling of noticing associated imagery. There is the feeling of developing an idea. There is the feeling of the familiar. But there’s so much more that could be articulated in the expression. It would be interesting to have full-on maps of internal experience.

MusicalLanguage

Who is making a map of feelings that key musical melodies produce? (Who is making a map of key musical melodies, period?) For example, the Pacabel Canon, recurs countlessly. It should have a codepoint. We should identify codepoints for all melodies. And then we should map them out, and discover what feelings they produce in us. And we should see, “Are there emotional feelings that are underrepresented in musical melodies?” It’s likely, I think, that musical melodies form a language, in which some things are arbitrary, and some things are not (like onomatopoeia.) But arbitrary things have lineages, as surely as “simha” grew to “singh” and “simha” grew to “simba,” all meaning lion, all having slightly different expressions. Could we then make a musical translator, that produced music for someone else that roughly corresponded to the emotions you yourself felt?

ZeitGeistField

The field of ideas, and questions & theories about how it might “work.” How ZeitGeist functions, from programming to fashion. How ideas “induce” in people across the field. (This is not metaphysical, though; Just “people talking with people, and coming to conclusions.”)

And how is this different from the NooSphere or the “collective unconscious” or Wikipedia:communication_theory ? Or do you want something less nebulous than communication of ideas in general, and more “how people communicate in 2007, including cell phones, movies, and the Internet, and how people could communicate better in 2008”?DavidCary

The NooSphere, the field of signing, can be divided into the ZeitGeistField, and the CollectiveUnconscious? (roughly.) The zeitgeist is comparable to the conscious attention of the GlobalBrain. The CollectiveUnconscious? can be compared to the unconscious attention of the GlobalBrain.

ConceptualFocalPoints

Points that are easily reached through independent thinking as “valuable” in themselves, somehow. Easily become SeedIdeas, and can define positions, stances, worldviews.

AggregatedVisualDisplay

This idea needs a better name, but– whatever.

We need war-room style maps, that are easily automatically appended to.

Make a visual diagram of some system that you imagine – let’s say, “BarCamps.” We can easily envision that as a map of the globe, right?

Then push information into that map: Whenever an event is happening live, now, put a bit white dot on the map, at that location. But if an event is in planning for a date in the future there, put a dot there that’s some shade of red, indicating how close the event is. If an event happened there, make it some shade of blue, showing how long ago it happened. (And have red trump blue, but not white, or something.)

Another example: Take some system. Make a TensionMap for it. Affix tags to the different points of the TensionMap, sort of like SemanticRegions. Now, when you tag websites, the names of the websites show up on the TensionMap. If it’s recent, it’s big, and up front, and dark. If it was older, it’s smaller, underneath, or faded.

You can look at the TensionMap, and see the news and blog tracking, for the whole damn field, all in one picture. You can see the whole story.

Aside: That one guy was saying, “How you frame the issue is more important than what you (or your opponents) say.” If you can get the opponent to speak your language, even if they disagree with you, and say so loudly, “you win.” Well, this way of mapping web content– putting news stories literally on a map that displays how you and others think about the issue, will make this observation (about language) really clear. You’ll be able to see how a language and a map are really the same thing, and when you hear people’s words, I think people will think of the associated maps that go with those words. And I think they will, clearly and quickly, jump to: “Oh, well, I just don’t agree with that map.” Or, “Well, that language is connected to a map that I disagree with.” And this won’t be liberal e133t-speak; It’ll be daily reality for all people.

What this would mean is that we’d see a much larger picture. Rather than reading individual blog entries, we would be “reading” 1,000 blogs at a time, and become automatically more strategic about what blogs we will be reading. Blog reading is somewhat meandering and rambling right now, driven by (A) a page, (B) the hyperlinks out from that page. This would be different; The blog reading would be more governed by (A) a map, (B) our choices after reading that map. How is reading the map relevantly different than reading the page? Because a map works at a much higher level. It could be argued that a page is just a map, but really: How often do individual pages meaningfully link to 500 pages? These maps regularly will. And before people step from the map to a page that is mapped, people will be confronted with the question, “Which thing shall I read about next?” Hyperlinking off from a web page is more of an impulsive thing – a series (serial) of branching offerings from the author to the reader. “So blah blah blah blah blah; And, oh, by the way, would you like to read about… Foo? And then blah blah blah blah blah; … And, oh, by the way, would you like to read about, … Bar? Which is related? And then blah blah blah blah blah…” A reader makes a series of decisions, intersperced by text– not necessarily the best for strategic reading. But maps are different, and they make you think about what you’re going to read next; Consider the front page of the [[DMOZ?]], for example.

I conceive that there will be many many maps for a given region, and further, that the maps themselves will be hyperlinked. There will be maps of maps. I saw this a long time ago; I outlined it in my book. Except there won’t be just one GSMOC, but countless GSMOCS. It’ll be glorious. And the maps will be alive. They’ll be constantly shifting energy patterns, news and ideas and expressions and videos and lights blinking on and off, humming and singing songs radiantly. The HiveMind will be beautiful, and full of heart and life.


Related to: SharedAwarenessSystem


Another idea, relatively easy to implement quickly:

Suddenly, Wikipedia editing would seem “cognitively manageable,” rather than “wow; it’s a chaotic spree of activity.”

It would be readily apparent: “What kinds of articles are getting worked on the most?”, and so on.

AbstractionIdentificationProcess

  1. Have an idea, read a web page, …
  2. write down mnemonics
  3. identify tags (as per TagsForTags) – through a dialog on entry (& dialog on retrieval) IntelligenceDatabase?
  4. attach tags to idea / web page – entry complete
  5. over time, identify major components of structure
  6. …and the sub-structures, neighbors, super-structure(s), whole environment
  7. draw into TensionMap
  8. continue – keeping in mind MetaPhysics: that the Map is Part of the Territory

SonicLanguage

What would a dictionary of the Sonic Language of today’s tribes look like? What is the semantic information carried by specific sounds and sequences of notes? What is shared in common by the objects indexed by Sonic Language? What is the expressive range of sonic language? To what degree is agreement with a song consonant with a person’s agreement with the semantic messages encoded in the sonic language?

My exploration of EvolutionarySpirituality has led to what I call the “Indexing Problem,” which shows up in the ChallengeOfEmotiveExpression – specifically, we have no words for many of the concepts we’d like to refer to, everything even partly in connection with them exist in “God language,” of heavens, hells, deities, spirits, and so on. There is no word to index the sense of 13.7 billion years, or the collective emotions and strivings of countless creatures since the beginning of humanity. And yet, music and video seem capable of indexing to these specific concepts, even though we have not (yet) created single words for their address.

It seems to me that far from being “just sounds,” (which John Cage actually wishes that they were,) music has a ton of semantic “talking” in it (which John Cage acknowledges, but wishes weren’t there!) What I normally have to explain to people, John Cage is sensitive to, and further, considers an irritant. ;) But I differ, and would like to see an actual exploration of sonic language.

The accumulation is simple: a song is attached to a political movement, a movie scene, a movie in general, and so on. Semantic meanings from within the movie transfer to and attach to the soundscape we live in. When we hear those sounds again (consider sounds from the Matrix,) it triggers the associated semantics (philosophy present in the movie, “The Matrix.”)

Lion, worth checking out along the lines of SonicLanguage: Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture

NobodyReviewsWebsites

Website reviews are on the order of, “Let’s dissect this web design,” or, “Let’s see which of these children’s games are “appropriate,” (a status which bears near transcendental legal value.)”

Yet there are many books and websites out there, sharing ideas for free, for which reviews are, … …sparse, scattered, and so on, because they are not books. Books get reviewed, but websites do not.

Purposes for reviews:

  • to help you decide, “Should I buy this?”
  • to help you decide, “Should I read this?”
  • to help you see what people think about ideas in a book (source)

Only one of these is obsolete!

I think there are a lot of reviews of websites – but I agree that reviews are scattered and hard to find. I hope that AboutUs ( http://AboutUs.com/ ) will make web site reviews easier to find. – DavidCary

BuildingBusinessRelationships WhoBenefitsWhoPays

Some of the primary questions are:

  • “How do we build a business relationship here? We want this thing. I want to build it, you want to use it, … …how do we establish our business relationship here?”
  • “Who benefits? Who pays?”

Some of our (SamRose’s!) major ideas are:

  • interact with people
  • ask the people who are (or want to be) involved, or engaged, “Okay? What’s our deal going to be? What are the ideas here, for how we’re going to make money here?”

see also: CyberneticEconomy

SocialSelfRealization

Perhaps the thing to do is not to convince the scientific community to see the things people are just doing & realizing, but rather, to develop a self-awareness in society of the mechanical / solid power of its own reasoning process.

In fact, looking at the development of science, from Des Cartes, describing the Cartesian method, and the awareness of science and shaping of science into its own power and ways, – perhaps that is the model for the social awakening.

There wasn’t a “Science” before there was “Science.” (Capital S.) Rather, it was people collecting data, trying out arguments for one another, coming up with wild theories, trying each others stuff out, all the proto-scientific stuff. After scientists realized, “Wait, we’re doing these practices,” and started to realize it, the institutionalizing began, and so on, and so forth, until, “Wow, that’s science, that’s the body of science.”

It may be that something similar will happen out of this new proto-scientific space.

To give some form to it, I’ll drop down some major inquiries, working in this space:

  • Pattern Movement (Helmut’s crowd)
  • PermaCulture people
  • Democracy Activists
  • Trans-Humanists
  • BDSM / sexuality study
  • Queery theory
  • Third wave feminists
  • Identity theorists
  • EvolutionarySpirituality
  • OpenSource
  • Brain Science
  • Questions Theory
  • Self-Help, Self-Improvement communities
  • Psychology, emerging study into the nature of Reason & Rationality

That is, there’s an enormous, mass reasoning process going on, and– these efforts are not contradicting one another. In fact, in many ways, these groups are directly dovetailing nicely into place with theorists in the other groups.

The space is not “scientific,” in the traditional way, and yet there is a rhyme and reason to it.

So I can perceive that there may be a basic structure at work here, (likely rooted in science, I think, even, going on my personal “spear-point” theory, which would require a different conversation,) and that when we figure out it’s shape, something like the self-recognition of scientists that, “We’re doing Science, and this is how, and this is what it is, and here’s what it’s showing us,” may well crystallize out.

Maybe we’ll call it “techno-socio-mental processing,” or something? (Some people fear to associate technology with humanity, but, as far as I can tell, we are all living technology; We are living instances of technology.)

Dunno, but the picture’s becoming clearer to me.

MappingTheIntangible

People usually believe that only material things can be mapped.

To a degree, this is not true- social diagrams are in public consciousness as well.

But outside of these pretty conventional and narrow fields, people don’t think to visualize.

Look at the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, as an example. It’s all anatomy, or geographic places, or cloud layers, and so on. Tangible, tangible, tangible.

I think (know, really) that there’s tremendous value to be had in the mapping of the intangible.

For example, “Make a map of Linear Algebra.”

“Make a map of Chemistry.”

It can be done.

For example, if you go to the bookstore, and pick up a copy of WhatIsDna by the TransnationalCollegeOfLex, you’ll see a map of the contents in the book, in addition to the traditional Table of Contents.

Presently, we all throw away the EmergentStructure that forms in our brains, as we learn something. Each new person, learning the material, learns a brand new structure. Of course, there are some canonical books in various fields, that lead to shared structures in the minds of the people using them. But that structure in thinking is either unrecognized (most often,) or simply ignored.

Structure in information architecture is arbitrary, and there’s “no one right way.” But just because something is arbitrary, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful to systematize it, and think about it. You could arrange your bedroom or house any given way, within some constraints, (it is an arbitrary decision,) and yet its immensely important to structure it somehow.

The objects of our mental attention are the same way.

Usually people just use tables of contents, but that’s weak; There are many sturdier ways of arranging information. It can be done in a map, it can be done in a 3D space, it can be done in a fantasy worlds. The MemoryPalace? of old was a very good idea, and it works. It works for a reason.

When we open up a Linear Algebra “textbook” in 2050, it should resemble the metaphysical diagrams attributed to the occult - fantasy artists have always been drawing the mindscape of knowledge in visual form. I don’t think that this is just for “style,” I think that there’s a very substantial reason why this was done: We actually do envision the information and ideas that we learn.

Language is like a sea, and structured knowledge is like a firm land. One can’t work very well without the other. Often times, I find my knowledge of programming is like so many islands floating in the sea of words. But I do believe we can make solid land masses, and that it would be very beneficial to do so.

Learning Visual Language should be like traveling across the Pokemon map, gaining badges, and seeing the connections between different things.

GutenbergWiki

A “Gutenberg wiki” is a wiki that is made to be printed in its entirety.

Some ideas:

  • more rigorously segregate DocumentMode from ThreadMode, so that you can print the thread-mode much smaller
  • reconsider mark-up, for paper typography
  • export to PDF, with ease of finding pages by name, and an index in the back from name to page number
  • include the URL associated with the page, on each page
  • blank pages at the end with underlines for titles, for making new pages?

The purpose is so that in MaterialWorld? gatherings, people can distribute the GutenbergWiki, collect initialed edits from the people present, (perhaps tearing off the corners of pages that are edited,) and then someone recommits the changes to the wiki.

see also: DistributedWiki, JspWiki:PrintWiki, Print JSPWiki Pages

people:

  • JohnAbbe - who sparked the idea in LionKimbro, by printing out pages from a wiki, for people to see and edit “in the flesh”
  • LionKimbro - moi
  • HansWobbe - interested, may have intern work on
  • Eric Priou (erixtekila at gmail.com) - see this post

This idea was inspired by LionKimbro seeing JohnAbbe print out wiki pages at the StoryFieldConference, and put them on the wall, along with a large mission statement page, that was attached to the wall, and editable to all, for later submission to the StoryFieldConferenceWiki.

While I generally dislike PDFs, this idea appeals to me precisely because the Portable Document Format is designed to make its content “portable”. Thinking about this, it may actually be a better alternative that HTML+CSS for producing a printable output. I think I’ll add investigating this a bit further to the toDo list for the next intern that comes available.

I think that I’ve seen some news about a fork of Wikipedia that was supposed to produce a printed encyclopedia – I can’t find the name now.

I’ve been recently making some printed materials from web pages at my work, and I have noticed one thing that should definitely be included as “new markup” in such a wiki: the non-breaking space. The browsers completely ignore any rules for line breaking, and you need the ` ` and `­` (if it worked in any browser, that is) to get acceptably formatted text. I can see you can use ` ` here and it will be passed, but the raw text with it looks and reads horrible.

O’Reilly is working on a book that will be written on a wiki: http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/WikiContent:Community_Portal

“We thought that it would be a great idea to write a book about community using a wiki to allow the community to edit and write the book with us. It is in this spirit that we invite you to participate and help us write the Art of Community AS a community. If this experiment is successful, we hope to see it released in print form by O’Reilly Media.”

RadomirDopieralski, are you thinking of “Wikibooks” ( http://wikibooks.org/ ) ?

see also: [2007-08-03], Wikitravel Press


CrossCuttingEdits

Wiki is really bad at handling cross-cutting edits. For example, taking the stack of pages and sorting them into categories, – very hard to do.

It’d be neat to have some way of making edits that cut across pages.

TheatreOfTheMediums

Make a video of what it’s like to use different mediums on the InterNet, using only human actors, a camera, a chair, and stand-up paper sheets. So that people know WhatCommunicationSoftwareToUse.

LowPower “Low Power” is a metaphor that LionKimbro is picking up on, and exploring here.

Alignments:

see: 2007-08-29

Guess who created Wikipedia:Low-power ? Alas, I was fixated on literal power (in watts) in electronic devices. This seems to be something much more general.


MergingQuestion

When two wiki find they work towards the same (or very similar) purpose, when two FreeSoftware projects find they have the same (or very similar) purpose, there is an interesting question of, “Shall we merge? And, if so, how?”

This question gives rise to / comes with a number of other questions.

The study of that question is an interesting one.

There are very good reasons for projects to merge, there are very good reasons for projects not to merge. There are rarely very good reasons for the projects to connect somehow, in my experience.

Companies, religious organizations, and political parties also occasionally merge. Also, even when they are so similar that outsiders have difficulty telling them apart, sometimes they refuse to merge. I suspect that someone who knows more about Business Administration could tell us a few things about that.

Sometimes people get all excited about starting some open-source project. They’re willing to put in weeks worth of effort to make it happen. They even go out of their way to try to recruit others to work on the project to share the load. But when they can’t seem to drum up any interest, they think the project is too big for one person and give up. Or when they find out some other person or group not only is interested but has already started an open-source project to do basically the same thing – it mystifies me that sometimes those people, because they can’t be the “founder” of the project, totally give up on it. I would hope those people would get even more excited – glad that they found others that agree that this is a worthwhile project, glad they can skip over some of the initial preparation and dead-ends and jump right into the meat of the project, and glad that they have found others to share the load.

I agree; I also partly understand: I can’t see how to make MailMan? into a MailingListReplacement? – it’s so established, so complex, that I don’t think I could easily figure out what to do.

It looks far easier to me, to start with one of these little dinky scripts, start adding features, and then solve all the bugs over again, over millions of years.

The gestation path is the thing. I’m looking at (Mailman-Developers) Re: Hacking Mailman to Work with Central Authentication, and (Mailman-Developers) Editing messages held for moderation, and thinking, “Yeah; It’s really hard to manipulate a complex piece of software.”

NeighborhoodIndexing

Make a personal search engine seeded by blogs and the data that they point to. Wiki of course, as well.

The easiest way to do it is to supply a list of seed web pages, to spider, and then get going.

When you show search results, organize them by the seed they came from, and by date / currentness.

The idea behind this is that I intuit that my friends’ blogs and wiki are giving me better information than Google, and so, naturally, I should give special priority in my searches to their worlds.

Someone must have done this by now, right? I don’t keep up with the world of search. But I know that a bajillion people are thinking about it. Surely, someone must have done this? If only I could find them.

I’ve been told that Wikipedia:Nutch lets you pick your own seeds. I don’t know if it tells you which seed a particular result came from, but since Nutch is GPL, it should (in theory) be “a simple matter of programming” :-/.

I’ve also been hearing about “personalized search”, which sounds like it is vaguely similar to what you are trying to do. “Eurekster assumes “friends don’t spam friends,” and it’s a pretty safe assumption.” – Danny Sullivan 2005

There’s already a book about personalizing Wikipedia:web_crawler software.

Perhaps you could post your question on the Nutch wiki ?

In my, now suspended, LinkMine? project (a la del.icio.us), I added the functionality to source all pages in 1 or 2 links distance from a given url - this was enough to link all pages linked to from a wiki ( that has an AllPages page ).

See Also

HiveSpeech

When people write papers, they often make allusions to famous saying by Einstein, or things said in Shakespeare, and so on. This serves to frame the paper, and point to a higher purpose or principle.

When communities write, they can say, “This is CollectiveSpeech.”

Another thing we’re doing here on CommunityWiki, borrowed from other communities (forget which ones,) is to include original quotations from our initial dialogs, and work them into the rework. Perhaps we should call this practice, CommunityQuoting?. (See the PageMaintainerSeries for examples, in particular: PageMaintainer quotes SamRose, PageMaintainerAuthority quotes SamRose, BayleShanks, PageMaintainerAnalysis quotes SamRose, AlexSchroeder, and KeithHopper.)

HiveSpeech would be the speech of the Internet. I am envisioning something that quotes not just famous people, and not just community members, but people from all over the Internet, who are working on some issue, or have something relevant to say.

I see this in my (LionKimbro) mind as contributing to InterCommunityCooperation, and the development of the HiveMind. It is not uncommon for some small poster on some famous person’s blog to contribute a critical insight. Is this not worthy of quoting and connecting?

JaronLanier was afraid of DigitalMaoism, citing WikiPedia’s combining of voices into a single conglomerate. This is quite different, though, because individual voices are named. Actually, in the case of CollectiveSpeech, it would be an organization that is referenced, but the organization tracks back to the individuals and their decision making process.

The effect of this is to see quotes from all sorts of people in the exposition of an idea.

AplPy

Lion’s crazy way of writing PythonLanguage code in AgglutinativeLanguage? style.

Pronounced “Apple Pie.” A reference to the Wiki:AplLanguage.

CoolIsKnowledge

I was just reading WikiPedia:Subculture. It says that marketers seek “cool.” Subcultures generate “cool,” in order to segregate themselves from the mainstream. “Cool” is thus something like peacock feathers- utterly superfluous, except to attract mates.

I have a different theory.

I think that cool is often times knowledge.

Let’s consider the FreeSoftware subculture, for a moment. They make new software. Some of it is “cool.” Why is it cool? Did they just re-arrange the icons, per-chance? Ruffle up some feathers?

No; New software is “cool” because it’s better made, or it holds promise of a better way, or it has some new features, or something like that. It is cool, because it is a better assembly. It was made because we value better software. We like that.

But what about other subcultures?

I think that there is semantic content to art products (“art persuades without argument,” and “art communicates the universal through the particular,”) and that people in different life situations are seeking to understand and develop through those life situations.

I think that when something really epochal happens, when some major understanding or change happens, that it is told in art that is then venerated and holds weight. It makes an impact. It makes an impact because of what the change signified within the cultural narrative. This then is seen as “cool,” by people who don’t necessarily understand it, but may sense it’s significance in a way that can’t be articulated (“art persuades without argument.”

Or it may be a better telling that really captures the story that people carry, or a telling refit to a new circumstance that the people find themselves in. It’s all “cool,” but not because it’s “just peacock feathers.”

I think that the view that everything is just peacock feathers is just SuperFreudianism, the insistance that everything must be just inhumanity and senseless ranking.

BeyondTransparency

WikiPedia and Citizendium aren’t just transparent. They’re full-on OpenCommunity.

Perhaps what we’re looking for is “responsive” and “connected,” as well? Responsive to what?

What would it mean for an organ or a body to run not just transparently, not just openly, but in a responsive and connected way?

Searching for the phrase, I found: The Global Centre for ICT in Parliament - Beyond Transparency - New Standards for Legislative Information Systems. It points again for me: PoliticalSoftware.

RealCommunity

Seattle is hardly anything like a “community.” Why then is it called such, in the local papers? “The Seattle community decided…” it reads. I don’t think that language should be applied in the political sphere of the EcosystemOfNetworks. The only respect that Seattle is like a community, is that there are people in it.

I read in our local rag, TheStranger, an article about how domestic violence perps (we’re talking minor infringments here) who were called in by 911, were being separated by the government for years, over the wishes of both woman and man. The prosecution kept speaking about how “the community” looks at such cases. But we’re not talking about a community. We’re talking about paid prosecutors, defendants, and a few other court assigned people. This is not “a community,” nor is it “the community of Seattle,” which probably doesn’t exist.

In a real community, people who knew the couple, had known them for years, and were part of the rule making bodies and so on, would hear about the situation, talk about it, and then decide what to do. Most likely, if it were just “he slapped me,” they would talk about it, tell him (their friend,) “you can’t be doing this,” issue some kind of short-term separation (if the situation warranted it,) make sure that their finances will work out, and take all the various things into consideration. If she’s due to have a baby shortly, they can say, “Oh, your 2 week separation won’t be in effect, when your wife is in labor, and your baby arrives. We look forward to your happy future together.”

There is space for law to give way to dialog and deliberation. I see this as a big part of the DemocracyOfGroups: Actually enabling societies to self-police, make their own rules, and so on.

People do not belong to communities in our present lives here, at least in Seattle. Perhaps the courts can approximate: “Are there families, and family friends here, who know and love both of you?” They can have those family members and friends swear: “I know and love both of these people.” Then they can have them deliberate, and come upon an answer, within some set of tools that the government makes available. Is there a church that these people belong to? Then let the church decide that question, at their next congregation, within the tools and parameters made available.

It may be that the question of “Where do we collect powers?” may be a question that it actually is important for people in general to think about, beyond: “There are three branches of government.” Right now, we in the US see ourselves federally, the ImaginedCommunity of the USA. States take up very little space in our minds, – mostly our minds are attentive to the federal government. This is something I’d like to understand better, and start to disassemble, for reassembly into a different shape.

Another spin on this: In Santa Cruz, someone started a tradition called “1st night.” It is the most amazing new years festival I have ever seen in my life.

Here in Seattle, new years is terribly boring: There are just fireworks. It saddens me that this excites my family.

When I was in 1st night, there was an amazingly creative display from the public. It was like wiki. People wore costumes, people played music. There were instruments everywhere, you just pick one up, and start playing with others. People would drum in the streets for hours. There was a parade, you could just step in and join. There was a giant star made of wishes; You wrote a wish on some pieces of paper they had, and put it on the stars. Tons of bands. I think you had to sign up a couple of weeks in advance, if you wanted to play something. It was beautiful, and it worked. I ran into current friends and old friends at first night, regularly. Amidst the 1,000s of people, I ran into old friends. Amazing. People talking everywhere, people dancing, out in the middle of the street, and on the sidewalk, and on the displays, and so on. This points more in the direction of real community.

How tragic, that in Seattle, which should have something 1,000x more awesome, just has fireworks.

I am convinced that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that the quest for perfect security is the enemy of the public health.

Apologies for the rant; I’m undergoing something of a personal transformation at the moment. I’ve held these thoughts for a while now, but they’re now clicking with several other ideas in interesting ways for me immediately. I’m starting to see a coherent picture of action and implementation.

TextGraveyard

I often times wish I had a public graveyard for the gigantic swaths of text that I regularly throw out of my writing.

DoctrineOfSecrets

There’s an idea floating about, that secrets are at the heart of our lives.

So for example, I’m a programmer. I am paid, because I know how to program, and other people do not. That’s my “secret,” according to the doctrine. If I could somehow write something that could teach everyone how to be a programmer, (say, overnight,) and that method of teaching were not secret, I lose, because now I don’t have a secret.

In some respects this makes a lot of sense, especially given our capitalist economy.

In another sense, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Imagine the pilgrims, coming in on the Mayfair, or whatever.

People need houses, food, and so on.

These aren’t secrets. We could abstract it to “information,” but where does that get us?

There are needs, and the people work to meet those needs.

If there’s only one carptenter, he’s going to teach others in the town how to do the carpentry, so that everyone can get their houses or barns or whatever built, before the first storm comes.

The "netocrats?" Please.

If there’s a bunch of programming work to do, there’s a bunch of programming work to do.

This may be seen connected to the AlexandrianMethod / MusterTheorie / “pattern theory”. The theory is about the creative process in general. Each pattern contains a description of how to solve a problem, a secret. It may be a secret of “how to create” but also of “what’s behind something”. Normal science talks about facts and causal relations and avoids to put this together to working modules, which would weaken the position of the experts. To collect and ellaborate patterns means to enable people. This is in the interest of a democratic society.

Yes, I see the connection, and agree.

SemiFormalConversation

Casual conversation has a broader range than “small talk” (weather,) often involving particulars of the local environment (gossip) or personal doings (“going to the store today,”) but generally avoids matters of the heart that may be disagreed with.

Formal conversation is generally directed to a specific purpose, and intentionally limits going outside of particular boundaries. “But that is not what we’re talking about; We’re focusing on X.

I find that I do not generally enjoy casual conversation or small talk or formal conversation.

What I enjoy, I’d call “SemiFormalConversation.”

This is about matters of mutual interest, matters of the heart, may involve construction, follow-up, further presentation, deliberation, confrontation, difference, integration, and so on. It has a degree of work to it. But it is also open ended, flexible, voluntary.

ZeitGeist

A page I’ve intended to write for ages, but have never had the time. I still don’t have the time. But I can put in a brief mention here, about the shape of what I’d write.

  • “Zeitgeist” is German for “the spirit of the times.”
  • Where does the “spirit of the times” come from? Global events, the collective background processing (calculating) of bajillions of people, historic events, new technologies, and so on.
  • By the PowerLaw visible in the political sphere of the EcologyOfNetworks?, attention focuses on very large, very specific problems, in a very distributed way. People put 2 + 2 (+2 and +2 and +2…) together on massive scales, and several people realize the answer (or alternative answers,) find the key locuses of thought, sometimes nearly simultaneously, in many different places.
  • People who were “almost there” but didn’t quite have all the pieces quickly recognize the whole solution, the whole frame, the whole perspective, and then start articulating it for still others.
  • In this way, the emergent answers to the questions develops. No single individual can really be credited with the whole answer; It is the working of the whole organism. The power law just causes us to see individuals.
  • Looking through the historical records, we can always track key lines and individuals and movements in thought. We can’t see forwards what will result.
  • History is the product of the various forces, (Dialectic Hegelism,) but it is also creative as well. It is wrong to say everything is determined, but it is also wrong to say “just anything can happen.” The best description I have found so far, is Bill Joy’s, who said that at any given (say) decade, there are certain opportunities that can be taken, at any point. Whether these opportunities are taken or not shapes the future.
    • (I saw this in a video interview with Bill Joy, that I can seek out, if anybody is interested.)
    • As an example: Wikipedia was an opportunity. It could have been held off, until 2005, rather than 5 (?) years prior. Perhaps we could have written the SvgWiki? in the last 3-5 years, as well. Some opportunities are taken, others are not.
    • Timing matters.

FearOfGroups

There is a prevailing attitude in individualistic America (the only country I believe I can speak for) that is anti-group.

  • anti-group
  • “Don’t be a joiner.” – my dad told me, and after googling, I see the phrase other places as well.

Fear of mobs, and just groups in general, is pretty much everywhere. Proposing groups as solutions to problems gets almost (but not quite) the same sort of reaction, as proposing communism (which is legitimately denied, to my eyes.)

I don’t think “groups” deserves that treatment, and if we’re going to solve any of the problems of reductionism at the society-level, we’re going to have to overcome our fear of groups.

Much of the fear is justified, of course, and that needs to be addressed. Assuming that is done, what can we say?

After thinking about it for a while, I came up with the following:

  • Fear of Groups is really about…
    • … fear of collosal error, …
    • …which is basically: fear of error.
    • That is, “fear of power,” “fear of daemons.”

The definition of “daemon” that I understand and mean, is in the Greek sense, of, “Something capable of great good, or great evil.”

When people organize into a group, they become powerful. Thus, they become a daemon, capable of great good, or great evil.

What I think is happening here, is that people are fearing that, saying, “We can’t do anything right, especially as a group,” and then going: “Ergo, it’s best for us all to be individuals.”

But…

Here is the challenge: That is a group decision. We have, “hook line and sinker,” taken in this conclusion, as a mob. There’s very little thinking involved: This is something that we just gobble up when we’re young, and accept: “Don’t make groups. Don’t be part of something. Live only for yourself. When we do that, everything will just balance out for us. When we’re all busy trying to take advantage of each other, it’ll all cancel out, and nobody will be taken advantage of.

But just because we’ve made this group decision, it doesn’t mean that it was the right one, or that we’ve saved ourselves from the daemon fact, the fact of great power in groups. We’ve just turned into a world where, by God, people are taking advantage of one another, and everyone’s suffering for it.

I’m not sure we’ve really solved anything.

I think that the future lies in discarding the doctrine of: “Don’t join groups. Don’t give anything of yourself to a group, a greater good.”

I think we need to re-access groups. We need to start asking, very specifically, “What groups are good? What groups are bad? What should we do, as a group? How do we understand groups? How do we work with them? How do we dissolve them, and how do we form them?” The essential thing I have here isn’t these particular questions (just pulled off the top of my head,) the essential thing here is the attitude of asking these questions, rather than just saying: “Don’t be a joiner. Don’t join groups. Fear groups larger than, say, 20. Have as few meetings as possible, for as brief as possible, as disconnected and as delegated as possible.”

Perhaps this should be: ReimaginingGroups?, or something. See also: DemocracyOfGroups

LayeredGovernment

I have this vision of the future government being a dual-layered thing.

We have the nation states as they exist right now, as a basic layer, providing basic rights to people and so on.

Then I am envisioning that the EarthCommunity? will exist as a layer on top of that, being the CivilSociety. So for example, just about all OpenSource projects are part of that second layer.

It is analogous to the layerings of the brain. We have the reptile brain, the mammal brain, and then the neocortex.

Similarly, the GlobalBrain would have the governmental bodies, corporations, and the CivilSociety, which functions as the neocortex. Through efforts such as a DemocracyOfGroups, visualization technologies, SoftTechnology such as governance, PoliticalSoftware, and such – we can start forming the interlinkages, like the interlinkages between OpenSource software and various corporations and governments and so on. What really requires activation is the CivilSociety, getting BeyondTransparencyWorkingOpenly.

MetaphysicsOfOntology

Multiple ontologies are available for any mess.

SeeingTheWhole is multiplicity– there are multiple wholes.

Wholes exhibit personalities of the beholders, and there are consequences of seeing one whole vs. another; One narrative vs. another, whether cultural or individual.

Wholes reflect the MetaPhysics that order them, and the choice of MetaPhysics influences the whole.

MetaPhysics then has a rich and practical future. Maps that were once considered mystical metaphysics, will be everyday practical reality, in our UserInterface. Just look at “The Sims,” for a miniature version of it.

See also: MessMaps

IntrospectingToSociety

  • finding the divine “within” and how the individual is a product of the society
  • OpenSpaceTechnologyPeggyHolman: it works, because we recognize the socially relevant through discussing the personal – assumption: we are a hologram of society
  • post-symbolic communication, and not entirely as I understand JaronLanier’s example with VR – Is there more than one consciousness? NooSphere through direct brain connect, “The Soul of the Planet”

OddmuseReallyIsTheBest

People keep asking me which wiki I recommend, and I keep saying, “OddMuse.”

“Oddmuse, Oddmuse, Oddmuse. If you are using wiki to converse, to build theory, to learn about the world with others, your choice is very simple: It’s between Oddmuse, Oddmuse, and Oddmuse.”

They ask why. Then I have to come up with the bullet points again, from scratch, and that can take some time.

To help me get it straight, here is my reasoning.

First, I say, “I like it for what it does not have!”

Then I say, “Here’s what’s cool:”

  • easy setup (including NO setup, by OddWiki)
  • near perfect multi-faceted evolved federated spam control
  • camelcase
  • named sections within pages
  • talk portraits
  • sidebar
  • editable summaries
  • community editable css
  • date pages
  • svelt layout
  • documentation & support

This said: I think MeatballWiki:RecentChanges has surpassed OddMuse’s – collecting all participants for the day together, including the # of changes, removing history, … It seems to all have worked well.

– 2007-12-06

AntiCommunication

AntiCommunicate

This is an idea that is not original to me.

The idea is that we should not strive to communicate; Rather, we should embrace what HerbertBrun? (I believe it was him) called anti-communication.

“(Anti-communication is…) maintained through messages requiring and permitting not yet available encoding and decoding systems or mechanisms.”
“Insistence on communication ultimately leads to social and physical violence. Anticommunication ultimately leads to insistence on composition and peace.”
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Asc/ANTICOMMUNI.html

Communication is intrinsicly regulatory, working entirely within established orders of things. Anti-communication is creative, and is generative within misunderstanding.

Oftentimes, we can say what we mean far better by anticommunicating, rather than by communicating.

The emphasis on clear communications is then entirely misplaced. Clarity is great, but can you inspire?

If you liked that one, here’s another Herbert Brun-ism, that I’ve come to deeply appreciate: “War is a defence against conflict.” That’s just how Herbert Brun talks.

“anti-communication” does not make any sense to me.

The only way I can even begin to make it sort of make sense to me is to paraphrase as “Certain individuals have core beliefs and personalities that are diametrically opposed to the core beliefs and personalities of certain other individuals. Forcing people to communicate (rather than allowing one or both to walk away), even when there is such a personality conflict, inevitably leads to violence.” ("connectedness leads to conflict").

Or perhaps a better paraphrase would be “Insistence on certain very restricted forms of communication – restricted to only Politically Correct statements, and further limited to statements that never criticize anyone, or cause anyone to lose face, or that might potentially cause someone to lose self-esteem, or might offend someone – ultimately leads to a backlash.” (“Don’t shoot the messenger”) ( “Being told that bad news or blunt advice isn’t welcome infuriates me.”[3]) (“Being polite wastes time” – "Crocker's rules")

Or is there something else I’m missing here?

I think you’re looking at communication like an engineer: “Was the signal intended the signal received?”

This is more about interpretation and the human domain, though.

The common language is regulatory, “Do this; Don’t do that; You owe this,” and so on. The communications are present to keep the system in a homeostasis.

Where there is something new, an inspiration, it will not be understood by regulatory language. It will provoke conflict and disrupt the homeostasis. New “decoders” and “encoders” for the words will be needed, to account for the new thing.

In the land of engineering, we see the birth of video codecs, for example.

DoWeNeedToReadSources

The question is, “Do we need to read source materials?”

That is: “If a movie comes out, and you’ve read plot synopses, analyses, commentaries, reviews, from myriad angles and locations, do you need to actually see it?

And if the answer is, “No,” then what exactly has just happened? And by that I mean, “What exactly has just happened?”, from the standpoint of identifying the occurance of an event within the social organism?

It’s a question for our InterNet era.

It is related to another question, “WhatDoesItMeanToRead??”, … which I will get into later.

Traditionally speaking, it is taboo or rude or improper or rough or crude to talk about something you haven’t seen. It’s an academic sin, akin to judging a book by it’s cover, or to hopping on a bandwagon, blindly accepting hearsay. It’s not quite in the domain of plagiarism, but it’s considered (in the public eye) as going in that direction.

And yet, I increasingly find, for better or for worse, that I feel that I do not need to read or reference source materials, in order to come to feeling that I have legitimate conclusions about said source materials, and to base further claims on top of those conclusions (consider: ArgumentPyramid.)

I have a suspicion that I am not unique, and I also have a suspicion that this is actually not illegitimate. That by whatever scoring or criteria system or what have you, that this is actually perfectly fine behavior, if we really look at what’s happening.

What I am saying is that I believe that a person does not need to read or watch source materials, in order to form good informed conclusions about them. It is sufficient in a great many cases to just listen to 100 people’s recounts, thoughts, conclusions, and so on, and then form a perspective from there.

I would compare the significance of this, to the significance of the scientific organism, which can go out, do a ton of experiments, get a ton of confirmations, and you don’t need to do a single thing, except to read the established perspectives of scientists who have done these things for themselves, and judge from there.

This is some sort of social delegation process, and it’s actually okay.

It was cautioned against in TheMachineStops? [4]. Part of the caution is, “If people accept abstraction intermediaries, than people will cease to connect with the real.” E.M. Forster envisions people going into the land of air castles, and never coming back. However, that does not seem to be the case with science. If anything, we’ve found that the abstraction layers have vastly increased perceptive powers. And I believe that what is happening is – I believe I have (we have) vastly greater perceptive powers over phenomenon occuring within the social organism, by way of intermediating and relying on the outputs of others.

Hah!

Stick that in your pipe, and smoke it!

“But wait, that makes no sense– the point of a movie is to enjoy it. If you’re just listening to people’s thoughts about it, then you’re not living the enjoyment. Nobody can enjoy it for you.” Well, that may the case for some people (and I suspect the number is far lower than most people would think,) but it is my firm understanding, that movies and books and other mass presentations (see also: DocumentsVsMessages), mass documents, are more like church experiences than entertainment nerve stimulators, and it is the religious experience of the MultiSensoryMessage?s that makes up the enjoyment of the document. People are essentially authentically religious (see: ThinkingGoo,) and derive great joy from attending their church, whether it be in the form of a chapel, a ShinTo? shrine, BurningMan, a corporate office, or a nudie bar.

Feeling into a movie for most people is a surface level event: They feel entertained. If you sensitize yourself, if you ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way?”, or, “Why does this entertain me?”, and so on, and ask the question about others as well (“Why do they feel that way?” “Why does that entertain them?”), and delve deeper than face-value SuperFreudianism answers (“Well, they’re just stupid,”) then you can start to get another level of depth into understanding movies and our responses to them.

It’s like video game players: They know the genres more sharply than non-video players. And then there are people who really get into it, and identify the sub-genres. And then they can start to identify even deeper patterns and natures, to really pick out and identify, “What is going on here?” It is like the differences in the level of understanding, between people who believe “I just like to talk,” and people who have worked with and analyzed conversational scripts, decision trees, approaches, and see communication as something of a martial art. They can say, “You consistently adopt pattern 3-7-5B.” People don’t like to feel like robots, (and they are not,) but that doesn’t mean that the analyst is wrong.

So, going back – where was I –

Oh, right: So if your enjoyment out of movies is such that it has to do with ideas, and root patterns, and so on, – then you can dramatically increase your scope of perception by reading the analyses, synopses, and so on, of trusted / “credentialed” others – people who you know have insight to some social perception. For example: if you read the blog of a Catholic priest who has interpretive powers, and you know the kinds of things he looks for, then you can trust him to give you “a Catholic perspective” on a movie, and know that you’re going to get some pretty interesting insights on it.

Sometimes, you can get a better vision of the movie, than by just going to see it! Even though you may have good interpretive powers, will you see everything? Far better to get 100 angles on the movie from multiple dimensions.

(That said: I have yet to see a good analysis of, say, Enchanted. I saw a lot more in it, than I ever saw reviewed.)

I envision that one day, if the copyright questions can be sorted out sufficiently, or with some interesting annotation system – we will be able to get blow-by-blow “here is what this beat does” anotations to go alongside a movie. When I watched Enchanted, I felt like I was reading an essay. I can imagine a clear and perfect argument saying, “This is why this is a good movie at this time,” in almost brutally functional terms: This is a good movie because (A), (B), (C), (D), (E). The shape of the MovieEssay? is such: X, Y, Z, ….”

“Why would people do this?” Because people are religious, and as we approach Trans-Human reality (should we survive to the limit-case,) values and expressions and other higher-maslow order things will become more important than lower-order things (food, survival, lazing, …)

At any rate, … much too late to be writing. (I always thought that what sensei had to say was far more interesting at midnight, than at 2 PM.)

So here is my weirdo SpeakingEdge explanation of why we don’t need to actually read books or watch movies.

DavidCary, this obviously doesn’t apply to the Bible, if you’re a christian. In that case, you need to both read the Bible, and read what all the stars have had to say about it.

Or: If someone’s being tried for murder, and you’re on the jury, it’s really important that you actually listen to the person speaking and so on.

But whatever. Finding the border line will be left as an exercise for the reader; I just want to get the main point out there: That we don’t necessarily have to read source materials, to appropriately sense the object. It can be better not to.

Addendum: There may be some implications for copyright and book-writing and DarkTheory here.

If “word gets out” that you don’t actually have to read a book, in order to have perceived the ideas within, then books may get shorter, ideas may be (?) guarded more closely, or we may move towards the HiveMind and collectivist notions around idea construction and sharing. Either that, or be in the bizarre (and I’d wonder: untenable?) position of holding society-changing ideas, … …privately?

To prime the imagination: “Imagine if feminist realizations were held as a private treasure?

Let’s assume for a moment that feminism has basically been a force for good, (putting aside whether we actually believe that or not,) – things such as “votes for women” and “women should be able to do intellectual work” and so on. Now we generally assume, “When people were agitating for women’s rights and so on, who were they doing it for?” For example, maybe “for women the world over,” or, “for humanity,” and such.

But what if they weren’t? What if in a parallel universe, they were doing it for the benefit of their tribe, and the insights of sociologists and such, were treated as treasures for their own society only? Like, “If you told a woman in another country that they could agitate to vote, we’d have to kill you?” Treating compiled statistics about women and votes and jobs and labor and so on, as if they were high-tech secrets?

That’s the sort of bizarre territory we’d have to explore, if DarkTheory reacts against “the diminishing need to read source materials,” just talked about.

I don’t give it much credit, but I honestly don’t know what surprises we’d have to account for as living organisms approach TransHuman? space, ideally / hopefully the OmegaPoint?.

Reference point, should this ever become an article here:

…may also want to include the HyperHistory.

Everything that rises must, of course, converge. Good ol’ TeilhardDeChardin. MysticalRealism.

MixedAutomationAndArtistry

That is, “Show me all the data you collect automatically, and then let me tweak how you show it to me, and add my own flourishes, text, and structures.”

Most of our tools right now are either focused on data entry (“I have something in my head, and I’m going to show it to you” – ex: Word, Photoshop, Illustrator,) or focused on data visualization (“Show me, computer, what you know.”)

I’d really like to say, “Show me, computer, all my email, and threads, and mailing lists,” for instance, and then say, “Okay, of these email threads, this is the important one, make it big, these are all unimportant, make them tiny, or even invisible. Track them through time, like this. That particular email was crucially important to me, make it really big.”

The zeitgeist right now appears to be “ZeroUserInterface?,” which is to say, “I shouldn’t have to do anything. Let the computer figure it out, and present it to me.” There are good reasons for this being the zeitgeist, but it makes my idea unpopular.

I want to communicate with other people, and see things in proportion to other things; All of this requires artistry and expressive power.

Another way of saying it:

“I’d like some help from the computer, in building my LifeMap?.”

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