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2013-01-13

2013-01-07

  • 22:03 UTC I just saw somebody on Google+ say that in her exp...
    Alex Schröder 6:00am Jan 8
    I just saw somebody on Google+ say that in her experience, males are leaving LiveJournal. Any supporting observations?

    Alex Schröder 6:03am Jan 8
    "Over the past few years, there has been a mass exodus of all males on LJ. I still use it daily, and it's still my favorite social site. I think they have the community thing DOWN. But I no longer have any male friends, there. I noticed one day when I went to make a "girls only" friends group and realized that there was no one to exclude. It's a strange trend."

2013-01-03

2012-12-29

  • 19:39 UTC OK. So, inspired by Alex Alex Schröder's recent p...
    Phil Jones 12:51am Dec 27
    OK. So, inspired by Alex Alex Schröder's recent post, I'm going to DO something.

    This is a great community. But it's getting sucked into Facebook basically because FB are a decent feed aggregator. I think that's crazy. And I've been playing a bit with PlanetPlanet this year. So I've decided I'm going to set up a planet page just for the blogs of CommunityWiki people.

    Here it is : http://sunfeedsuperstreams.com/planets/communitywiki/

    So far, I've got Alex's blog, the CommunityWiki feed and Lion Kimbro's Posterous (which seems a bit static).

    What feeds should I be adding? To get a single place to see what CW people are writing about online? Bill Seitz, Seb Paquet, Mattis Manzel and the rest of you CW people I don't know so well. Give me some links! (Don't be shy about nominating your own feeds, whichever you feel are part of what you're saying to this community.)

    Sam Rose 1:38am Dec 27
    I played with SFW a bit a few months ago. Re-igniting it on my dev machine now.

    What is the general appeal among you all with SFW? What do you find it useful for?

    Sam Rose 2:04am Dec 27
    Would be cool to see recent changes in new wiki engines use something like either Ostatus, or AMQP, or something that can support lots of service traffic. RSS is nice, but not enough on it's own to handle federating across services with lots of traffic and updating.

    Sam Rose 2:08am Dec 27
    Also, seems it would be easiest to just consume the JSON that is already output by SFW. It would be easy to make a "planet" from the JSON output of many SFW wikis, for instance (and RSS output of non-SFW).

    Mark Dilley 2:19am Dec 27
    Ted Ernst and I worked on a social media supportive RecentChanges many years ago - a G+ push type system - and I have more developed ideas on it than our scratchpad - http://www.aboutus.org/Granular_Recent_Changes

    Lion Kimbro 5:00am Dec 27
    Hmm, ... I thin that FaceBook really proves SideSystemsFirst is wrong, and that PlatformsFirst is right. Also, the merit of the OverHear system. If we are going to make a social software system to replace Facebook, it has to include everything that makes Facebook great- including the people..!

    Sam Rose 5:11am Dec 27
    Lion Kimbro it seems the right focus changes over time. That maybe "SideSystemsFirst" was right back when you wrote that (back when blogs were big, and wiki sites were big, forums, etc). But, the pendulum has swung toward "PlatformsFirst", perhaps? If it swings back again (if it even is a "pendulum") maybe it will all look very different (especially given the drive toward mobile devices, etc). One really harsh action by a big player like facebook or google, releasing data to government, companies, or something else like that could drive people toward more decentralized systems.

    Lion Kimbro 5:14am Dec 27
    http://www.communitywiki.org/CommunityTiedToOneTechnology (just recalling now)

    Lion Kimbro 5:41am Dec 27
    I think that if we are going to have a different technical platform, it requires a community intent on using it. The draw of the community must be sufficiently strong. I am thinking I the intentional community efforts of the past and present and not of hobbyist efforts and social clubs.

    Lion Kimbro 5:41am Dec 27
    Either that or a powerful commercial force like Facebook.

    Lion Kimbro 5:41am Dec 27
    Or a major obsession, like Ponyhoof.

    Lion Kimbro 5:42am Dec 27
    I meant: PonySquare.

    Lion Kimbro 5:42am Dec 27
    Or something like tumblr, that attracts a demographic somehow.

    Lion Kimbro 5:43am Dec 27
    I like Phil Jones but I'm not about to start blogging again, ..!

    Seb Paquet 5:56am Dec 27
    The social web changed in a major way over the past 6 years, mostly owing to the absolutely massive addition of non-geeks who are not in it for the tech *at all* and can be expected to roughly follow the lines of least resistance and maximum 'normal-person-concern benefit'. Any project that has normal people in its eventual sights (not all of them do) needs to be where the normals are. And the normals are not just anywhere - they have massive attraction to where the other normals are. (I'm probably abusing the word 'normal' here; hope you get my drift)

    Alex Schröder 12:17pm Dec 27
    http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Planet/
    This is a wiki within a wiki farm where one of its pages is used to
    configure a planet (using Venus). There is also a little CGI script that
    allows you to add new feeds without editing the config page, checking for duplicates and all that.

    Am 27.12.2012 um 02:21 schrieb Phil Jones <

    Alex Schröder 12:22pm Dec 27
    Both Facebook and Google+ have the benefit of being integrated into Email.
    I'm posting here by replying to emails, for example. (G+ is only half
    integrated unless you're a Gmail user, in which case it's omnipresent.)
    That is something the other feed aggregators don't do. Replying, commenting
    and editing require a click, a load, a change.

    Am 27.12.2012 um 01:52 schrieb Phil Jones <

    Alex Schröder 12:51pm Dec 27
    Haha, now that I'm seeing it on the Facebook website, I notice some formatting issues. ;)

    Phil Jones 12:53pm Dec 27
    I'd like to respectfully disagree with Lion Kimbro. I really don't believe that Facebook's all-encompassing platform that does everything is the killer we currently imagine it to be.

    If it were,

    a) I don't think G+ would have worked out. Yes Google had massive amounts of advertising, yes it was ridiculously easy to upgrade my GMail account to a G+ account. But actually, what made G+ compelling was NOT its world domination, it was just the willingness of 10 or so people I cared enough about, to jump in and start using it. That created sufficient value for me to stay engaged.

    b) Increasingly I find myself discussing on private Facebook groups. Once again, I'm on fB anyway, but my audience / community is in the 10s or 100s. I'm putting a lot of work into groups but I never think fBs billion members are going to see them.

    c) G+ Circles

    d) Quora, Pinterest, etc. etc.

    My conclusion this year is that size is LESS important than ever. What's important are small, interesting communities. I will go and stay where they are.

    Yes, Facebook is, and always will be, my way to keep track of aunts and long out-of touch colleagues. But it's far from what I want for the intense community interactions I have.

    So I disagree that it's the "platformness" that's the most important thing. Increasingly I think the real story is that fB / twitter / G+ have pioneered some nice UI patterns.

    In particular, the combination of a single page feed / river / recentchanges of the people you care about COMBINED with an input box at the top to quickly post to those people. Blogs / RSS have always separated the enter-a-post view from the aggregator view, but the social media giants demonstrate that this is crucial.

    They've also kept their UIs slick and up-to-date. So that you can post a link and have its content dynamically transcluded. Once again, all blogging software I know has fallen way behind this easy for forwarding ideas.

    Sam Rose What's the appeal of SFW for me? The insight that we should move wiki from a single server, which is vulnerable to spam, and where we struggle to integrate conflicting points of view, to a federation of multiple wikis where forking is allowed and resynchronization, when needed, is made easy (the Git model of wiki).

    Alex Schröder 12:55pm Dec 27
    I actually agree with the smaller numbers. Definitely a thing for me. For the potential, nebulous, anonymous "other" people: they can check out my blog, leave comments. They will find their way into the inner circles automatically.

    Alex Schröder 1:39pm Dec 27
    As far as Oddmuse and SFW goes: I'd love to know what the non-user interface features of SFW are. Mostly because I feel that Oddmuse already offers feeds and transclusion. If SFW offers those on a more granular level—like purple numbers offered linking on a more granular level—I'd also like to hear some use cases. And if you'd write it up for Community Wiki, that'd be awesome.

    Lion Kimbro 2:50pm Dec 27
    I like and will think more about the easy submission and updates on one page. Most other pieces I can't connect with. For example, I dropped G+ because my interesting activity was on FB. People became interested in my work on FB, strangers and friends alike. (and on). I am leaving in minutes, but the things you wrote worked opposite for me.

    Sam Rose 3:12pm Dec 27
    I personally love SFW, but the user interface is not going to work for most people. Too complex. And the workflow is also not going to work for most people. Again, too complex. OddMuse was also too complex for most non-programmer people. In both cases of SFW and OddMuse, we have or had community to fall back on, to help fill the knowledge gap, and that worked to a degree. I am disciplining myself to write a page on Lansingwiki every day, and therefore get back into wiki writing in some way.

    I am like Lion Kimbro and rarely use G+. Most of my activity is on Facebook, and diaspora about every other week. I never use twitter anymore. I have email down to just business communication (which is strange, because it used to be my primary means).

    Back in CW, we had at least a loose focus and goal of sorts. So, it'd be cool to think about what that is if we start to do something again. I think there is a huge community of people around the world interested in a new platform, and they have struggled to find people capable of building it. Seb Paquet has had a big hand in drawing many of these people together over the last 4-5 years. That greater community's current state is kind of like aimless wandering, with small private groups trying to focus.

    Peter Kaminski 4:39pm Dec 27
    I build on what Lion, Seb, and Phil said.

    In my view, a successful social networking system includes:

    1) Ubiquity
    2) Focus

    In other words, you do *not* want to talk to everybody at once (focus), but you *do* want to use the medium most everyone else is using (ubiquity).

    Strategies that build ubiquity include:

    * commercial(-ish) scaling effort, including marketing, distribution, technical scale (examples: facebook, twitter, wikipedia)

    * platformy-ness -- being horizontal while app developers target multiple niches for you (examples: facebook in its high-growth phase, twitter)

    * densely-connected demographics with lots of spare time and sociality (examples: tumblr, facebook in the early days, email in the very early days)

    * open standards (examples: email, usenet (RIP), web)

    (not a comprehensive list, just some sketching in of "ubiquity")

    As for focus, 10-150 people deciding to use any system regularly will create focus, regardless of ubiquity or ease-of-use or what have you. It is more likely (i.e., it is rolling downhill) that group-forming like that will start and continue on a ubiquitous tool, and one that is easier to use rather than harder to use; but neither is an absolute prerequisite.

    Personally, I find Facebook overall to be so distracting that it is hard for me to engage with any focused group on it; worse, its combination of walled garden and crazy privacy semantics (with no disrespect intended, they're trying to do the impossible) makes it hard for me to feel good about putting thoughts into it -- it's sort of a black hole.

    And I haven't been back to G+ since #nymwars -- the cognitive dissonance between their stated principle ("Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world") and what Google did (use your real name unless we don't like it, then you have to make up a real-looking name) was extremely disturbing to me.

    So my home neighborhoods are still a couple of email lists. Though I would love to have something else, that felt like home, on the web.

    Sam Rose 5:00pm Dec 27
    Peter Kaminski great thoughts. I think we also have to acknowledge our biases for who we are. Over the holidays, we had some friends over, including younger people between age 17 and 28, and they are more likely to use sites for flirting, finding people to hang out with, joking around and having fun, etc.

    Some of us in this discussion (at least) seem to be talking about a "thing" that is more for our complex and complicated view on what the web/internet should be used for. A place for exploring and connecting and synthesizing deep concepts over time.

    Still, all of that aside, the ideas of "ubiquity" and "focus" seem to hold up to everything I am throwing at it. Except that I think that both G+ and FB fit the bill for "ubiquity" and "focus" in the way you are describing. But, for "us" here, we are saying they are limited, and/or that we don't like their policies. However, there are many others that will live with the limitations, and that will ignore the policies.

    Peter Kaminski 5:09pm Dec 27
    Sam Rose, yes, G+ and FB are both great at ubiquity and focus for regular folks -- "normals," as Seb says -- and we're not "normal." :-)

    Sam Rose 5:14pm Dec 27
    OMG, you're right Peter Kaminski! I am not "normal"! (mental breakdown proceeds ...) :-D

    Edward Vielmetti 5:16pm Dec 27
    Pete - in addition to ubiquity and focus, I'd like to suggest a third axis of utility for social media - "isolation". It's the notion that you can go somewhere online and do something special that's unlike anything else on the net, and that because of this the rules that have accreted over time about expected behavior are different.

    As an example, I have an account on Pinterest that I use nearly exclusively for collecting maps. I don't follow all of my friends there, and I don't expect that people will follow me just because they are my friends.

    I think we all need a little corner of the net to call our own. Facebook ranks very low on the isolation scale and so it will not appeal to those who are looking for a quiet corner to express themselves. A lightly trafficked wiki, your own blog, or the carefully walled off corner of an interest-specific forum can all have that isolation factor that lets us be sociable but not to the entire world all at once.

    Peter Kaminski 5:32pm Dec 27
    Yes, Ed, good one. "Isolation" makes a lot of sense -- tight-knit community and sociality takes a good deal of Tuckman's "norming," which is hard when there's a hustle-bustle admixture of people with different goals and needs in a place like Facebook.

    Phil Jones 5:39pm Dec 27
    Yes Sam Rose. 'mlooking for focus, not utility.Moreover, I'm looking to not have my thinking, or that of my community, constrained by Facebook's commercial exegencies.

    Phil Jones 5:41pm Dec 27
    Ubiquity, damn you autocorrect! Typing on new tablet

    Bill Seitz 3:45pm Dec 28
    I think FB, like pretty much *all* non-wiki media, discourages an accretion of value/context over time. So, if you can get value from a low-context conversation, then FB can work. But if your goal is to grow a community of *practice* or something like that, then you're kinda spinning your wheels.

    Bill Seitz 3:47pm Dec 28
    You could mitigate this a bit by making the wiki your primary writing "place", then copy/pasting to FB for discussion, with a link back to the wiki page. A big loss with that process is that WikiWords within the post would not be linked to those pages.

    Seb Paquet 4:02pm Dec 28
    Related: http://www.quora.com/What-conditions-favor-the-emergence-of-scenius

    (btw, Quora has become my knowledge accretion spot of choice)

    Peter Kaminski 4:09pm Dec 28
    Great link, Seb, thanks!

    Say more -- why is Quora your favorite knowledge accretion spot? And what keeps it from being an anti-favorite?

    Phil Jones 3:18am Dec 29
    Quora has lots of good design decisions :

    1) big space to write in. Doesn't try to squash your writing into a thin column surrounded by adverts but uses most of the page for writing (and leaves the rest as white space)

    also readable fonts and uncluttered design.

    2) very good community. Mostly smart.

    3) the "one answer per user" rule gives a kind of egalitarianism. No one can dominate the conversation around a question simply by virtue of being willing to write more than anyone else.

    4) vicious penalty for pissing people off - one downvote hides your answer - means that people are civil, and tend not to waste their answers making facile jibes at other people. Also, any obnoxious stuff just gets hidden very quickly.

    5) the private "thank" option is a very nice way to reward people that isn't mere voting.

    6) the gamification / points system doesn't really touch me personally. But it *may* be helping to reinforce quality in a way I don't understand

    Phil Jones 3:20am Dec 29
    7) autosave of answers and comments. Unbelievably useful. Makes you confident typing longer, more discursive answers and points, over several sessions.

    Mark Dilley 4:12am Dec 29
    Before SFW - I said Quora was the most exciting thing to be in the wiki space - lots of wiki ethos in the place.

    Sam Rose 4:15am Dec 29
    I love the way that Stackoverflow works, too. Although, it is primarily for developers and technology knowledge ...

    Alex Schröder 9:38am Dec 29
    There are Stackexchange sites for role-playing games, language
    learners, and so on. The only problem I have with these Q&A sites is that I hardly ever feel like going there to read and be inspired. I
    just go there if I have a question, and when I'm there, I might answer one or two just because I feel that'd be fair.

    Sam Rose 4:21pm Dec 29
    Alex Schröder I hear you. The one really great thing about stackexchange sites (at least on the coding end of things) is they tend to produce accurate answers to questions. So, as a space to share knowledge around some kinds of problems, it's really good. It would work really well as a space to share some basic knowledge via Q & A around sustainable farming practices, for instance.

    I will agree that it is not a place for deeper knowledge or concepts, or getting to know the people behind the discussion.

    Seb Paquet 4:35pm Dec 29
    Would you say that stackexchange works best for questions where it is relatively straightforward to verify the validity of an answer once it has been found?

    Alex Schröder 10:07pm Dec 29
    Seb Paquet, the platform is actually more powerful than that. There are questions and simple answers, one of which is determined to be the best one, with all of them getting votes. There are also questions of a different type that are best answered by a collection of links, statements, and so on. Those are determined to be "community wikis" if I remember correctly. They seem far less popular, however.

    It would also seem to me that the platform would work for subjective questions such as relationship advice. Other people would offer answers, and one of them would be deemed "correct" by the original poster. There's no inherent need to deduplicate questions (although on technical topics, people usually try to do so).

    Also, I think I should copy some of this stuff to Community Wiki itself. :)

    Seb Paquet 10:12pm Dec 29
    This group would be perfect for figuring out a good workflow that integrates FB discussion for sparking insights + wiki for capturing stuff that deserves persistence, naming, etc. Please post a link in this thread if you copy this stuff into some kind of digest over on CW!

    Edward Vielmetti 10:21pm Dec 29
    I pulled out my comment from above and posted it to my blog, after doing some editing, for what it's worth. http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2012/12/ubiquity-focus-and-isolation-as-success-factors-for-internet-socialiability.html

    Lion Kimbro 10:36pm Dec 29
    I really agree with using FB+wiki, as a form. I am just beginning to experiment with that for conversations on sexuality on my FB. No "working in" yet, but it's starting super recent.

    Alex Schröder 10:52pm Dec 29
    Several branches linked from here: http://www.communitywiki.org/en/SocialMedia

    Sam Rose 11:00pm Dec 29
    I think our group would do very well with FB + Wiki. But, I think many others would struggle or avoid (who are not very invested in wiki already). It's too bad that browser plugins (similar to what you see from diigo, etc) never caught on. I could imagine a browser plugin that basically dynamically loads wiki pages in a column that correspond with FB discussion threads, so that you can see the wiki while you are in FB. That is likely the kind of interface that would work for people outside of our group, I think.

    Alex Schröder 11:03pm Dec 29
    Then again, I don't think I'd install a browser plugin to read a Facebook group…

    Bill Seitz 2:46am Dec 30
    I agree, Sam, not everyone reading the FB thread would read the wiki, much less read multiple linked pages, much less edit any. But it gives a good "surface area" to let people get exposed to the thread, then self-select based on their motivation level.

    Sam Rose 3:39am Dec 30
    Alex Schröder yeah, there's no easy way to tackle this problem...unless people just want to go ahead and use a wiki :)

2012-12-27

  • 14:21 UTC Anybody with thoughts on social media developments...
    Alex Schröder 1:06pm Dec 26
    Anybody with thoughts on social media developments, their use of social media in the last year, offline community building?

    My own:
    http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/2012-12-23_Social_Media_this_Year

    Phil Jones 2:01pm Dec 26
    Answered in comment to your post.

    Lion Kimbro 5:22pm Dec 26
    I embraces FaceBook this year. Access to people > quality of tool.

    Lion Kimbro 5:23pm Dec 26
    I love EMACSwiki. Haters gunna hate. :D amusing watching people repeat mistakes we worked through many years ago.

    Sam Rose 1:21am Dec 27
    I started a new wiki this year: http://lansingwiki.org/ :) With some help there from the people behind http://arborwiki.org and http://toledowiki.net/ offering advice on starting local wiki.

    Alex Schröder 12:51pm Dec 27
    Local wikis sound like an excellent idea. Good luck! Is there a particular subculture you feel are your target users or do you want it to be "for everybody" but from the bottom up, as opposed to an official Facebook page, for example?

    Sam Rose 3:00pm Dec 27
    Alex Schröder there are some subcultures that are target users: people who care about documenting local history (local musicians, area historians), businesses that want to promote and expand on info about their business, people focusing on local food and local economic development. Plus, local software and technology people are enthusiastic about it. arborwiki.org (for the town of AnnArbor, MI just under an hour away from here by car) has been going for a number of years now (probably since around the start of CommunityWiki) with help from people like Mark Dilley Edward Vielmetti and some Ann Arbor locals. Arbor wiki was able to get some support from the Ann Arbor public library system. I may try to go that route. Or, I may look at historical societies (since we really lack a good online source of history for Lansing, which at one time had dozens of manufacturing operations, and all kinds of other stuff happening).

    I am also discussing with a local trade cooperative having them support the wiki for a while, and the wiki in turn can be a tool for some of their purposes. This is actually getting some traction.

    I am also sincerely and seriously hoping to add a couple of improvements to localwiki software, which would make it more interesting to my friends at http://lansingonlinenews.com and other local citizen journalism efforts: 1. a way to collect, store and categorize statistical data about a place (associated in the wiki with pages). So, one could start collecting crime statistics, etc etc

    2. A way overlay many layers on to the http://lansingwiki.org/map/ (instead of just one. This is doable, I've accomplished it in the past with this site that I made http://regionaldb.hollymeadcapital.com/ This makes the map more useful for people looking for specific information.

    Alex Schröder 4:34pm Dec 27
    That reminds me of +Daniel McKay's wiki on gay Halifax.

    Alex Schröder 4:35pm Dec 27
    http://gay.hfxns.org/
    I think he got a prize for it because of its documenting of LGTB local history.

    Alex Schröder 4:37pm Dec 27
    Also, Mattis Manzel tried to create local wikis but I think he lacked a local population that was a priori interested in it. "Build it and they will come" doesn't seem to always work.

    Mattis Manzel 7:44pm Dec 27
    a single case where it works would do. Unfortunately building 'local populations' is as much time consuming as not my thing, so: in theory it works ;)

    Sam Rose 7:47pm Dec 27
    yeah, I am getting more interest in the area I am actually in. So, I am just focusing on that, and trying to make it as rich as possible. I will expect it to take at least 2-3 years to take off on it's own. The wikis for Ann Arbor and Toledo are pretty popular in their own spaces.

    Mattis Manzel 7:49pm Dec 27
    SamRose: Does local wiki - it seems to have sprout out of Davies-wiki - still run on Sycamore wiki, a drilled up moin wiki, kinda?

    Mattis Manzel 7:51pm Dec 27
    two or three years is also Helmut Leitners guess and he's darn right on it ;)

    Mattis Manzel 7:51pm Dec 27
    at least, true …

    Alex Schröder 7:53pm Dec 27
    My experience with Emacs Wiki was that I needed about 1000 pages.

    Mattis Manzel 8:03pm Dec 27
    I'm pretty doubtful what page count is concerned. Mediawiki does it excellently, but a wiki with a hundred (cleverly included) pages can make more sense than a 1000 pages. Page count is over-evaluated nowadays (as technical possible). Links, wiki-net links to pages locally watching a wiki in particular is what I rather tend to.

    Mattis Manzel 8:09pm Dec 27
    ok, 1000 was when the emacs-wiki came live. I'm ~ 400 pages on some wikis, ha!

    Mattis Manzel 8:24pm Dec 27
    correction: wiki-net links to pages in other wikis watching a wiki locally in particular rather

    Mark Dilley 8:36pm Dec 27
    LocalWiki is from the folks who brought us DavisWiki - it is new fan-dangled wysiwyg wiki - where you can't link while you think very easily ( think - write - highlight - click on link button - insert link - save ) - it instead focuses on other affordances - maps for example.

    Mark Dilley 8:37pm Dec 27
    Runs with Django I believe

    Alex Schröder 9:47pm Dec 27
    Mattis, I think the reason for the thousands of pages is mostly this: the wiki needs to be valuable before others will start maintaining it. It's hard to tell what other people will find valuable. I guess it could be true that of the 1000 pages, only 100 were important enough to attract contributors. Unfortunately, I was unable to tell which 100 pages this would be so I had to create 1000 pages to be sure.

    Edward Vielmetti 9:52pm Dec 27
    For comparison, Arborwiki has about 10000 pages accumulated over 7 years. I was working on it for a time when I was writing for AnnArbor.com so it had the feel of something that was part of my job. A handful of pages get the most traffic, and the ones that get the most traffic get the most routine updates by people who are not regulars.

    Sam Rose 10:21pm Dec 27
    Mark Dilley one trick that I figured out with LocalWiki is to highlight with Shit+arrow key, the Ctrl+L and the wiki will link it. Not as easy as [[]] or CamelCase, but at least I don't have to take fingers off keyboard :)
  • 06:02 UTC Reminder: The inclusion of the facebook group Comm...
    Kommunity Wiki 1:54pm Dec 27
    Reminder: The inclusion of the facebook group CommunityWiki into the community-wiki works. Mattis Manzel :)

    http://www.communitywiki.org/en/FirstFaceBookGroupCommunityWiki

    Mattis Manzel 1:58pm Dec 27
    It does transclude facebook user icons into the community-wiki, I like that.

    Mattis Manzel 2:02pm Dec 27
    An interesting side effect of this set up seems to be that it makes facebook group conversations getting indexed by google.
  • 05:44 UTC OK. On another thread I started to say that I'm in...
    Phil Jones 12:03am May 23
    OK. On another thread I started to say that I'm inspired. I think we're in a wiki renaissance. A "next generation", return to and reinvention of wiki to take us to the next level.

    So I just sat down and sketched a quick manifesto for this new wiki era. What's the same? What's, perhaps, a bit different?

    Mainly inspired by the SFW, of course, but I don't think it's entirely specific to that, I think federation is an idea which will come to all wikis. As Mattis Manzel's soup experiments are hinting.

    Naturally, it's on my wiki : http://thoughtstorms.info/view/wikimanifesto2012

    Phil Jones 1:00am Dec 27
    I'm going to bump this manifesto too, in light of Alex Schröder's discussion.

    Alex Schröder 1:44pm Dec 27
    It continues to be an encouraging point of view and I like it. The essence of the read and write web indeed!

2012-12-20

  • 19:41 UTC I keep returning to that Amit Patel post "Unstruct...
    Alex Schröder 5:49am Sep 11
    I keep returning to that Amit Patel post "Unstructured to Structured". I created a new Community Wiki page to extract some links to.

    (Note that editing the wiki requires an editor password which you can request by email: kensanata@gmail.com)

    http://www.communitywiki.org/en/OrganicStructures

    Lion Kimbro 3:41am Dec 21
    Still valuable.

2012-12-05

  • 07:38 UTC The wiki seems down? Alex Schröder
    Seb Paquet 10:47pm Dec 4
    The wiki seems down? Alex Schröder

    Lion Kimbro 10:48pm Dec 4
    I noticed it too, trying to show someone an article the other day.

    Seb Paquet 10:49pm Dec 4
    There's always archive.org

    Mark Dilley 1:10am Dec 5
    was trying to edit it yesterday, noticed it was down and figured Alex would get to it when he could :-)

    Alex Schröder 6:14am Dec 5
    I will take a look.

    Alex Schröder 6:19am Dec 5
    Fixed. :)

    Lion Kimbro 7:43am Dec 5
    Thank you Alex!

    Alex Schröder 1:15pm Dec 5
    Got another email: "We would like to contribute tot the communitywiki.com and would like to receive a password to create a wiki page in Dutch. Our expertise is in the Real Estate."

    I guess the answer is "No!"

    Phil Jones 3:33pm Dec 5
    Could be an "honest mistake" Alex Schröder "community" / "real estate" easy to mix-up. :-)

    Seb Paquet 3:38pm Dec 5
    wikis are infinite sources of virtual real estate

2012-06-02

  • 00:11 UTC I'm religious but not spiritual. A friend of mine...
    Brandon CS Sanders 11:12pm Jun 1
    I'm religious but not spiritual. A friend of mine (Eric) recently suggested that us religious but not spiritual people (and maybe everyone) need a religious method akin to the scientific method. I love this idea and am helping to organize a mini un-conference to really chew on it. I can't wait until June 20 to get started though, so ...

    What is the religious equivalent of the scientific method?

    Could religion begin a period of rapid progress if it got its own 'Religious method'?

    What does religion do? What must a religion have to be a religion?

    What do religions not do? What should religions be forbidden from doing by the method?

    What is a religious question? What kind of questions do religions ask and what do their answers look like?

    What steps are there to answering religious questions?

    What do you think?

    Brandon CS Sanders 11:14pm Jun 1
    ps. Community wiki folks who think this topic is interested should feel warmly invited to the event: http://solseed.org/Sol2012

    Brandon CS Sanders 11:22pm Jun 1
    When I consider a religious method, I imagine restrictions. For example, if a question can be addressed by science, then it isn't a religious question. That sort of thing.

    One of the difficulties I foresee is that religion is already a term with a lot of valid claimants. And many of their definitions aren't going to be compatible with our conclusions. So do we need a different term? I'm not sure. I guess it may be similar to the relationship between science and alchemy, or between science and any sort of psuedo science.

    I wonder how people would react to us calling fundamentalist Christianity and other flavors of fundamentalism pseudo religions? Could be very interesting.

    Phil Jones 11:37pm Jun 1
    Brandon CS Sanders What is it about yourself that makes you think you are religious without being spiritual? Surely whatever that is could be the beginning of a religious practice.

    As an outsider who is neither religious nor spiritual it looks to me that the beginning of "religious practice" could be something like "self-denial" ie. a root sense that your own desires, impulses, intuitions are somehow invalid or inadequate and so the practice becomes a search for something outside yourself to audit or evaluate and curb your own self.

    But this may be casting things in a very negative light. You presumably have a more positive story.

    Joel Chandler 5:58am Jun 2
    1) hermeneutics(?)

    2) not if it is based on the supernatural (my opinion)

    3) traditionally, religions exhibit a number of these traits (from my class notes): 1) belief in a supernatural being or beings, 2) belief in a being of superior intelligence (e.g., heros), 3) a metaphysic identifying significant events of human life, 4) belief in experience after death, 5) moral code, 6) a place for evil, 7) a theodicy explaining why the suffering of innocents is allowed, 8) prayer & ritual, 9) sacred objects & places, 10) revealed truth, 11) religious (mystical) experience, 12) intense concern, 13) commitment to sharing. Some of these will count as reasons to abandon your use of the term "religious."

    4) concern itself with quantitative facts(?)

    5) a question that involves that a stand be taken by the questioner(?) - as opposed to the putative impartial "view from nowhere" stance of science. The answers of religious questions will be interpretive(?)

    6) guessing all: an existential question. consider the personal, social, and historical context of the question/answer. ...what does the question mean to me? (i.e., what does the nature of the question tell me about the nature of myself?). how does the answer I accept affect my behavior? how am I moved by the question/answer? how does the question/answer connect me to a reality larger than myself such that I may identify with this larger reality? etc.

    Lion Kimbro 7:06am Jun 2
    I think I understand what Brandon is saying; I've told people that I am "religious not spiritual" before, because they didn't understand the depths of my commitments. A woman who wanted me to make a life with her said to me "making societies is your hobby, you are not on a mission from God," and I knew then that it was over between us.

    Lion Kimbro 7:11am Jun 2
    Brandon, esotericists have been establishing religious sciences for a long time. My observation is that ... they have succeeded! The thing is- the vast majority of people have not caught up with the esotericists. Science is still science even if there only a few hundred thousand scientists. The work is still active, the peer review is still ongoing, it is all just invisible to most people. This is my sense of things. The Damanhurians say: the crystal of truth can only be penetrated by way through a facet. Once the facet is penetrated, the various facets can be seen and understood. I take this allegory to mean that a person needs to learn one language and system. Once this is accomplished, the links and connections with other languages and systems can be understood. But here is the thing- you can't do it for someone else- they have to learn it themselves, and for themselves, ...

2012-05-28

2012-05-26

  • 18:48 UTC I have a desire to flesh out some philosophical qu...
    Lion Kimbro 4:34pm May 19
    I have a desire to flesh out some philosophical questions that may or may not be in step with who we've (individually) become. In particular, I am interested in exploring questions about identity, individuality, community, society, and meaning. I've already got some ideas in mind, but I'd like to give them struts and supports, and also some kicking around from others. There are other related themes that I can't think up off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure they'd make it in as well. Does this sound at least somewhat interesting to others?

    I see CommunityWiki as a place to develop ideas consciously, basically, and I'm wondering what ideas people may have an interest in developing.

    Sam Rose 4:39pm May 19
    I have a perspective related to experience about people "free riding", being extractive, not understanding how to co-develop commonly held and shared spaces, resources, "things" (like communities).

    I am convinced there is a rational and effective way to deal with this, but first it must be objectively identified, acknowledged, and understood.

    Lion Kimbro 6:27pm May 19
    Sam, I'd like to hear more about this. Perhaps start with key ideas?

    Alex Schröder 12:14am May 21
    Identity, individuality, community, society and meaning sounds very interesting—but also dangerously close to WordMagic. I'd love to see you start with something small. If it takes hold, we'll expand it.

    Edward Vielmetti 12:18am May 21
    Here's a "WordMagic" page from Meatball, http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WordMagic , if you are not familiar with that particular theme. The bigger challenge is in picking a name space that fits your world, and I'll note that one of the Facebook features/disfeatures is that nothing really has a name or needs a name in order to exist.

    Alex Schröder 12:24am May 21
    Hehe, it reads as something I might have written… :)

    Sam Rose 2:47pm May 22
    Lion Kimbro you know what, I changed my mind. I actually think this page and the discussion with you and Alex Schröder there is more important than my "issue" above: http://www.communitywiki.org/en/StructureOfWikis (that page and the related pages) I really like the idea of saving links, and using them in wiki as "ArgumentPyramid" building blocks towards "TheoryBuilding". That seems like a really important topic that CommunityWiki as a whole still has a lot to say, thin, and do about.

    Lion Kimbro 9:30pm May 22
    Two main ideas I have are 1. that the individual is substantially identified by/through the society, and that we do not have sufficient control over our social forms to be able to truly individuate. That is, our freedom to be ourselves is limited by our incapacity to make our societies around us. 2. That meaning is more real than our mindsets permit.

    Lion Kimbro 9:30pm May 22
    More broadly though I am questioning my whole approach to communicating with people in general right now, and this contributes to my paralysis right now.

    Alex Schröder 10:20pm May 22
    Lion Kimbro Perhaps what you're experiencing is the problem of all communication when it comes to wisdom. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. It's easy to talk a lot, but it's hard to convey the important bits, to touch people where it matters. Sometimes the answer to an important question can only be given by living it. Sometimes the answer can only be understood by those looking for it. I know that this is how I feel, personally. Am I going to write about the vague feelings of peace, the golden thread of life I sometimes see, the dread of old age and frailty creeping up on me, the joy of love, the fear of endings? Absolutely not, for writing about it would cheapen it just as TV cheapens everything that we could have experienced instead. TV is great when it comes to rockets launching, observing wild life and the like, telling stories.

    Phil Jones 12:12am May 23
    Lion Kimbro What would be the problem with 1? (Ie. the individual defined by society). I mean, yes, it's true. So what? Why is that any worse than if the individual was defined by his or her biological body and couldn't really be themselves because of that? Or because God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster individuated them at some point?

    Lion Kimbro 2:10am May 23
    Aaron Poeze, I think that that part is relatively easy -- 1. find people who are willing to commit to the idea, 2. develop solid relationships with these people, 3. go for it, whole-heartedly.

    Lion Kimbro 2:16am May 23
    Alex Schröder, I think you are somewhat right. The problem is that I don't know when to (A) "be myself," and say what I'm thinking immediately directly, (B) when to work with people via stepping stones, gently guiding people from idea to idea, (C) when to give myself over to emotion and inner voice, and speak from that visionary place.

    The Federation of Damanhur works from C, to epic success. Tamera works from A, to moderate success but crystal clarity. OneTaste works from B, and is able to survive in a city.

    I'm not a quietest; I don't believe in not communicating so that "the real" can speak on its own. I know several quietists, and while I respect them and find them to be people of solid character, I ultimately believe in the evolution of society and social form, and believe that that means speaking.

    Sam Rose 2:19am May 23
    Lion Kimbro the dilemmas you describe above are very related to how some people (like Richard Lewontin) look at living systems in general. You cannot separate the gene/organism/environment. Your communication is going to be affected by the perspective you have on your environment, by the social litany, the deeper world views, and myth metaphor you are steeped in.

    I was just reading this article: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/how-to-get-rid-of-the-local-drug-dealer/Content?oid=875133 and it struck me just now how the approaches that they describe there for dealing with their problems are related to what you are discussing here. Those people in that article created new capacities for dealing with problems, new ways of looking at problems. They did not even really know where they were going with it. They were in a searching and consolidating/evolutionary mode, until they stumbled across real answers. Then, there was a new reality for them, a new way of addressing what they perceived to be their problems of existence.

    Lion Kimbro 2:37am May 23
    Phil, I'm not sure I completely follow, but I am in support of altering the body, and recrafting our visions of God, as well. The problem is that myself and many people I know have ideas and desires and movements inside that go way past what polite society "knows" how to make space for.

    One of the obstacles is a view of "individuality" that ends up actually being a conformity, -- and I'd love to dynamite it. The trick is that we can't just move individually; We can only move with others. "How can that be? I thought you were seeking individuality." Ah- but our concept of what individuality is all screwed up. That's what I wanted to talk about.

    But maybe it's just dumb to talk about, and, like Alex may have intended, I should be practicing rather than talking at this juncture. But part of the practicing is talking. {;)}=

    Phil Jones 11:50am May 23
    Lion Kimbro I'm not really sure what you mean by "individuality". As this is a philosophical debate, do you mean some technical sense like "haecceity" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity) or is this more a question of "why doesn't the world let me do my own thing and treat me the way I want to be treated"?

    To be honest, I have no real idea what haecceitus is, but I tend to think of it as the universe handing out UIDs to everything at a deep level. It's hard to see how other people can affect that.

    If it's more about people not letting you do your own thing, then that's largely a political problem. As in, yes, other people really are trying to use you for their own advantage. It's about understanding that that's the case and figuring out a response.

    Then there's also a whole existentialist literature about the struggle to be "authentic" or "free". Most of which is about the horror of finding that all the things you *thought* were freedom or authenticity were just more levels of bad faith.

    To go back to my individual question of "what's the problem?" I guess I mean that I'm fairly comfortable with thinking that what I am is a construct. Or a "true pattern" in the sense there's definitely something in the universe that's me, but whatever you can say about it is basically through different kinds of abstract models. Each of which covers a slightly different physical substrate.

    So the body is clearly involved. The brain particularly so. But so are feedback loops in my patterns of interaction with other people and the rest of the environment. I couldn't be "me" (as in the me I am) if I wasn't in this exact environment, in the relations I'm in with the people and objects and spaces around me.

    If some distraction had stopped me having this conversation with you, I'd be a slightly different PhilJones. I'd still have the same name, live at the same address etc. But I wouldn't be quite the same person. So what I am, my individuality, is a superposition of a lot of things, including you.

    Lion Kimbro 2:42pm May 23
    The reason I talk about individuality is because I want people to make new societies- lots of new societies. I've explored with my imagination and found that the way I want to live, the kind of society I want to live in, the kinds of thoughts I want to live in, are vastly different than the way that the mainstream culture is able to support.

    When people try to make new societies though, what do people say? They say, "Oh, thats a cult; Don't do that; You'll lose your individuality." I challenged that accusation in my thoughts, and found that individuation is tightly constrained by the social body. In this light, the creation of new social forms, guided by the desires of the people and peoples that form them, is one of the greatest boons for the cause of individuation that is possible.

    Seb Paquet 3:00pm May 23
    Lion Kimbro "We can't just move individually; We can only move with others" - would love you to expand on this.

    Lion Kimbro 3:03pm May 23
    You can't play a board game by yourself, or get married by yourself, throw a party for one, or do all the things that a society does by yourself.

    Lion Kimbro 3:07pm May 23
    But more important than that are the overpowering nature of the thoughts of the society; the power of atmosphere. You can meditate all you want but you are going to think back in the thoughts of the atmosphere of the mainstream society. People will make you think in their language in a way that is very difficult for us to liberate ourselves from- and I would argue that most of us who believe we have done so are actually fooling ourselves.

    Lion Kimbro 4:41pm May 23
    It depends on how you want to move. Do you dream of a society of isolated people all cut off from one another doing their own thing, distant and remote from one another, or do you dream of a society with other people?

    Alex Schröder 5:49pm May 23
    The pragmatic in me find that communes would be the first step.

    Lion Kimbro 10:17pm May 23
    Why do you say there is procrastination? Two days I was talking with 2 collaborators here in Seattle. I'm constantly talking with people here in Seattle about these ideas. If I post here about these ideas, does it mean that I'm procrastinating? I don't think so. And I already stated why I come here -- to develop ideas and explanations, and to hear from other people who are investigating similar but different threads.

    Lion Kimbro 10:19pm May 23
    ("Two days I was talking" -> "Three days ago I was talking...") I work Mon, Tue, Wed, ...

    Lion Kimbro 1:36pm May 24
    Do you mean, "Why does it take so long?"

    Lion Kimbro 1:41pm May 24
    If so: It's because it has taken a long time to get to the point where I am now, to get to the understandings that I have now. The doing is complex, and there are lots of pieces to it. It's all about stumbling from one set of problems to another set of problems. Further: While the steps are easy, the *do* take a lot of time to perform. I've been establishing relationships here in Seattle for several years now. Some people stay with it, others move away for various reasons.

    Mattis Manzel 7:45pm May 24
    In Kenya they say: "It's a process." A true thing.

    Phil Jones 1:15am May 25
    It sounds to me Lion Kimbro that you have a political problem rather than a philosophical problem. What you seem to want to do is change the way other people think and behave. And so you need tools to persuade them.

    I'm not sure philosophy will help you with this.

    You might be better off studying traditional rhetoric.

    Sometimes it feels like philosophy will help, in that it could clarify your ideas so well that other people can't NOT see the force of your argument.

    But that can often be a delusion. Your ideas will seem clearer to you because you've spent so much time thinking through them, while, in fact they'll be as obscure (if not more so) to the listener because you'll have loaded up each word in your own mind with very detailed but very personal understanding that isn't shared by the listener.

    There's a reason that philosophy is advanced by lifetimes of long, long texts : it takes a lot of words for a philosopher to get a subtle idea across to someone else. Because you have to keep rephrasing it until the reader - by a process of triangulation - eliminates all their own misinterpretations.

    Lion Kimbro 1:54am May 25
    There are a few things difficult for me in what you are saying.

    First, I don't intend to change how other people think and behave. I intend to offer people ideas and choices, and for those who understand the ideas, and make the choices, to work together with them. It is very important to me that we are clear on this. Any degree of force or manipulation is anathema to me.

    Second: As far as I can tell, it is by my own reasoning, in communication with others, that I've come to the ideas and choices that are important to me.

    Third: People can understand ideas clearly, and still disagree. No matter how much I understand about Tomatoes, I'm still not going to like them.

    I am not disappointed if I communicate an idea clearly to somebody, and then they understand it, and they make a choice different than what I would choose. But I am very disappointed if I communicate an idea poorly, and then do not understand it, -- regardless of the choice they make afterward.

    I believe that the likelihood of a person understanding my idea is related to how *sound* the idea is (the integrity of the idea), and how *well* I communicate it (which rhetoric is one part of; there are many other parts).

    The "delusion" you speak of has an excellent cure -- communication with others. Especially those who are (A) sympathetic to you, and have some understanding of you, and (B) are willing to listen to your idea and understand it, and (C) who you can trust to be critical of your ideas once they understand them. If you have all of those things, you have a great partner in thinking. CommunityWiki is, for myself, like a collection of great people who have, on several times, with friendliness, nipped bad ideas of mine in the bud. This is not to say that CW people agree with everything I say -- far from it. But they have been a great curating community.

    I sincerely believe that a community is the best place to develop ideas in. The body of people who participate in science are a great example of this.

    Alex Schröder 7:13am May 25
    I agree with Phil. Politics and persuasion don't need to be negatively
    loaded. I talk to somebody and then they make a choice and change their behavior, of their own free will. What happened? Did I teach something? Did
    I inform somebody? Did I manipulate them? There was no coercion, no
    falsehood. If the ideas thus communicate change the way we interact as
    citizens, I think this falls squarely into the field of politics. (Even if politics today often does involve coercion and falsehood, these are not necessary ingredients.)

    This mail/post was originally much longer but I deleted most of it because
    I'm no longer regarding the point of this thread. Let's turn back to "flesh
    out some philosophical questions that may or may not be in step with who
    we've (individually) become" instead of arguing semantics. I'll be over
    there in the next thread. :)

    Sam Rose 1:48am May 27
    "I sincerely believe that a community is the best place to develop ideas in. The body of people who participate in science are a great example of this."

    For sure. There is a reason why big drug and biotech companies bring huge teams together in one physical place. They need them to work together intimately. They need the mutiple perspectives on one problem. It is very much like playing music by yourself vs with others. Many times, people's precision, and ability with instruments increase faster when playing with others vs. alone. See Bill Benzon's "Beethoven's Anvil" http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/338
  • 15:55 UTC via Peter Thoeny "Why I think [wikis] worked. What...
    Mark Dilley 8:15pm May 26
    via Peter Thoeny "Why I think [wikis] worked. What we really did was say was the command and control hierarchical communications that we had to use in organizations wasn't necessary anymore. In fact, it was an impediment." ~ Ward Cunningham, inventor of wikis

    Phil Jones 10:55pm May 26
    Ward awesome as usual.
  • 15:48 UTC Thanks, Lion, for creating the group. ...I'm not a...
    Joel Chandler 7:41pm May 20
    Thanks, Lion, for creating the group. ...I'm not a programmer and I don't know much about wikis, so I apologize for any naiveté that I may exhibit below. I'm wrapping up my MA work in philosophy - focusing on Heidegger - and I'm secretly envious of the skills possessed by computer programmers. Anyway, maybe you all can shed some light on this... I'm interested in collaborative efforts regarding interpretive matters. Take the question, "what's the ontological structure of phenomenon x?" - i.e., "what are the conditions which allow me to experience phenomenon x in the way I experience it?" The answer will be interpretive, depending upon one's frame of reference, etc. I'd like there to be a program that can do at least two things with this: 1) Take all answers from all participants and divide them into categories based on the general frames of reference employed - e.g., biological, cultural, sub-sets of culture, etc., and 2) synthesize and summarize the answers provided in each category. To contrast what I have in mind with my (elementary) understanding of what wikis do, the output would not be the reporting of facts or ideas which could be changed and added to by the comminity, but would constitue encapsulted syntheses of all of the interpretations offered by those in the community. Is there anything like this out there? If so or not, I would think the program's automation would need to be "guided" is some sense by one capable of experiencing phenomena (viz., a human being). ...I could go on, and do hope to be pressed for clarity, but I'll see what any of you have to say so far. Thanks.

    Mattis Manzel 7:51pm May 20
    Hi Joel, welcome. You need an entire wiki to develop your idea. I'm sure. You're welcome to create one on kabo if you feel like.http://kabowiki.org/hive/EnKaboCenter/StartANewKaboWiki

    Phil Jones 2:20am May 21
    Joel Chandler Have you looked at some of Simon Buckingham Shum's work with argument mapping etc? Basically what you're talking about seems be somewhere along the spectrum between a structured map editor and a full scale machine-readable ontology of the kind that AI researchers sometimes get involved in. Argument mapping may have something of interest. Also, obviously the semantic web picks up a lot of those AI ontology ideas. Here's an example of Wittgenstein's Tractatus put into SemWeb form : http://wab.uib.no/ojs/agora-alws/article/view/959/614

    BTW: Computer programming is just applied philosophy similar to how engineering is applied maths. In philosophy you ask how the world is structured and how we can know it. In computer science you ask what part of the structure of the world the computer needs to capture in order to do its work,and how this should best be represented.

    Joel Chandler 4:04am May 22
    Thanks, guys, for the leads. I'll be looking into them.

    Lion Kimbro 2:41am May 23
    I have a hard time understanding what you are intending, ... maybe some pictures or a mock-up?

    Joel Chandler 5:28am May 26
    To be honest, I'm not quite sure what I'm intending either. That is, I'm not quite sure how an ideal that I envision is practically realizable, or even if its realization is logically possible. First I'll give you the assumptions upon which the ideal that I have in mind is based, then I'll give you the ideal.

    Meaningfulness grows organically out of lived experience. As such, we are "given over" to meaningfulness - i.e., we can't help but encounter a meaningful world given our lived experience. Reflecting upon this experience occurs after the fact. We abstract from experience the conditions that make it possible. This abstraction moves in the direction from particulars (concrete, lived experience) to universals (general conditions of possibility). Yet in so moving, we inevitably color our abstractions in various shades of the spectrum, let's say, depending upon a number of variables, including the degree to which we allow ourselves to be freed from the biases to which we're already "given over" and the degree to which we stick to the phenomena and don't venture off into metaphysical speculations which may posit a de-contextualized subject adopting a "view from nowhere." In any case, to the extent that we so reflect upon the meaningfulness to which we're given over, we do abstract the conditions thereof. Those conditions that we abstract (whatever color they may take) count as our ideals (so long as they bear upon us and aren't an automatic reflex shirking off the question).

    Take the question, "what do you tell your child when she asks you why she should care that Sally was ridiculed on the playground when that ridicule was ventured by her peers as an indirect way to prop-up your child's status in the playground pecking order?" After all, immediate lived experience lives as close to the present moment as is possible - thus its operative ethic is "what pleases me now?" Only when we see into the past and future does the present moment "stretch out" such that the "now" that is subject to pleasure cares more about its sustainability, and, consequently, the context which conditions that pleasure. So the question becomes, "how do we stretch the present?" Upon what model do we base our abstraction? (Note that I am here using "abstraction" and "stretching the present" analogously.) Further, when multiple options for abstraction present themselves, by what standard do we choose between them?

    So, the concrete (and inevitably "colored") ideal that I intend is this. Pose a question such as the one above about Sally and your daughter. Pose it to 1000 people. Let them answer. Input their answers into some algorithm that is somehow capable of intelligently recognizing the characters of their answers. The algorithm would somehow know how to associate answers to each other, such that 1) all those that invoked "God" in their answer would be grouped in a "family," those that invoked "evolution" would be grouped in another family, etc. (and by this you will see the influence of your other post on my discussion here, Lion;) and 2) those answers occurring under a single family umbrella would be "compiled" or "synthesized" into a single representative answer for that family. This would spit out a report that all participants could read. They'd see the other stories that the other "families" offered, and they'd see who answered similarly to them and so thereby find social connections.

    To return to the assumption upon which this concrete ideal is based... The idea is not to offer a "solution" to the question, but to allow the solution to present itself organically (from the ground up, as rooted in the meaningfulness of lived experience and the interpretations thereof).

    ...Like I said, I don't know if my "concrete ideal" is logically possible. I'm skeptical of AI, as I'm inclined to believe that these matters are characterized with reference to our familiarty with the world, a familiarity which involves an infinite number of logical interrelations which we simply take for granted and couldn't possibly be codified. But I think technology could somehow meet us half way with this - if nothing more, perhaps as a sort of screening mechanism.

    Phil Jones 10:48pm May 26
    Well, Joel Chandler, the problem is in your "some algorithm that is somehow capable of intelligently recognizing the characters of their answers"

    It would certainly be possible to give people multi-choice questions and let them define themselves on something equivalent to the "political compass". That would cluster them into families.

    But having the computer interpret natural language to try to work out which ones are "roughly the same" isn't yet viable.

    Perhaps you can ask a lot of "micro" multi-choice questions and then infer macro positions based on a cluster analysis of them, and perhaps these can be "surprising" in the sense that you didn't plan them. It's tough to author good micro-questions though.
  • 13:48 UTC There's an idea I've been giving form to for the l...
    Lion Kimbro 2:11am May 25
    There's an idea I've been giving form to for the last few months. It's this: Morality is fundamentally based in our heart's desire.

    A demonstration: Why is murder wrong? Because I don't want to live in a world of murder. Why is the golden rule so golden? Because I long for it. Why is selfishness an obstacle? (Immoral, or unethical, ...) Because I feel a hollowness or an inner emptiness when I contemplate it.

    I am perceiving conscience as a kind of "deep desire," or a "deep avoidance/not-wanting." We are used to thinking of our desires as the things that are about our own person, and our way of life endorses and enforces this view. What happens is that our desires for how we want other people to behave become externalized. We say "It is moral," or "It is ethical," or "It is what everybody knows," but really, we are stating our desires, or at least our compromises and agreements.

    The notion that morality is fundamentally based in our desire CAN be seen as begging the question: Because, where does the desire come from? Which I perceive as a fair and interesting question.

    But here's what the idea DOES do: It moves the locus of attention when morality or ethics comes up straight into the life of the mind, rather than an external (God or a specific responsible agent), metaphysical ("true ethics," or a governing theory of ethics), or even history ("evolution says that ____ is what is moral.") It also places us in a position where we take responsibility/recognition for our morality.

    I am sure Nietchze said something about this, though I could never be sure what he was really intending.

    There is an argument I have not explained well, but I have on a recurring basis with Christians. "Your bible has a moral message, and this both you and I have recognized. But when you appeal to the books morality, and then say that it is God's morality -- don't you judge the morality first? You tell me that homosexuality is a sin, and that unbelievers will be damned forever, and use God's authority as the author of the book to base these arguments - even if you yourself cannot find the sin in them. But how many words that make no moral sense to you can your God say to you, before you are critical of your God? If Jesus never spoke moral sense, but worked the miracles, would you have followed him?"

    The same goes for atheists who follow moral algebras: How do we evaluate the moral algebra? Do we not check for consonance with our hearts? If the moral algebra gives heartless results, then we are foolish to pick it up, right? So why not be clear that it is our heart that is the authority (and author) of the moral and ethical? Isn't our heart's desire our true guide?

    I do not imagine that this is a *new* argument, but I am not concerned with new arguments. I am concerned with good arguments, and understanding their limitations, and even better arguments.

    Seb Paquet 2:42am May 25
    This reminds me of Greg Rader's piece: http://onthespiral.com/we-are-all-sociopaths-now-conventional-success-no-longer-option

    Alex Schröder 6:40am May 25
    I'd say the importance of moral norms in society is that they apply to
    everybody and they are the source of our laws and our etiquette. They are basically the result of our negotiated feelings.

    I assume Nietzsche said that we would transcend morals in order to be free. Within the framework described above, his books would simply be the opening
    move of a new round of negotiations regarding our moral norms. Feelings
    change, then we talk about it, then we feel the need for change, and in the
    end we change the laws.

    Bill Seitz 12:11pm May 25
    An interesting article surveying a few recent books that hit on moral systems - http://american.com/archive/2012/april/the-tribal-mind-moral-reasoning-and-public-discourse

    Lion Kimbro 3:34pm May 25
    Very quickly, tapping out on a phone before work-... Sociopaths? Yikes! Yes, our morality comes from our desires, but we miss out if our desires are so small. We get what we came for. I read in the fourth article that there are four binding forces for the individual to the social system- reputation, internalized morality, security systems, can't access others immediately. What I didn't see there was love, defined here as the desire to see others do well. It might cynically argue "oh you are just internalizing moral ideas," but I earnestly speak that I genuinely do not want to live in a world where I slit throats to take money from the corpses, whenever I can get away with it. Doesn't my desire get to be a participant I our reasoning?

    Brandon CS Sanders 5:39pm May 25
    I think social psychology backs you up on this one Lion. I like Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of us having a moral tongue with moral taste receptors. Liking a particular morality is akin to liking a particular cuisine ... it just tastes good! I highly recommend amzn.to/RighteousMind ... in my top 5 all time favorite books.

    Joel Chandler 4:19am May 26
    What draws us to find a ground for morality in something other than ourselves (e.g., your examples: God, metaphysics, evolution) is the fact that when we consider "the life of the mind," we find a moving playing field. The morality that you propose - as based on "our heart's desires" - continually changes according to the contexts that condition us - e.g., epochs, cultures, local communities in which we're immersed, etc. How can we "base" anything on a moving foundation? This speaks to your well noted "begging the question" question.

    Why don't you want to live in a world of murder? Why do you long for the golden rule? What causes the hollowness that you feel when you're selfish? The answers to these questions moves beyond lived experience to the conditions that grant that experience. Most find these answers in something external, but that needn't be the case, and I think this is where your insights are leading you.

    We can't make sense of something to which we're experientially unrelated. Do I experience God? Do I experience a metaphysical principle which is to govern my behavior? Do I experience the trajectory of evolution? To each of these questions we may answer "yes" or "no," as in each case the question is interpretive. This suggests that, at "heart," what we are are interpretive beings, continually reinterpreting ourselves and our world in terms of what matters to us.

    Your "heart's desire" will be determined by factors external to your "heart" as lived experience, yet this is not a one-way street. You in turn have the capacity to determine the conditions that condition you. Some say this dialogical relation to the world that we possess constitutes the very nature of our being, in which case any morality so "based" would necessarily be a morality to which we're continually attentive (in your words: "where we take responsibility/recognition for our morality"). The key is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. We are conditioned beings, and to that we must attend, and in so doing we will access the "deep desire" of which you speak. Yet, as interpretive beings, the deepest of our desires must ever remain indeterminate, as conscience is, in the end, (to steal a line from Heidegger) the silent call that we hear when we choose choice.

    Lion Kimbro 5:26am May 26
    I am a moral realist; I believe that there is one morality that we all experience within ourselves but that it is an emergence and situated. So, no disagreements from me..!

    Lion Kimbro 5:28am May 26
    You have "jumped ahead" in my explanation. The next point to me is the question of "our we ultimately connected or ultimately disconnected?". If we are ultimately connected then our moralities connect. If our moralities connect there is one morality, the morality of love. But dang that is a lot of jargon.

    Joel Chandler 5:40am May 26
    "Are we ultimately connected or disconnected?" That depends on what you mean by "we." At first blush, your use of the word "we" gives you your answer. "We" already entails connectivity. But I know you're driving at something deeper. To which I reply, can't it be both? We are connected to the degree to which we share common factors that condition our experience, and not to the degree to which we are each uniquely situated. I'd suggest that our common conditions vastly outweigh our unique conditions. But the unique conditions are important for the progression of awareness (call it evolution if you like). It's the interplay between the two that I find most interesting.

    Lion Kimbro 5:43am May 26
    Unique and connected.

    John Abbe 8:37pm May 26
    Just scanning this thread, feel moved to offer my perspective that a common black hole in philosophy is to suppose that morality is 100% subjective or 100% objective. The reality imho transcends and includes both.

    Lion Kimbro 8:41pm May 26
    That doesn't make any sense to me, I don't see how you can say it is both 100% subjective and objective. I'd love to hear you speak about your idea of the higher order reality, though I am a bit miffed you are goading me to ask you for it. ;D

    John Abbe 8:48pm May 26
    I wouldn't say both 100% subjective and objective. The best analogy might be light - it is neither waves nor particles, but it's behavior is often such that it makes a lot of sense to talk about it as one or the other. Morality is neither subjective nor objective, but it often makes sense to talk about it as one or the other, as long as we don't lose sight of the fact that talking about it either way is incomplete.

    The typical political breakdown is that people on the right will say it's objective - god determines morality, and people on the right will say it's subjective - we each have our own perfectly valid morality. That's an oversimplification of course, but consciously at least I've certainly leaned toward the subjective. One realization I had reading Daniel Quinn's Ishmael was that there's a sort of physics of morality: If you live out of sync with reality, you will not last.
  • 13:19 UTC some thoughts on wiki, and people who may find thi...
    Edward Vielmetti 6:39pm May 20
    some thoughts on wiki, and people who may find this group of interest.

    Lion Kimbro 6:41pm May 20
    In a rush out the door so no link but- check out "TheoryBuilding" I think it was called.

    Edward Vielmetti 11:57pm May 20
    The phrase I'm familiar with is from Karl Weick, who uses the term "sensemaking" in the same approximate meaning.

    Lion Kimbro 3:00am May 23
    Yeah, that's the term I'd heard going around later after that page. Would love to rename it "SenseMaking," since that's what all the people are calling it.

    Sam Rose 8:19pm May 26
    When I showed using wiki "TheoryBuilding" way (including transclusion) to my friend Paul Hartzog, he immediately equated it with "bibliographic management". We actually made a really useful configuration of mediawiki for research in a "TheoryBuilding" approach and used it for a time.
  • 13:10 UTC I think this has applicability to wiki: http://www...
    Peter Kaminski 8:10pm May 26
    I think this has applicability to wiki: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicahagy/2012/05/25/learning-from-jerks/
  • 11:24 UTC I think a natural discussion point here would be '...
    Mark Dilley 7:59pm May 19
    I think a natural discussion point here would be 'WhyWeHateFacebook' or for a more positive spin on it 'WhyWeLoveWiki'

    Mark Dilley 8:05pm May 19
    First off - I don't know how I can be 'alerted' that there were several posts before this that started this line of thinking. So I am a little embarrassed that I started a new post when this could have been a comme t to either of the first two.

    Mark Dilley 8:06pm May 19
    Secondly, which I think touches the first is that Facebook is only a WriteOnlyMemory system (http://bit.ly/WriteOnlyMemory)

    John Abbe 7:49am May 20
    The question I'm interested in is, "What does wiki have to contribute to making something better than Facebook/Google+/etc.?"

    Lion Kimbro 1:21pm May 20
    Facebook has essentially fulfilled the vision of "OneBigSoup," (providing, specifically, the "personal server" and "group server" roles,) and it did it by following the PlatformsFirst strategy.

    Lion Kimbro 1:22pm May 20
    John Abbe, I think wiki contributes the idea of LinkLanguage, mainly. Easy document creation exists in most things these days, and RecentChanges existts in most things these days. WikiSyntax is integrated in various platforms too. So I think the main idea that wiki has to contribute is LinkLanguage. I can imagine FB integrating LinkLanguage, via a mechanism that would resemble LocalNames.

    Lion Kimbro 1:29pm May 20
    The reason I hate FB is because they own us, and, furthermore, the reason that they own us is because they own our friends -- which is to say: they own us *Personally.* FB was never "us," in the sense that Wikipedia as an institution is or was "us." FB is like a government, but a government that is definitely not democratic, and a government that lives in our house and watches us all the time.

    Lion Kimbro 1:34pm May 20
    To get away from FB would require a very real, serious, and sustained revolutionary effort. It will not be 20-somethings with free time working together in a fit of enthusiasm. You'd have to somehow convince most of my relatives who are not in any way interested in technical details, and not particularly politically/technically motivated to leave, to uproot their whole life and exodus to a new land, en masse. This new land would need to be shown to be in some way democratic, and it would of course need to be technically "better," meaning -- an extraordinarily better UserInterface. You could start getting traction via a smaller side-system comparable to Twitter or G+, but you would need to know for sure that you can grow it.

    Mark Dilley 2:19pm May 20
    Lion, explain how you understand that RecentChanges is here. For me I understand it as Recent Personal Notifications - but not understanding group transparency. Also, I have no idea how to find things here once they have passed by. I mentioned WriteOnlyMemory as an issue.

    Mark Dilley 2:20pm May 20
    We can bludgeon LinkLanguage, i.e. http://bit.ly/LinkLanguage

    Lion Kimbro 3:09pm May 20
    I say Recent Changes is here because most recent activity goes to the top of the groups page. Ex: in this group.

    Lion Kimbro 3:11pm May 20
    Re: finding things here- indeed, the lack of link language matters. But more- there is no search, nor means of exploring the records, save manually stepping through.

    Mark Dilley 4:47pm May 20
    Ok, so a thread bumps to the top ( something I just now learned after years here) what it needs is the ability to see the diff or at least through me to the new content. And that is per thread only - so what is missing is an InterestSphere - that one wiki creates.

    Edward Vielmetti 4:48pm May 20
    If anything, Lion, Facebook is entirely seen through the lens of recent changes - and if you want persistent conversations about specific topics, you need to plant those off-site.

    Lion Kimbro 4:54pm May 20
    Yes, Edward. Agreed. So we can construct our list of deficiencies and strengths. We have done good here picking out pieces. Let's see- we have LinkLanguage, document revisions, and persistent communications wanted. LinkLanguage is particularly specific to wiki, to date. DocumentMode collaboration has broadened out, but is a strength of wiki. And persisting threads is an important feature of Forum boards and email + email archives.

    Lion Kimbro 4:55pm May 20
    I think that FB adequately includes the interest sphere through the groups mechanism. Groups are easy to form.

    Lion Kimbro 4:56pm May 20
    Another major failure (or feature?) of FB is discoverability. People do not "google into" FB discussions. A bug for me, but a feature for most.

    Edward Vielmetti 5:26pm May 20
    Lion, regarding the question of migration to a new system. There will always be some progression from old systems to new ones, just because people like to start over and collect new friends every once in a while as their interests change. I see Facebook as just part of a continuum that started at Compuserve and Prodigy and Delphi and AOL and Friendster etc etc, and that eventually will be challenged by something else that's novel and probably simpler.

    Phil Jones 6:21pm May 20
    OK, I've written comments about this so often, I've just decided to make a page with my position on this issue : http://thoughtstorms.info/view/beatingfacebook

    (BTW : if you want to make your reply to me somewhere other than this thread, drop a link here and i promise to read it.)

    Alex Schröder 12:10am May 21
    Now somebody should take the discussion we had and summarize it on the wiki. We've moved from ReworkingIsHard to PostingIsHard. :)

    Mark Dilley 12:40am May 21
    Lion Kimbro - I have been using LinkLanguage in a different way the past year. It is not currently wiki bound, although I envision it back to being wiki bound. John Abbe and I had this discussion, John, do your remember where we wrote about it?

    Edward Vielmetti 1:03am May 21
    Phil Jones - another thought on beating facebook here: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2012/05/beating-facebook-imagining-what-comes-next.html

    Edward Vielmetti 1:08am May 21
    Mark Dilley - I think your LinkLanguage piece is here http://www.communitywiki.org/mark/LinkLanguage - describing how to use bitly as the unbinding tool.

    Mark Dilley 3:48pm May 25
    Many thanks Ed! I am just now seeing this, and I have tried to keep up with this FB group! This is exactly the page where John and I put our notes :-)

    Peter Kaminski 6:23pm May 26
    I don't hate Facebook or Google+, but I find them difficult to contribute to. For me, it is [[Why I Can't Love Facebook]] or [[Why I Can't Trust Google+]].

    Perhaps the core reason [[I Love Wiki]] is that wiki is community. The members of the community own it and govern it.

    This is true of physical communities, too. The citizens of San Francisco own it and govern it (even despite widely varying differences in representation and amount of ownership).

    Also importantly, there is no one small group who owns or governs *all* the physical communities; San Francisco is owned and governed by different people than those who own and govern Mumbai, Berlin, or Caracas.

    Conversely, while there are certainly communities which inhabit Facebook and Google+, the people who use Facebook and Google+ cannot own their communities, nor can they govern Facebook or Google. They lack basic [[community member rights]]. Facebook and Google+ own and govern the real estate these communities inhabit. They also own and govern the real estate that *all* the communities inhabit.

    On the one hand, when people interact with governments and other people, they have [[human rights]].

    On the other hand, while Facebook and Google are beholden to provide certain human rights, such as certain rights to privacy, they do not have to provide other rights, such as freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, or the right to self-determination of identity (hi, Google+ and #nymwars).

    On the one hand, when people interact with commercial vendors (their supermarket, their insurance company, their bank, their Internet service provider), they have [[customer rights]].

    On the other hand, Facebook and Google+ do not have to provide customer rights, because users do not pay to use the service.

    So therefore, people who use Facebook and Google+ end up with [[product rights]], not human rights or customer rights. As [[Andrew Lewis]] wrote, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

    I want me and my friends in community to be more than a product. I want us to be people.

    When Facebook and Google+ withold certain human rights, or govern poorly, it makes it hard for me to love Facebook, and hard for me to trust Google+.

    When a small, homogeneous group of people at Facebook and Google govern all the communities which inhabit their service, it makes it hard for me to love Facebook, and hard for me to trust Google+.

    Peter Kaminski 6:24pm May 26
    An exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the ownership and governance models of Facebook, Google+ and Wikipedia.




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