Curmudgeons Unite!
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Steve,
I felt that the analogy was attractive. Ah, CA... This week I made real progress on a long backburnered CA project of my own. A little over a decade ago, I ran across this blog post on realizing cellular automata as comonadic evaluation[☱]. Since then, I have wanted to generalize the result to higher dimensions. While presently only a toy, I have finally written a working model[☳]. As a pleasant corollary, I managed to learn quite a bit more about connections on fiber bundles. Go is such a wonderful game and I very much miss meeting up at the Violet Crown for a game and a pint on Tuesday nights, especially during the summer when we sit outside on the benches. I know of a couple of other go players on the list, it would be cool to hear some additional voices on the matter. I am very thankful to the NHK for making their matches available on youTube[☷], some with subtitles. Jon [☱] http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/12/evaluating-cellular-automata-is.html [☳] https://github.com/jonzingale/Haskell/blob/master/blinky/blinky_image/Comonad.hs [☷] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MObfCxOYOTQ&list=PLx0y1YBuwgxYkkicujlT2E1AfMkArTvx0 -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Ah yeah, "He not busy being born is busy dying..."
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In reply to this post by gepr
Well stated Jon, Well pivoted Glen... I'd challenge us to go further and reconsider/rethink how
"Democracy" in all it's recognizable forms is only a weak attempt
at achieving more fundamental goals/constraints of ??? (fairness,
egalatarianism, inclusiveness, diversity, liberty, ???). We, of course, are a Democratic Republic (modulo electoral
college, gerrymandering, voter suppression, widespread
disinformation, direct voter fraud) rather than a direct
Democracy. Interesting the current dominant (exclusive duopoly?)
Seems to reference our discussions of the canonical nearly-decomposable hierarchy, cohesion and coupling between identity-groups or special-interest-groups, etc. I cannot put my hands/eyes on the Ben Franklin quote I remember
from reading his Autobiography (inherited from my Grandfather
through my Father who likely never read it) some 20 years ago. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography A search yields no use of the term "faction" in the Pr. Gutenberg
text above... I suspect he used another term which I
transmogrified into "faction", or maybe I made the whole thing up,
but I remember him offering a nice tension around the temporary
aligning of factions to respond to a given challenge followed by a
dissolution of those factions to allow for a re-alignment into new
factions to meet new and different challenges. Self-organization galore? - Seize
On 8/20/20 3:31 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
The only plausible answer to this is the acceptance of a satisficing rule, a tolerance for error/uncertainty. That's what allows us to trust the USPS, which is simultaneously cursed by individuals on a regular basis, yet one of the most trusted institutions in place. All this election integrity hooha centers around quantitative confidence and perfection. But our first past the post system consistently tightens up our *intolerance* for uncertainty/error. That's the change that needs to be made first. As long as our elections are winner-takes-all and based on 50/50 thresholds, technology can't help us. Technology will simply kick the can down the road, leaving the main problem unaddressed. I.e. your billion dollar projects will largely be a waste of money, perhaps resulting in a Star Wars quality spinoff machine, but not solving the targeted objective. The first actionable steps are being taken. Ranked choice voting is steadily being adopted. It's also *not* a panacea. But at least it targets the disease, rather than the symptoms. On 8/19/20 10:06 PM, jon zingale wrote:Eric, Yes, what are the next actionable steps? In an upstream post I wrote: "Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post into design details, the voting app needs little more than a Facebook like-button, a Redis server, authentication, and a light-weight rest API. If the idea were to be taken seriously, such an app could be written starting now for an election in four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency, like the NSA." While the preceding quote effectively gets at the idea, I will further spill e-ink in the hopes of saying something practical, but first... Given the power to do so, I might try redirecting a hundred billion dollars from next year's military budget towards collaboration between big tech and government. The acceptance criteria would include public access to the code and the platform would be subjected to a week-long national hack-a-thon, complete with outrageous prizes and awards. Since this fantasy risks getting to far-out, let me reel things back a bit. Let me begin with a mission statement: Our goal is to introduce a trusted, reliable and secure digital voting option for U.S. elections. Determining a metric for success will require identifying: the scale of the project (city, state, nation)[1], collaborators with diverse skill sets and talents[2], the strengths and weaknesses of the current voting options[3], the state-of-the-art for digital application design[4]. [1] Selecting an appropriate scale for the project will be crucial to the adoption of the application. A full-blown application backed by industry and government organizations (with lobbyists in D.C.) could easily find adoption at the national level. Since the sole collaborators maybe just you and I, we may wish to start small, targeting the city level. Planning for this latter case, let's be prepared to scale if excitement around the program builds. Perhaps borrowing from or explicitly using a crowd-sourcing model would be good, extending to the state or national level manifesting as explicit *stretch goals*. Getting one or a few city contracts for our application may be just profitable enough to bootstrap the process. [2] The program will benefit greatly from the help of a diverse talent pool. We will need to design, build, test, and maintain the application. I advocate for seeking out individuals versed in building scalable critical applications and encouraging a transparent open-source development process. I foresee a role for trolls and white-hat hackers as it will be important to stress test and subject the application to *our worst*. We will need philosophers, critics, and trouble-finders all along the development process. That said, impossibility *proofs* ought to be taken with a grain of salt. We will need to lobby, campaign, and rouse excitement for the adoption of our application. It would be good to inspire competition because another group may just do it better, and ultimately this is what we want. It will be good to attract individuals that have a history with and have succeeded in: affecting policy, building grassroots movements, and selling the moon. It might be good to work with a business incubator or apply for an SBIR grant. [3] You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you. By studying the integrity of the voting systems presently in use, we can know where to set the bar for success. For instance, that the meaning of the postal service is being over-loaded in the 2020 election strikes me as a notable risk and a potential point of failure. Our application should be expected to do *just one thing*, and ideally the projects future funding will be promised independent of political influence. [4] As mentioned in the upstream posts, large scale web-based applications are here: the FBI-Apple encryption dispute, 20M concurrent Steam users, 1-click shopping, etc... Our application doesn't need to be very fancy and it would be good to avoid failing like the Iowa caucus. We don't need a *big reveal* on election night and then to impress the world as it flies along flawlessly. The opposite is needed. By the time the application is in production, it should be road-worn and rugged, the code probed and debated thoroughly on stack overflow and subreddits. This will not be the time or place for proprietary and opaque black boxes. The tech can be as impenetrable as an iPhone, as packet hungry as a Steam server and as intuitive as drunk shopping at 2 am on Amazon. The time period allowed the application should mimic mail-in voting rather than the polls. Votes could be validated slowly if need be. Perhaps, this may be one of the only reasonable applications for a block-chain protocol? Jon - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by jon zingale
Jon - Well said. I often look at our collective (in different
chunkings) in terms of opportunities lost. Evolution is
intrinsically wasteful by some measure, so it does not surprise me
that from a judgemental/discriminating/big-picture/hindsight
perspective *virtually everything that happens in human endeavor*
seems incredibly wasteful. I spend (nearly) half of my energy
boggled by this apprehension and (nearly) the other half trying to
refactor my perspectives of these things so that they *don't* seem
wasteful/squandered. Looking for "method in the madness" and
then working the meta-problem of pruning a variety of obviously
delusional overfits to the data at hand. I recognize that
many/most/all of my throwdowns/gurgitations here are lame
projections of the latter half. <groan> I especially appreciate the link to the PDF text of your Borges
reference. I can rarely put my hands on the original paper texts
I read some of these things in due to multiple hashings of
combining libraries, owning a bookstore, living with a bibliovore
( voracious book/collage artist),
shelving/reshelving/boxing/storing elaborate excesses, etc. Here
is someone else who has taken a whack at (or reflection on) one
aspect of the problem: Bibliophilia
Obscura. This particular Borges short reminds me particularly of Vonnegut
and perhaps Harrison
Bergeron, but then I suspect Vonnegut was significantly
influenced by Borges' abstractions. <... tangent snipped
...> Oh yeh, and you "can't grep paper" (even if my fragmented associative memory also often fails to find the right search terms: e.g. Franklin:faction). On the topic of "wasteful decadence", I finished watching AlphaGo
and YouTube rolled me into the PBS documentary The Amazon Empire
which I suspect implicates us *all* in one way or another. <...
yet another tangent snipped... > Carry on! - Steve
Sure my tongue-was-in-cheek wrt redirecting 1/9 of the U.S military budget to fund solving this problem, maybe it does detract from my main point. Fixing the problem of wasteful decadence is also not on the docket for me this pass through. I feel a lot can be said about what a culture burns its resources on. Hell, if we must, à la Ghostbusters, choose the form of the destroyer I choose the societal engine described in Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon"[£]. To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken, great, we now have the opportunity to take others. [£] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~inceogl4/modernism/lotteryofbabylon.pdf -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Steve,
MAKIF'AT writes: “Books are catnip – or porn, if you want to be vulgar about it - to me, and if they’re in plain sight, well, I’m going to be looking at them. I’m also gonna hightail it out after the meeting and look up as many of the titles as I can remember to see if they should go on my wishlist. I’m a bibliophile, and that’s what we do.” I relate deeply. Thank you, Signore Eco. In another life, I would have loved to be a librarian. When Margaret retired from her position as the SFI head librarian, I asked her if I could be considered for the post. She reminded me politely that I don't have a library science degree. The more unfortunate reason, as far as I am concerned, is that I simply don't have the temperament for it. I am hot-blooded through and through. A few years ago the downtown branch of the Santa Fe public library notified me to return a copy of Richard Hamming's 'Numerical Methods', a really nice hard-cover Springer copy. I did and then waited for a day to check it back out again, but alas it was gone, and not just checked out by another patron. The entire math section disappeared! I went to the desk and asked about the book. The math section was boxed up and sent to auction. They assured me that they were to get new books soon. I asked for another copy of the book and they were sad to inform me that it was too expensive for them to replace. One month later, I returned to find that the math books had been replaced by books about mathematicians. Surely they were just ignorant, us wizards read such esoteric tomes and they cannot be responsible for knowing what it is we want or need. I walked up to the checkout desk and asked if they were hiring for a curation position, and they again sadly informed me that they were not. I haven't returned since. Please, make no mistake, Alexandria is burning. As far as Go documentaries are concerned, have you checked out 'The Surrounding Game'🀀? A co-director of the film, Cole Pruitt, was finishing up a post-doc at LANL when he and Will completed the film. Cole would join us for the Saturday Santa Fe go club meetup at St. John's to play and he was a pleasure to learn from (~3 dan?). 🀀 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrounding_Game -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
So it’s not for the US today, but the thing that put Scott Boorman on the map (and fairly quickly got him installed in Yale), was an attempt to be a bit systematic and disciplined, and commit to some specific interpretations, for Mao and the infludnence of Go on military strategy across much of Asia, and on the consequences for misunderstanding and non-sequitur responses in West/East conflict zones:
Eric
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Huh, cool. Piqued my interest, I should probably order a copy :)
-- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by David Eric Smith
EricS -
So it’s not for the US today, but the thing that put Scott Boorman on the map (and fairly quickly got him installed in Yale), was an attempt to be a bit systematic and disciplined, and commit to some specific interpretations, for Mao and the infludnence of Go on military strategy across much of Asia, and on the consequences for misunderstanding and non-sequitur responses in West/East conflict zones: Excellent! I shall add learning Japanese to learning Go to my bucket list <grin>... or just reading: https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Boorman/dp/0195014936 I like the book-blurb about the US thinking it was playing Chess
when in fact it was Wei-Ch’i (also known as Go).
Back home, it looked to me like the politicians were playing
Checkers, expecting to sacrifice the board of Pawns tactically
to "win" and many of us being fitted for our "cannon fodder"
Pawn-costumes were playing "hell NO, I won't GO" or "hell YES!
Ho Gung HO!", ending up as cannon-fodder (body-bag or
tarNfeather draft-dodger suit nonetheless. This past 4 years has felt like a recurring nightmare game of
Tic-Tac-Toe even though we know the best outcome is a cat's-game
unless your opponent makes a stupid mistake, but then letting said
opponent (DT) flip the board every time he's about to lose (change
the subject of the headlines this cycle with an outrageous
tweet/order/act).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe#Strategy
- SteveS - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Steve -
Are you saying that DT tenukis every move? It appears to me that the Dems follow him around the board. While the latter is most certainly a beginner mistake, the former (if memory serves) was the sound advice given to a young Janice Kim from her father. idk, I will ask her next I see her. -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
Bibliophiliacs (was:Curmudgeons) Unite!
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In reply to this post by jon zingale
Jon - What a familiar story when dealing with nearly decomposeable
bureaucratic hierarchies (left/right hand mutual ignorance)!
When I came to LANL, the library allowed books (after a short
period of limited circulation upon acquisition) to be shelved as
long as you wanted in your own office bookshelf as long as you
agreed to allow another staff member to "borrow" it from your
shelf (mediated/tracked by the library) for the nominal designated
week or two. At some point, the library decided to eliminate
this by A) calling all of the books in; B) allowing a
free-for-all giveaway to staff of said books; C) allowing a more
generous personal purchase allowance for books; D) capping the
size of the permanent collection. Fortunately when they called
the books "home", one of the possible responses on the list of
books en holdin, was "unable to return book" implying damage or
loss, but leaving room for "I don't want to". The list of
"unable to return" books was remitted to our group leaders (middle
managers) who might consider some kind of censure, but I never
heard of any group leader even checking one's bookshelves for any
such "witheld" books or complaining to anyone. In principle, a
staff member could have turned in a book and then gone to the
free-for-all and retrieved it. I gave up my Knuth collection
from that era to someone else who coveted them even MORE. Your anecdote makes me think that I must invite you (someday) to the "grand unpacking" of my 6x6x12 box-trailer of books (fondly known as my "two cords of books"... if packed tight, closer to 3.5 cords @ 432cf?) where I would invite any number of people to:
- Steve PS. My greatest score ever during my rabid-collection (ending ca
2014) phase was a *full color* faithful reproduction of
Michelson's notebook (published by Bell Labs in the late 60s?)
covering the famous Michelson-Morely experiment at the St. Johns
annual $5/bag-of-books sale (2003?). I saw a stack of perhaps 20
of them and happily took a copy, coveting the other 19.
Meanwhile my partner Suzanne tripped over them as well and took 2
copies (I was surprised she didn't take all of them) as her father
was a Physics professor and the diagrams at least, were
familiar... a few minutes later, I saw another patron take the
remaining stack and drop them in his sack. I was really torn by
this act of greed, even though I had contemplated grabbing "a few
more". Later, I found Suzanne cutting up one of them for a
collage/book project, planning to vivisect the second one (I had
hidden my own copy by that time)... and talked her into letting me
make a color photocopy of the pages from the second copy she
intended to have her way with. I had a particular
colleague/friend in mind to gift the second copy to, but over the
decade(s?) since then I have ached to have additional copies to
share. I think I once did a search and found a copy for sale
online for some outrageous price (~$100) but did not find anything
(just now) with a half-hearted effort. I'm not sure if my
copy-in-reserve is still in one of those boxes or in a hidden
file-folder or if in fact I gave over and gifted it to someone
spontaneously. If I still have a copy, I would gift it to you
Jon. Stay tuned... Steve, MAKIF'AT writes: “Books are catnip – or porn, if you want to be vulgar about it - to me, and if they’re in plain sight, well, I’m going to be looking at them. I’m also gonna hightail it out after the meeting and look up as many of the titles as I can remember to see if they should go on my wishlist. I’m a bibliophile, and that’s what we do.” I relate deeply. Thank you, Signore Eco. In another life, I would have loved to be a librarian. When Margaret retired from her position as the SFI head librarian, I asked her if I could be considered for the post. She reminded me politely that I don't have a library science degree. The more unfortunate reason, as far as I am concerned, is that I simply don't have the temperament for it. I am hot-blooded through and through. A few years ago the downtown branch of the Santa Fe public library notified me to return a copy of Richard Hamming's 'Numerical Methods', a really nice hard-cover Springer copy. I did and then waited for a day to check it back out again, but alas it was gone, and not just checked out by another patron. The entire math section disappeared! I went to the desk and asked about the book. The math section was boxed up and sent to auction. They assured me that they were to get new books soon. I asked for another copy of the book and they were sad to inform me that it was too expensive for them to replace. One month later, I returned to find that the math books had been replaced by books about mathematicians. Surely they were just ignorant, us wizards read such esoteric tomes and they cannot be responsible for knowing what it is we want or need. I walked up to the checkout desk and asked if they were hiring for a curation position, and they again sadly informed me that they were not. I haven't returned since. Please, make no mistake, Alexandria is burning. As far as Go documentaries are concerned, have you checked out 'The Surrounding Game'🀀? A co-director of the film, Cole Pruitt, was finishing up a post-doc at LANL when he and Will completed the film. Cole would join us for the Saturday Santa Fe go club meetup at St. John's to play and he was a pleasure to learn from (~3 dan?). 🀀 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrounding_Game -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by jon zingale
That’s cool, Jon,
You know Janice Kim? 2-DOS Eric > On Aug 21, 2020, at 11:50 AM, jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Steve - > > Are you saying that DT tenukis every move? It appears to me that the Dems > follow him around the board. While the latter is most certainly a beginner > mistake, the former (if memory serves) was the sound advice given to a young > Janice Kim from her father. idk, I will ask her next I see her. > > > > -- > Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,b0h4yWKwRmMpXpmC-IpFhUPqVnXP1npuXiBGVUQfMcCw6ZiiZmfP2IkLif9fM4ed_QE37Q7FSfnTWXqqKbWDG9-ot67CGbQq9LU9oEYYUPmR6IEI8yw,&typo=1 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,RGVmefgXA5OcZWMNFXFYYAJOatqwkZB6rjwaN6UhbkONk4s050GNusazN7XD-Fh8IIEJBDsi7g_jT-gxSSEgyMGufiaAeWK6Y1deT61-&typo=1 - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by jon zingale
> Steve - > > Are you saying that DT tenukis every move? It appears to me that the Dems > follow him around the board. While the latter is most certainly a beginner > mistake, the former (if memory serves) was the sound advice given to a young > Janice Kim from her father. idk, I will ask her next I see her. I am too lame at Go to say much, but aping the idiom as best I can, I think the *media* has followed him around the board and to the extent the board we are playing on is much larger than the 19x19 standard grid, he has gotten away with a Tenuki nearly every week/event. The analogy breaks down badly unless we can invoke some kind of *collective* Go playing with team Trump and team McConnel and team Limbaugh/Jones and team Bannon (see the news on him today?!) and probably team Putin and Team Assange and ??? with, as you say Team Pelosi, Team mainstream Media, and Team alternative Media (e.g. DN, Guardian, etc.) "following them around the board". I'm looking forward with morbid fascination/trepidation at how the configuration of the board is going to need/deserve "cleaning up" in a few more months... I'm sure there will still be rearGuard defenses skirmishing against those who DO try to clean it up, just as there must have been in all the failed Trump enterprises (Steaks, University, Casino, ... ) and now the myriad schemes he's started/aborted/abandoned these last 3.x years from the White House. I hope Biden/Harris, and more to the point, the army of functionaries (Cabinet staff, Department/Agency staff, etc.), look at what *those* cleanup crews had to deal with... like the retreating Axis armies in Europe WWII, it suspect there will be (metaphorical) undetonated munitions everywhere if not outright mines set to destroy evidence and slow down the Allies. I also hope Biden/Harris and their other power-allies look more to Mandela's or Havel's lead than to Stalin's or Putin's or Trump's in a post-opposition nation. Of course many here will (loudly or silently) decry my implied optimism on the upcoming overthrow of "he who shall not be named". - Steve > > > > -- > Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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In reply to this post by jon zingale
Nah. That's simply false and cleverly ignores my post entirely. Tools don't solve problems. The typical Republican approach of throwing money at some vague problem doesn't work. What does work is to identify the problem and develop candidate solutions to it using the extant tools. Resources devoted to your nonexistent tool will make the problem worse. And even if your tool did exist [⛧], it would make the problem worse.
The problem is our mechanism for representative government. That mechanism lenses in, magnifies, the wiggle and defocuses the "bases" to the periphery. You see it every day. Just yesterday, there was a segment on some TV show asking the panel about whether or not Harris as VP will help sway the "undecided" ... the "independent". Pffft. It's nonsense. Your tool will do that, enable that, magnify that, if the actual problem isn't addressed *first*. And it's a very difficult problem to solve. So the more time we spend on distracting nonsense like alternative voting technology, the *less* time we spend working on the actual problem(s) -- the electoral college, first-past-the-post, informed citizenry, gerrymandering, etc. It's not zero sum, of course, but there are opportunity costs. The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. The USPS, vote fraud nonsense is more eshatological Trump disinformation designed to distract us dorks from the real problem(s) while the gamers continue their game. [⛧] There are *many* exploratory alternative voting efforts going on all over the country, all of which exhibit a panoply of security flaws. On 8/20/20 7:53 AM, jon zingale wrote: > To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative > voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all > modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal > problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone > apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating > for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct > concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity > is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken, > great, we now have the opportunity to take others. - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and after
the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool doesn't solve problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee voting generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your post, it is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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There are other trials beside absentee voting. It's largely irrelevant, though, as is the patent. My point was that this focus on "digital" voting will do more harm than good. Of course, everyone is free to do harm, accidentally or on purpose. My only objective was to point out why these efforts will be harmful if the core problems aren't addressed first.
On 8/21/20 7:46 AM, jon zingale wrote: > Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and after > the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool doesn't solve > problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and > technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee voting > generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your post, it > is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started. - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Glen -
I know you tried to be explicit about what the core problems are, and I am aligned with what you have gestured at and I don't expect you to have been complete or detailed in this type of forum on such a huge subject. Huge in depth, breadth, and perhaps more critical, import. I am glad you are carrying that torch to keep the playing/working field illuminated well. On the other hand, I *do* think the mechanisms involved in maintaining coherence, etc. must be considered and acted upon as possible/necessary as well. In the idiom of the moment, it isn't enough to declare that the Postal Service is sacred and must be allowed/supported to be robust, etc... but the staffing policies, the maintenance of physical mailboxes and delivery trucks and sorting machines must also be attended to to achieve the former. To the extent that the latter is where the former are encoded, I am sympathetic with those who are eager to "get to work" on the specific mechanisms which *can* be worked on while the abstractions of the moment feel hard/impossible to address. I think this is an example of one of our ongoing threads of conversation here... not just about the *spectrum* of concrete<->abstract, but the need to keep the distinction in our awareness and to evaluate the tensions between them and work them against (or more to the point, with) one another. My experience with systems analysis, engineering, development seem relevant and mirrors what I suspect many here also use as their lens. Networked Digital Computing is our hammer, so the aspects of our Democracy which has purchase for a hammer becomes our nail. I suspect that your own steeping in working on modeling biological systems and using bio-inspired idioms for modeling non biological systems gives you a better perspective on this tension than some of us might have. My own limited understanding of such things suggests that this tension between mechanism/goal and intrinsic/extrinsic is key, and I am hoping that the tension between Jon's focus (at this moment) on mechanism/intrinsic (to the voting system) and your more big-picture awareness of the constraints/goals of human endeavor is precisely the kind of tension that allows our whole system to pivot from something that might have worked (barely, sortof, for many/some of us) in the past to something which can continue to meet the whole level of needs in some as-yet-unspecified new-Maslowian hierarchy or complex. - Steve > There are other trials beside absentee voting. It's largely > irrelevant, though, as is the patent. My point was that this focus on > "digital" voting will do more harm than good. Of course, everyone is > free to do harm, accidentally or on purpose. My only objective was to > point out why these efforts will be harmful if the core problems > aren't addressed first. > > On 8/21/20 7:46 AM, jon zingale wrote: >> Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and >> after >> the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool >> doesn't solve >> problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and >> technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee >> voting >> generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your >> post, it >> is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started. > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Hm. I want to confirm that this post is commentary and you're not expecting a response. But maybe it's push-back for me to be *more* explicit about the problem? Just in case, I'll throw more words/gestures at it.
The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow, faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false equivalence between household budgets and national economies (or in comparing the USPS to a corporation, or in approval rates for our representative vs Congress as a whole, or in thousands of other individual vs collective contexts). As I've tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced. Personally, I think anyone ought to be able to destroy the world. Politically, socially, that's madness and we ought to ban handguns entirely. As the Carter paper on Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology tries to tease out, fidelity/accuracy in representation is a huge problem, one exhibited across all scales and domains (tech included). Clinton famously demonstrated *she* understands the difference when she expressed that she has different private vs public positions about Wall Street. Of course! We all should have individual vs. social distinctions. The problem is the map (or lack thereof) between them. We can even use the virus and the fact that personal psyches have trouble with large numbers, exponential growth and statistics. E.g. that everyone was surprised by how "wrong" the polls were about Clinton being X% likely to win. Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in the popular vote will continue this false equivalence between individual and collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that produced Trump's win. Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target the disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with Nick. Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to the tabulation and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position helps him understand how Republicans win elections, then it's useful to go into a little more detail about the actual problem like I'm trying to do, here. On 8/21/20 8:20 AM, Steve Smith wrote: > Glen - > > I know you tried to be explicit about what the core problems are, and I > am aligned with what you have gestured at and I don't expect you to have > been complete or detailed in this type of forum on such a huge subject. > Huge in depth, breadth, and perhaps more critical, import. I am glad > you are carrying that torch to keep the playing/working field > illuminated well. > > On the other hand, I *do* think the mechanisms involved in maintaining > coherence, etc. must be considered and acted upon as possible/necessary > as well. In the idiom of the moment, it isn't enough to declare that > the Postal Service is sacred and must be allowed/supported to be robust, > etc... but the staffing policies, the maintenance of physical mailboxes > and delivery trucks and sorting machines must also be attended to to > achieve the former. To the extent that the latter is where the former > are encoded, I am sympathetic with those who are eager to "get to work" > on the specific mechanisms which *can* be worked on while the > abstractions of the moment feel hard/impossible to address. > > I think this is an example of one of our ongoing threads of conversation > here... not just about the *spectrum* of concrete<->abstract, but the > need to keep the distinction in our awareness and to evaluate the > tensions between them and work them against (or more to the point, with) > one another. > > My experience with systems analysis, engineering, development seem > relevant and mirrors what I suspect many here also use as their lens. > Networked Digital Computing is our hammer, so the aspects of our > Democracy which has purchase for a hammer becomes our nail. > > I suspect that your own steeping in working on modeling biological > systems and using bio-inspired idioms for modeling non biological > systems gives you a better perspective on this tension than some of us > might have. My own limited understanding of such things suggests that > this tension between mechanism/goal and intrinsic/extrinsic is key, and > I am hoping that the tension between Jon's focus (at this moment) on > mechanism/intrinsic (to the voting system) and your more big-picture > awareness of the constraints/goals of human endeavor is precisely the > kind of tension that allows our whole system to pivot from something > that might have worked (barely, sortof, for many/some of us) in the past > to something which can continue to meet the whole level of needs in some > as-yet-unspecified new-Maslowian hierarchy or complex. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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On 8/21/20 9:58 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote: > Hm. I want to confirm that this post is commentary and you're not > expecting a response. I'm always *hoping for* responses, but don't usually expect that my style or even content is something others care to or feel able to respond to. > But maybe it's push-back for me to be *more* explicit about the > problem? Just in case, I'll throw more words/gestures at it. Yes, I definitely meant to invite that if not *expect* it. And I appreciate it. > The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow, > faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false > equivalence between household budgets and national economies (or in > comparing the USPS to a corporation, or in approval rates for our > representative vs Congress as a whole, or in thousands of other > individual vs collective contexts). And I take this to be strongly related with your issue with metaphor... metaphors can be used thoughtfully to help explain or understand one system in terms of another, but they can also be used to *generate* or *exploit* conflations for various purposes misaligned with understanding or explanation. > As I've tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced. > Personally, I think anyone ought to be able to destroy the world. > Politically, socially, that's madness and we ought to ban handguns > entirely. I appreciate this span. I experience it more *generally* in the sense that my extreme awareness of Libertarian ideals unto Anarchism is that I can do anything I *can*. But as you imply (I think), I *choose* to live within the context of a culture where I have to constrain many of the things I *could* do, as a participant in shaping the society/world I want to live in. I *want* to live in a world where there are very few people suffering acutely from any of the implied needs in what I've referred to as neo-Maslowian... I don't want to be deluded into thinking that my simple acts of commission/omission actually directly *cause* the world to be a better place, but I also think it is a delusion that I can operate acutely *counter* to the ways of the world I want to live in and still expect it to manifest in that way. In your example, I believe that by owning, carrying, brandishing firearms I help to create a world where my only sense of security is likely to come from owning, carrying, and brandishing more and better firearms. So I don't and live with the paradox that *others* do choose that path, and thereby have the opportunity to impress-by-force on me and mine with those in ways that might be blunted if *I* chose their path as well. My house could become the sight of a national news-headline-worthy firefight with friends, neighbors, criminals, law enforcement, military, etc... depending on the scenario. > As the Carter paper on Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology tries to > tease out, fidelity/accuracy in representation is a huge problem, one > exhibited across all scales and domains (tech included). Clinton > famously demonstrated *she* understands the difference when she > expressed that she has different private vs public positions about > Wall Street. Of course! We all should have individual vs. social > distinctions. The problem is the map (or lack thereof) between them. > > We can even use the virus and the fact that personal psyches have > trouble with large numbers, exponential growth and statistics. E.g. > that everyone was surprised by how "wrong" the polls were about > Clinton being X% likely to win. > > Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in > the popular vote will continue this false equivalence between > individual and collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that > produced Trump's win. Parscale/Bannon could exploit into a (slim/faux but qualitatively signifcant) win. > Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target > the disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with > Nick. Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to > the tabulation and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position > helps him understand how Republicans win elections, then it's useful > to go into a little more detail about the actual problem like I'm > trying to do, here. And so, explicitly, can you elaborate yet more on this abstraction? What I think you introduce (well) above is the conflation between the personal/collective, private/public conceptions. I could (as I often do) riff on *my* apprehension of what that looks like or how it goes wrong, but I would welcome your's and other's thoughts on this. In particular I'm interested on "just what is it" we are trying to achieve with our representative democracy and how well are we and where might there be room for improvement? Mary and I have been discussing the details of how (mechanically) we will participate in this November 2020 election. As denizens of a fairly strongly blue state, I don't worry that my vote will make or break the "Blue Tide", but it feels like there are lots of meta-narratives implied in if/when/how/who we vote. I'm torn between wanting to help prove/exercise the mail-in voting system and wanting to engage/enjoy the implied spirit of in-person voting and contrasting it with my father's admonition of "vote early, vote often" by taking advantage of generous early voting here and avoiding being part of "the rush". I think I have settled for simply "voting vert early" and paying close attention to the dates/times/location so that I'm not scurrying at the last minute like Mary had to for the Democrat Primary (I'm "unaffiliated"). Paralleling your schizm on guns, I'm fantasizing about taking a paintball gun to (the perimeter of) my polling place and "marking" any poll watchers who think they need to show up exercising *their* open carry rights at that perimeter. I am sure I will not do such a thing for myriad reasons, but I enjoy considering the irony of the various ragtag "Militias" that have chosen to involve themselves in other things in a disruptive/intimidating fashion being confronted with a mock shooting. For the faint of heart here, I re-iterate "I am sure I will not", just like I don't actually go around cutting the truck-nuts off of pickups even though I tell my friends who are likely to sport them that I *do* carry bolt-cutters for precisely that purpose. I just can't resist the cognitive dissonance of the image. - Steve - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Re mismatched expectations with voting and representation versus liberal use of metaphor: yes, they are strongly related. My impulse is to object slightly and say that I'm a big fan of metaphor. But I'm not a big fan of constant reflection on our (ubiquitous) metaphors. It's analysis paralysis ... or navel gazing. It's human to see *through* the metaphor, as a tool, to it's target and constant focus on the tool is debilitating ... similar to arguing about word definitions.
Re personal vs political position: yes, I feel the same way you do in wondering if/how my individual *can* possibilities help construct the world I *want* to see. This is another form of (forward) map from individual to collective. We see lots of posturing about how some one person thinks they know how that map works (e.g. individualists claiming it doesn't work at all, socialists claiming all their favorite examples demonstrate how it should work, technologists claiming "if you build it they will come", etc.). I tend to push back and ask that we study the map(s) before making such claims. Re Parscale/Bannon gaming: Exactly. The more our representation depends on first-past-the-post, and the more technology we insert in between the humans being represented and the humans doing the representing, the more *gamable* the system. Re what are we trying to achieve with our representation?: I don't know. It would be *great* if we could ask that of the people, everyone, homeless and wealthy alike, in such a well-formed way that their answers would parse and compose. But I doubt we can. That question and its forms co-evolves with the answers. And that coevolutionary, wandering, implicit set of objectives argues, again, for a more robust and spread out representation. I.e. a parliamentary system which allows the wings and extremes to participate in the government helps ask good questions and helps provide parsable and compositional answers. A ranked choice voting scheme helps formulate the questions and answers. The electoral college (and Senate/House structure) was a (failed) attempt to do that, too, I think. The reason I think a steady re-org of representation is necessary before digital vote tech is because these questions are not well-formed. If you don't understand the input, you won't understand the output. I *love* the idea of the paintball gun. But it does sound a bit like suicide ... suicide by gun nut. On 8/21/20 1:10 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > > On 8/21/20 9:58 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote: >> >> The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow, >> faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false >> equivalence between household budgets and national economies (or in >> comparing the USPS to a corporation, or in approval rates for our >> representative vs Congress as a whole, or in thousands of other >> individual vs collective contexts). > And I take this to be strongly related with your issue with metaphor... > metaphors can be used thoughtfully to help explain or understand one > system in terms of another, but they can also be used to *generate* or > *exploit* conflations for various purposes misaligned with understanding > or explanation. >> As I've tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced. >> Personally, I think anyone ought to be able to destroy the world. >> Politically, socially, that's madness and we ought to ban handguns >> entirely. > I appreciate this span. I experience it more *generally* in the sense > that my extreme awareness of Libertarian ideals unto Anarchism is that I > can do anything I *can*. But as you imply (I think), I *choose* to > live within the context of a culture where I have to constrain many of > the things I *could* do, as a participant in shaping the society/world I > want to live in. [...] >> Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in >> the popular vote will continue this false equivalence between >> individual and collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that >> produced Trump's win. > And in some way perhaps magnify it, or make it something the likes of > Parscale/Bannon could exploit into a (slim/faux but qualitatively > signifcant) win. >> >> Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target >> the disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with >> Nick. Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to >> the tabulation and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position >> helps him understand how Republicans win elections, then it's useful >> to go into a little more detail about the actual problem like I'm >> trying to do, here. > > And so, explicitly, can you elaborate yet more on this abstraction? > What I think you introduce (well) above is the conflation between the > personal/collective, private/public conceptions. I could (as I often > do) riff on *my* apprehension of what that looks like or how it goes > wrong, but I would welcome your's and other's thoughts on this. In > particular I'm interested on "just what is it" we are trying to achieve > with our representative democracy and how well are we and where might > there be room for improvement? > > Mary and I have been discussing the details of how (mechanically) we > will participate in this November 2020 election. As denizens of a > fairly strongly blue state, I don't worry that my vote will make or > break the "Blue Tide", but it feels like there are lots of > meta-narratives implied in if/when/how/who we vote. I'm torn between > wanting to help prove/exercise the mail-in voting system and wanting to > engage/enjoy the implied spirit of in-person voting and contrasting it > with my father's admonition of "vote early, vote often" by taking > advantage of generous early voting here and avoiding being part of "the > rush". I think I have settled for simply "voting vert early" and > paying close attention to the dates/times/location so that I'm not > scurrying at the last minute like Mary had to for the Democrat Primary > (I'm "unaffiliated"). > > Paralleling your schizm on guns, I'm fantasizing about taking a > paintball gun to (the perimeter of) my polling place and "marking" any > poll watchers who think they need to show up exercising *their* open > carry rights at that perimeter. I am sure I will not do such a thing > for myriad reasons, but I enjoy considering the irony of the various > ragtag "Militias" that have chosen to involve themselves in other things > in a disruptive/intimidating fashion being confronted with a mock > shooting. For the faint of heart here, I re-iterate "I am sure I will > not", just like I don't actually go around cutting the truck-nuts off > of pickups even though I tell my friends who are likely to sport them > that I *do* carry bolt-cutters for precisely that purpose. I just can't > resist the cognitive dissonance of the image. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Glen -
> Re mismatched expectations with voting and representation versus > liberal use of metaphor: yes, they are strongly related. My impulse is > to object slightly and say that I'm a big fan of metaphor. But I'm not > a big fan of constant reflection on our (ubiquitous) metaphors. It's > analysis paralysis ... or navel gazing. It's human to see *through* > the metaphor, as a tool, to it's target and constant focus on the tool > is debilitating ... similar to arguing about word definitions. I do agree on this, even though (because) I resemble that description... "when you are a navel gazer, everything looks like lint"? > Re personal vs political position: yes, I feel the same way you do in > wondering if/how my individual *can* possibilities help construct the > world I *want* to see. This is another form of (forward) map from > individual to collective. We see lots of posturing about how some one > person thinks they know how that map works (e.g. individualists > claiming it doesn't work at all, socialists claiming all their > favorite examples demonstrate how it should work, technologists > claiming "if you build it they will come", etc.). I tend to push back > and ask that we study the map(s) before making such claims. Yes, this seems to be the "Hard Problem" of real-world "collective *", and in fact I don't think studying the maps is enough in the sense that I believe we need to *generate* a lot of these maps *in the real world* which is why I'm a fan of the seeming disorder, for example, in global (and even national) pandemic response. It is the real-world realization of *ensemble studies* crossed with the ideal of the "halting problem"? The only (or reasonably efficient) way to answer the problem of "Life the Universe and Everything" is to let it play out, even if we understand in advance that the Eigenvalue is '42'. > Re Parscale/Bannon gaming: Exactly. The more our representation > depends on first-past-the-post, and the more technology we insert in > between the humans being represented and the humans doing the > representing, the more *gamable* the system. I agree with the general sentiment. Patches on top of patches on top of patches does not yield a more robust system... at best, it circumvents the last or most egregious breach/abuse. This is what refactoring is all about? In a more general sense, what paradigm shifts are all about. > Re what are we trying to achieve with our representation?: I don't > know. It would be *great* if we could ask that of the people, > everyone, homeless and wealthy alike, in such a well-formed way that > their answers would parse and compose. That is what a "National Conversation" should look like, and what primaries/debates/elections *might used to have* served. I felt *I* had a little bit of that during the short-circuited Democratic Primaries... but would like more. > But I doubt we can. That question and its forms co-evolves with the > answers. Yup... > And that coevolutionary, wandering, implicit set of objectives argues, > again, for a more robust and spread out representation. I.e. a > parliamentary system which allows the wings and extremes to > participate in the government helps ask good questions and helps > provide parsable and compositional answers. A ranked choice voting > scheme helps formulate the questions and answers. The electoral > college (and Senate/House structure) was a (failed) attempt to do > that, too, I think. Having recently (re)watched Turn; Washington's Spies and John Adams, and reading "Team of Rivals" (Goodwin's biography of Lincoln starting decades before his presidency and following his frienemies and coopetitors through the time) with Mary, I have a new appreciation for how hard those people worked *and* how flawed many of them were, and how flawed the processes involved. It both makes me much more appreciative of the result and simultaneously understand how "Sacred" it isn't. My friends in UK and OZ would all tell me that *their* Parliamentary System is/has-been gamed badly also. But I find the accomodation of factions and "wandering" among various semi-stable (e.g Lagrange) points a step above. I believe that Trump's significant contribution has been to show us how gamed and gameable our current system has become. He said he was going to "drain the swamps and eject the alligators", I claim he simply took control of the levies and gates, thus "managing the swamps", introduced his own nest of Crocodiles (who he seems not to even recognize when they get hauled out of the swamp and into court/prison) and then presided over the ever-more-toxic-miasmic-and-dangerous result as the Lord of the Flies that he is. > > I *love* the idea of the paintball gun. But it does sound a bit like > suicide ... suicide by gun nut. Yah... *one* of the many reasons for not doing it, though I suspect a well practiced paintballer (not me) could run circles around a crowd of open-carry militia nuts, decorating them lavishly without getting touched themselves. For the tech geeks, I recommend *this* alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P28LKWTzrI The gun nuts *I* know (and sometimes call friends) would either A) be practiced enough to actually hit a (probably not moving) target, but likely unable emotionally/spiritually to shoot at another human being under "normal" situations; B) be quite ready to unleash hellfire on a provoking citizen but not particularly disciplined or well practiced enough to hit anything except maybe each other. I was surprised to see (class II?) lasers being deployed against the Federal Agents in Portland... I have always expected to see a laser dot playing on the chests or foreheads of militia types when they are posturing at the gate to the federal lands they believe are their own, or at a BLM rally, etc. I don't think any of this is actually a *good idea* and apparently most others feel the same, else we *would* see more of it? And as another diversion: http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html - Steve - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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