How I made my own VPN server in 15 minutes | TechCrunch

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Glen write:

< More on topic, it's these signals, these symbols, like which sites to which you encrypt your visits or UDP vs TCP that tell us everything we need to know about you. >

I guess if "everything we need to know" is that social behavior measurable over narrow windows of time.   If, as you say, Snowden is a `dork', then it should have been a simple matter to predict his behavior and stop it.   But it is not so simple because people don't reveal themselves in such overt ways.   They may only reveal some dimensions and those dimensions may to a significant extent just be performance.

Marcus
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[gepr]

On 04/12/2017 05:02 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I guess if "everything we need to know" is that social behavior measurable over narrow windows of time.

There's no implication of the time window being narrow.  Sure, there's a tradeoff between cache size and target value.  But if we assume unlimited cache size for any particular target, then the window can be unlimited.

> If, as you say, Snowden is a `dork', then it should have been a simple matter to predict his behavior and stop it.   But it is not so simple because people don't reveal themselves in such overt ways.   They may only reveal some dimensions and those dimensions may to a significant extent just be performance.

I agree it may not be simple.  But I claim the information is there for anyone who lives a significant portion of their life online.  The more you live in meat space, the less of a footprint you'll leave.  The point being that it doesn't matter how many VPNs you set up or how many layers of the onion your traffic goes through, if you live your life online, the information is there.  That does not imply that it's simple to reconstruct the state space, though.

--
☣ glen

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

There's a Quinn Norton article on Medium about falling in love without leaving a digital trail, and then finding out that the state wants your digital trail to verify the relationship before granting resident status.

-- rec --

On Apr 12, 2017 8:04 PM, "Marcus Daniels" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen write:

< More on topic, it's these signals, these symbols, like which sites to which you encrypt your visits or UDP vs TCP that tell us everything we need to know about you. >

I guess if "everything we need to know" is that social behavior measurable over narrow windows of time.   If, as you say, Snowden is a `dork', then it should have been a simple matter to predict his behavior and stop it.   But it is not so simple because people don't reveal themselves in such overt ways.   They may only reveal some dimensions and those dimensions may to a significant extent just be performance.

Marcus
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"But I claim the information is there for anyone who lives a significant portion of their life online."

Hmm, well, there are millions of employees of corporations or the government that never reveal anything significant with regard to their non-disclosure agreements.

Marcus

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[gepr]

On 04/12/2017 05:22 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Hmm, well, there are millions of employees of corporations or the government that never reveal anything significant with regard to their non-disclosure agreements.

I suspect that information will be (mostly) about the corporation, not the employee.  Even in the case of a start-up founder (whose identity is closely aligned with the corporate purpose, at least temporarily), that founder is usually acting as an agent of the corporation.  A profile of an employee deep in the throes of their professional work will tend to capture their profession, not their humanity.  But the employee's _fashion_, well, that's another story.  Roger's cf is closer to the intent of advertising and spamming profilers (which is ostensibly why we care about ISPs selling our traffic info).

I get all these advertisements for things like knock outs, cell lines, compounds, and lab equipment despite my (almost utter) lack of interest in such.  I presume it reflects my googling as well as the rest of my online footprint (my name on some journal articles).  That would be akin to inducing predicates for confidential info, I think.  E.g. say your profile indicates you may be familiar with intelligence assets in Eastern Europe.  But your fashions tend toward cowboy hats and country music.  My guess is that the "Eastern Europe" profile is less about you and more about your profession, whereas your fashion predicates are more about you.  Are we defined by our jobs?

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☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"A profile of an employee deep in the throes of their professional work will tend to capture their profession, not their humanity."

If you posit there does exist this humanity as distinct from the organization (but this not clear to me in general), then it is reasonable to think there exists personal information that is not really available at all (not only electronically) just as the organizational information is not disclosed.   "Living in the closet" is one common example.

Marcus


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[gepr]

On 04/13/2017 09:43 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If you posit there does exist this humanity as distinct from the organization (but this not clear to me in general), then it is reasonable to think there exists personal information that is not really available at all (not only electronically) just as the organizational information is not disclosed.   "Living in the closet" is one common example.

Of course.  But my claim was not that your traffic tells us everything there can be known about you.  My claim was that it tells us everything we _need_ to know about you.  I suspect everyone has a complex occult kernel buried deep inside them.  And whatever secrets are hidden in there would be interesting (perhaps necessary) to those who are deeply familiar with that person, family, lovers, etc.  But for spam?  Naaa.  Of course, everything lies on a spectrum.  So, when the FBI profiles a serial killer, they're going to make a serious effort to unravel and make sense of that kernel.  Somewhere in the middle would be Levashov.  We simply need to learn enough about his person[ality] to catch him ... like when he visits Spain with his family.  Someone like Satoshi Nakamoto would be an even more interesting case.

But this thread is about possible techniques to compensate for Trump rolling back (as yet unimplemented) rules for ISPs and selling your traffic history, not catching human traffickers on the dark web.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"My claim was that it tells us everything we _need_ to know about you."

That I'm a likely person to pay two bucks to watch episode-by-episode of Expanse?    Or to want a Tesla?   Not sure who "we" is?

Marcus

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[gepr]

On 04/13/2017 10:44 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> That I'm a likely person to pay two bucks to watch episode-by-episode of Expanse?    Or to want a Tesla?   Not sure who "we" is?

Maybe I'm too dense to grok the subtle criticism.

Walking back up a few branches, Vladimyr made a comment about (I think) flocking, mob rules, tribalism, etc.  My response was that the _essentialist_ concepts he (many of us, actually) would _like_ to see governing people's behavior don't really exist.  What does exist is the trace, the behavior, the artifacts.  Do I really care why someone voted for Trump?  No.  Do I care about the deeply held secrets that someone thinks (because they believe in rationality) ultimately cause their behavior?  No.  What I do care about is how likely you are to pay by episode vs. by subscription, whether you're more likely to pirate than buy, whether you're an early adopter, etc.  And for that, all we need is fashion.  We don't need essentialist things like intellect and morality, even if I'm wrong and they exist.

Walking back further, this whole section of the tree branched off of your comment that "it depends on what you want to accomplish".  I suspect 99% of the targeted ads can be avoided with a slow (yearly?, quarterly?) cycle of temporary VPNs running in the cloud (ephemeral IP addresses).  Perhaps 90% of it can be avoided just by using HTTPS-Everywhere.  But I'd like something a bit deeper, as would most people, I think, even if _only_ to avoid being pigeonholed into stereotypes.  Yes, I'm a former libertarian who's become a (much hated these days) neoliberal and who's teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing democratic socialism is more coherent).  I have a similar problem with atheism and other people labeling me that way ... even the labels and categorizations others use feels totally inadequate to me ... like Nick's unfair condemnation of post-modernism.  I want to avoid all these exogenous and fictitious categorizations entirely.  Hence, strong privacy maps directly to autotelism and self-governance.

Hopefully that helps.  "We" are the optimizing exploiters who want to sell you things/ideas you don't need, while limiting the amount of effort required to extract the maximum amount from your wallet.  If we have to coercively brainwash you in order to do that, then that brainwashing is just a business expense, no more no less.

On a personal note, I have a friend who (as part of his start-up) monitors twitter data for sentiment.  In lieu of interpersonal contact, he also uses those tools to keep track of his (distal) friends.  As much as my narcissist homunculus likes the idea of being microcosmically influential in that way, and as much as my dork homunculus likes the idea of such a network monitoring ability, the whole idea kinda sickens me ... in the same way Facebook sickens me.  Is it dehumanizing to define a person based on their online ephemeris?  Or am I just a hyper-sensitive, delicate snowflake?

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☣ glen
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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

I've been following (loosely) this thread and find it fascinating.


On 4/13/17 10:56 AM, glen ☣ wrote:
> On 04/13/2017 09:43 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> If you posit there does exist this humanity as distinct from the organization (but this not clear to me in general), then it is reasonable to think there exists personal information that is not really available at all (not only electronically) just as the organizational information is not disclosed.   "Living in the closet" is one common example.
> Of course.  But my claim was not that your traffic tells us everything there can be known about you.  My claim was that it tells us everything we _need_ to know about you.
(not?) Just to be argumentative but is this claim (almost?)
tautalogical?  It tells us everything it _can_ about you, and to the
extent that we are elements in an ecology, it tells us everything any
other (competing/cooperating?) element in the ecology _can_ know, so in
that sense, there is no _need_ to know more.   Which is not to say that
*I* could not in some way take advantage of knowing one of your deeper,
darker secrets such as, for example, your bestiality fetish that you
carefully avoid acknowledging or pursuing in any way that might leave a
digital signature.   Whether I used to to extort in some way, or maybe
seduce (wanna meet my great dane?), I *might* gain some advantage over
*other* in the ecology in enlisting you as prey or symbiote.
>   I suspect everyone has a complex occult kernel buried deep inside them.
I take this to be true by definition.  I'm not sure what the right model
for all of this is, but I think it is key.   Do (any of) you have a good
abstract entity-relation/agent/??? model in mind for all of this?   Mine
is pretty ad-hoc and intuitive, it would be interesting (to me) if there
were to emerge a more formal one.
>    And whatever secrets are hidden in there would be interesting (perhaps necessary) to those who are deeply familiar with that person, family, lovers, etc.  But for spam?  Naaa.  Of course, everything lies on a spectrum.
I doubt you mean this phrase to imply that the spectrum is precisely a
continuum.   I think there are at least huge spikes in the spectrum.
>    So, when the FBI profiles a serial killer, they're going to make a serious effort to unravel and make sense of that kernel.  Somewhere in the middle would be Levashov.  We simply need to learn enough about his person[ality] to catch him ... like when he visits Spain with his family.  Someone like Satoshi Nakamoto would be an even more interesting case.
Following my request for a formal model, I'm guessing that professional
"profilers" *do* have such models.   It seems like especially for this
class of discussion, the ability to compose or superpose partial models
into an uber-model (or decompose from an uber-model, extracting the most
salient issues) would be useful. This fits complementarily with my own
work in Faceted Ontologies which does NOT try to model agents
(individually or collectively) but rather complex event structures with
agents as one of the many atoms within the event-structure (subjects and
objects, actors and actees).
> But this thread is about possible techniques to compensate for Trump rolling back (as yet unimplemented) rules for ISPs and selling your traffic history, not catching human traffickers on the dark web.
This thread feels hugely diverted if not entirely hijacked.  Not a
problem for me, but "I'm just sayin' !"

- Steve


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[Marcus G. Daniels]

" I suspect 99% of the targeted ads can be avoided with a slow (yearly?, quarterly?) cycle of temporary VPNs running in the cloud (ephemeral IP addresses).  Perhaps 90% of it can be avoided just by using HTTPS-Everywhere.  "

The problem with ongoing privacy measures is that it means going from a low-dimensional description to a no-dimensional description.   Empty spots on the resume are scary!   To have a truly benign profile, it is necessary to know what powerful groups consider benign and to create signatures to mimic it.   If ultimately governments, employers. etc. feel then need to know you, then perhaps being yourself (somewhat truncated) is the best thing.   That message can be controlled and kept consistent.   Not having a digital footprint is a situation that can be identified.   Who are these meatspace people and their secret cabals?  We can't have that!

Marcus
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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Walking back up a few branches, Vladimyr made a comment about (I think) flocking, mob rules, tribalism, etc. My response was that the _essentialist_ concepts he (many of us, actually) would _like_ to see governing people's behavior don't really exist. What does exist is the trace, the behavior, the artifacts. Do I really care why someone voted for Trump? No. Do I care about the deeply held secrets that someone thinks (because they believe in rationality) ultimately cause their behavior? No. What I do care about is how likely you are to pay by episode vs. by subscription, whether you're more likely to pirate than buy, whether you're an early adopter, etc. And for that, all we need is fashion. We don't need essentialist things like intellect and morality, even if I'm wrong and they exist.

I always appreciate your (seemingly?) contrarian stances.   I suppose I might be convinced that fashion is on a spectrum with intellect and morality, but I guess I would claim they exist because we have a word for them, but perhaps only a little bit more or differently than claiming that fire-breathing dragons and wraiths exist because we have names for them?

*I* DO care why someone voted for Trump.  If that someone is someone I know, I am interested in how that factoid (voting for Trump) effects my other dealings with them.   Many anti-Trump folks will virtually excommunicate a friend or colleague for the act of Trump-voting.   I find that in perhaps 20% of my Trump-voting acquaintances that their specific *reasons* make it somewhere between tolerable and honorable for me.   It isn't always arrogance or ignorance or fear-of-crooked-hillary that made them vote for Trump... 

I'm not clear what you mean "do I really care why?".  I suppose if the "I" in this sentence is a marketing profiler, then it may not matter, though if you realize they voted for Trump because they think he's a white supremicist  or homophobe or mysogynist, you can then further target them for products, services or memes aligned with those ideals?

Walking back further, this whole section of the tree branched off of your comment that "it depends on what you want to accomplish".  I suspect 99% of the targeted ads can be avoided with a slow (yearly?, quarterly?) cycle of temporary VPNs running in the cloud (ephemeral IP addresses).  Perhaps 90% of it can be avoided just by using HTTPS-Everywhere.  But I'd like something a bit deeper, as would most people, I think, even if _only_ to avoid being pigeonholed into stereotypes.

In the arms-race (a biological metaphor would be better, but I think most of those are couched in the military metaphor anyway) of cyber-privacy it seems that "something a bit deeper" will be necessary *soon* if not already.   I hate that we have to go there, but it is part of the larger pattern that requires it I think.

  Yes, I'm a former libertarian who's become a (much hated these days) neoliberal and who's teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing democratic socialism is more coherent).

I wonder if there is a model of the evolution of individuals in political state-space.  Your evolution as reported here (and somewhat as I apprehend it from our communications) is very similar to my own.    I think of my contemporaries who are *still* Libertarians or NeoLiberals as being in a state of "Arrested Development", but suspect that may be some form of arrogance on my part.   I believe that Marx has claimed that the penultimate social order is that of pure Communism and that the 20th century experiments in Capitalism and Socialism were at best a necessary step toward this final condition or at worst a wasteful diversion/stall to avoid it's inevitability.

  I have a similar problem with atheism and other people labeling me that way ... even the labels and categorizations others use feels totally inadequate to me ... like Nick's unfair condemnation of post-modernism.  I want to avoid all these exogenous and fictitious categorizations entirely.  Hence, strong privacy maps directly to autotelism and self-governance.

I think this last phrase: "strong privacy maps directly to autotelism and self-governance" is a very astute and pivotal point.  I would say that *all* forms of government will naturally eschew privacy because autotelism and self-governance are antithetical to their goals, perhaps their very existence.   

I wonder how your self avowed move toward democratic socialism fits with the implied value of self-governance and autotelism?   I myself, am divided on this issue... I want to be an uber-individual, yet I think being a very good part of a much larger whole is the only sustainable (and moral?) modality.   Is this my Ego vs my SuperEgo?   Or is there some kind of duality between these two seemingly incompatible ideals that I'm not yet grasping (though I do reach)?

    No man is an island, but most of us are at least self-styled as archipelagos!

Hopefully that helps.  "We" are the optimizing exploiters who want to sell you things/ideas you don't need, while limiting the amount of effort required to extract the maximum amount from your wallet.  If we have to coercively brainwash you in order to do that, then that brainwashing is just a business expense, no more no less.

    Is it a conspiracy or a good business model?

On a personal note, I have a friend who (as part of his start-up) monitors twitter data for sentiment.  In lieu of interpersonal contact, he also uses those tools to keep track of his (distal) friends. 

I find that the social media which I only oblique engage in does seem to support a migration of the distribution toward distality.   It is so much easier to keep track of friends distant in time, geography or sociopolitical views than ever, and impersonality of facebookery and twitting seem to *distance* close friends.  "Why did I have to learn on FaceBook that you were pregnant!?" or "You never call, you never write, I have to keep up with you by reading your FaceBewk Posts!  WTF, I thouhgt we were friends!?".  

 As much as my narcissist homunculus likes the idea of being microcosmically influential in that way, and as much as my dork homunculus likes the idea of such a network monitoring ability, the whole idea kinda sickens me ... in the same way Facebook sickens me.  Is it dehumanizing to define a person based on their online ephemeris?  Or am I just a hyper-sensitive, delicate snowflake?

yes to all of the above...  My ex sensitized me nicely to noticing any sentence with "Just" in it.   I think you are much more than a hypersensitive, delicate snowflake, which is your charm in my estimation... the foreground AND the background of that statement!

Something very significant is evolving in our culture, as a consequence of this "new media" which is at it's base electronic communication/digital networking/hypermedia/asynchronous communications.   It seems trite to simply quote McLuhan's "the Medium is the Message" here, but I think this was a powerful early premonition of what was to come.   I think his followon "Medium is the Massage" is even more apt...   How we are conditioned sensorially by our various mediums of not just co-mmunication, but also engagement in relationships and identities.   

Carry On,
 - Steve

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[gepr]

On 04/13/2017 12:36 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> *I* DO care why someone voted for Trump.  If that someone is someone I know, I am interested in how that factoid (voting for Trump) effects my other dealings with them.   Many anti-Trump folks will virtually excommunicate a friend or colleague for the act of Trump-voting.   I find that in perhaps 20% of my Trump-voting acquaintances that their specific *reasons* make it somewhere between tolerable and honorable for me.   It isn't always arrogance or ignorance or fear-of-crooked-hillary that made them vote for Trump...

Right, that's what I said.  If you're familiar with a person, you probably do care.  I agree.  Actually, I'd go even further.  If I've met a person in meat space, then I care.  Those I've only met electronically, then what I know about them is so out of context, it would be difficult to even define "care".  (I was once called an "online autistic" by a good friend ... perhaps others are not like me in this way.)

> I'm not clear what you mean "do I really care why?".  I suppose if the "I" in this sentence is a marketing profiler, then it may not matter, though if you realize they voted for Trump because they think he's a white supremicist  or homophobe or mysogynist, you can then further target them for products, services or memes aligned with those ideals?

Well, sure.  But the point is not the essentialist attribute (homophobic or intellectual or whatever).  The point, the purpose, is to predict behavior.  I, personally, don't care so much about predicting the behavior of my friends or family.  But I do care about their essence.  But if my purpose were behavior prediction, then I don't care at all about someone's essence, only whatever good enough models allow me the prediction.  A completely wrong model would be fine as long as predictions from it work.

> In the arms-race (a biological metaphor would be better, but I think most of those are couched in the military metaphor anyway) of cyber-privacy it seems that "something a bit deeper" will be necessary *soon* if not already.   I hate that we have to go there, but it is part of the larger pattern that requires it I think.

I agree that I _want_ something deeper.  I don't agree that it's necessary because we'd have to ask "necessary for what?"  I admit that I'm dying and will be dead soon.  If the people younger than me are willing to give up their privacy in exchage for whatever it is we're getting, then why would deeper privacy methods be necessary?

> I wonder if there is a model of the evolution of individuals in political state-space.

I suspect there are lots of (bad) models out there.  Being a professional simulant myself, my question would be: To what ends would such models be put?  And are those ends ethical?

> I wonder how your self avowed move toward democratic socialism

Whoa, hold the horses, there!  I'm moving toward social democracy, not democratic socialism ... different beasts, I think. >8^D

> fits with the implied value of self-governance and autotelism?

I now (not 5 years ago and probably not 5 years hence) believe socialism reduces degrees of freedom.  I haven't thought deeply enough to know whether anarchism (which kinda implies socialism) escapes that ... i.e. perhaps only statist socialism reduces degrees of freedom.  As such, I'm not moving toward socialism.  I am moving toward democracy, though.  To whatever extent we must, it's reasonable to qualify democracy with socialist infrastructure.  I think that's necessary to mitigate against buffoons like Trump _and_ the tyranny of the majority that we'd get without something like the electoral college.  So, given those extra words, wiggling between neoliberalism and social democracy should make sense.  Clinton and Sanders are both social democrats, I think, just to differing extents.

> I find that the social media which I only oblique engage in does seem to support a migration of the distribution toward distality.   It is so much easier to keep track of friends distant in time, geography or sociopolitical views than ever, and impersonality of facebookery and twitting seem to *distance* close friends.  "Why did I have to learn on FaceBook that you were pregnant!?" or "You never call, you never write, I have to keep up with you by reading your FaceBewk Posts!  WTF, I thouhgt we were friends!?".

I'm not so sure.  My conception of my meat space friends is colored/augmented by cyber space signals.  But the latter don't cause me to spend less time in meat space with them.  But, again, maybe most people aren't like me.  How would I know?

> yes to all of the above...  My ex sensitized me nicely to noticing any sentence with "Just" in it.   I think you are much more than a hypersensitive, delicate snowflake, which is your charm in my estimation... the foreground AND the background of that statement!

I like to think of myself (and all people) as fairly resilient, redundant, Rube Goldberg machines, rather than delicate snowflakes.  I also like the butterfly metaphor better than the snowflake metaphor.  Some of us are butterflies and crude handling will kill them.  But most of us adapt to the crude handling well enough.  Bunions and scar tissue are wonderful things.


--
☣ glen

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[gepr]

So, all the effort I've put into programming my GEPRBots is not wasted.  Yay!  I need to make sure they're not leaving traces from, say, Budapest at the same time I'm leaving traces from home.  Simulating a sequential process with multiple parallel processes is hard.

On 04/13/2017 12:23 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The problem with ongoing privacy measures is that it means going from a low-dimensional description to a no-dimensional description.   Empty spots on the resume are scary!   To have a truly benign profile, it is necessary to know what powerful groups consider benign and to create signatures to mimic it.   If ultimately governments, employers. etc. feel then need to know you, then perhaps being yourself (somewhat truncated) is the best thing.   That message can be controlled and kept consistent.   Not having a digital footprint is a situation that can be identified.   Who are these meatspace people and their secret cabals?  We can't have that!


--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"Simulating a sequential process with multiple parallel processes is hard."

The Donald does it all the time.  You just have to relax the coherency requirement.

Marcus
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[Steve Smith]

On 4/13/17 3:06 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

On 04/13/2017 12:36 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

*I* DO care why someone voted for Trump.  If that someone is someone I know, I am interested in how that factoid (voting for Trump) effects my other dealings with them.   Many anti-Trump folks will virtually excommunicate a friend or colleague for the act of Trump-voting.   I find that in perhaps 20% of my Trump-voting acquaintances that their specific *reasons* make it somewhere between tolerable and honorable for me.   It isn't always arrogance or ignorance or fear-of-crooked-hillary that made them vote for Trump... 

Right, that's what I said.  If you're familiar with a person, you probably do care.  I agree.  Actually, I'd go even further.  If I've met a person in meat space, then I care.  Those I've only met electronically, then what I know about them is so out of context, it would be difficult to even define "care".  (I was once called an "online autistic" by a good friend ... perhaps others are not like me in this way.)

I think the distinction in our conversation above is the general definition of "to care".  I used it mostly in the sense you elaborate further down as "ability to predict".   But I also use it in the sense of trying to elaborate my own mental model of that person, including (especially?) a meatspace friend.  Not just because I want to predict their behaviour, I might want to adopt that part of their memome into my own?  If YOU for example, indicated that you had voted for Trump, I would be very interested in your thinking, the feelings that lead to that.  I find your various motivations to be highly coherent, albeit eclectic.  I value those as I apprehend them and am motivated to learn from you your motivations because *sometimes* they inform me in a nicely nonlinear or at least unexpected way.   This is how I "use" many of my friends as good (counter?)examples for my own evolution.

I'm not clear what you mean "do I really care why?".  I suppose if the "I" in this sentence is a marketing profiler, then it may not matter, though if you realize they voted for Trump because they think he's a white supremicist  or homophobe or mysogynist, you can then further target them for products, services or memes aligned with those ideals?

Well, sure.  But the point is not the essentialist attribute (homophobic or intellectual or whatever).  The point, the purpose, is to predict behavior.  I, personally, don't care so much about predicting the behavior of my friends or family.  But I do care about their essence.

I suppose my version of this is that I have already built an envelope of predictability around my friends and family which I consider "safe enough"... for the most part I don't choose friends or associate with family who I believe are likely to murder me or someone else in my presence.   To some extent *that* is part of their "true essence" as I apprehend it, but I may be begging the issue here.  

  But if my purpose were behavior prediction, then I don't care at all about someone's essence, only whatever good enough models allow me the prediction.  A completely wrong model would be fine as long as predictions from it work.

I think you are using the notion of "their essence" in the sense of "modeling for comprehension" vs "modeling for prediction"... It seems that you might not allow that "modeling for comprehension" is real?

In the arms-race (a biological metaphor would be better, but I think most of those are couched in the military metaphor anyway) of cyber-privacy it seems that "something a bit deeper" will be necessary *soon* if not already.   I hate that we have to go there, but it is part of the larger pattern that requires it I think.

I agree that I _want_ something deeper.  I don't agree that it's necessary because we'd have to ask "necessary for what?"  I admit that I'm dying and will be dead soon.  If the people younger than me are willing to give up their privacy in exchage for whatever it is we're getting, then why would deeper privacy methods be necessary?

Agreed, I was just referencing the natural value of (sometimes) leading a moving target.  If the target is likely to be out of frame soon, why bother?   I'm dying and I don't know how soon, but fear/hope I have another dodecade (I just cranked over 60 on my odometer) which given the last 20 years, seems like plenty of time for the world to do  couple of major flip/flops.  Maybe not quite a Kurzwellian Singularity, but perhaps another World War, a Climate Inflection, an Economic or Social Collapse.   I'm hoping against all of those, but vaguely planning for their possibility (FWIW I'm not hoarding ammunition or food or medicine).

I wonder if there is a model of the evolution of individuals in political state-space.

I suspect there are lots of (bad) models out there.  Being a professional simulant myself, my question would be: To what ends would such models be put?  And are those ends ethical?

The ends I would put a "good" model to is comprehension, trying to understand the world as it appears to be evolving, trying to understand if we are about to have some kind of social inflection or inversion... for example, might all the pinko-commie-fag haters who have proclaimed that any effort to provide social justice/security/equality is an evil plot be waking up to wanting a universal health-care and maybe even economic security (unemployment/pension) plan that provides for they and theirs in a context where rugged-individualistic-exploitive-or-at-least-extractive activities are no longer viable means of self-support?   The point of me seeking such understandings would be to divert whatever resources I might be using to *blunt* what I *fear* is their efforts to undermine the development and maintenance of a healthy "commons" to increase my own contributions to said commons?

I wonder how your self avowed move toward democratic socialism

Whoa, hold the horses, there!  I'm moving toward social democracy, not democratic socialism ... different beasts, I think. >8^D

I misread your statement:

teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing democratic socialism is more coherent)

to suggest that you held democratic socialism higher (more coherent?) than social democracy and were perhaps aspiring to move on through from the latter to the former?

fits with the implied value of self-governance and autotelism?

I now (not 5 years ago and probably not 5 years hence) believe socialism reduces degrees of freedom.  I haven't thought deeply enough to know whether anarchism (which kinda implies socialism) escapes that ... i.e. perhaps only statist socialism reduces degrees of freedom.

I do believe that socialism reduces degrees of freedom, the statist version doing it perhaps harshly and arbitrarily and the version that *could* grow up out of anarchism being at least more organic and possibly hierarchical (meaning here that the degrees of freedom all still exist but some are in practice subservient to the others...  such as "I shall not kill".... "unless it is for the good of the group")

  As such, I'm not moving toward socialism.  I am moving toward democracy, though.  To whatever extent we must, it's reasonable to qualify democracy with socialist infrastructure.  I think that's necessary to mitigate against buffoons like Trump _and_ the tyranny of the majority that we'd get without something like the electoral college.

Very packed paragraph here.   I think you just said you are preferring a democracy which (happens to/naturally) chooses to have a strong social infrastructure?   In the second part, it isn't clear that the Electoral College mitigates us against buffoons "like Trump" since all indications are that the Electoral College actually *preferred* the buffoon over the ???? .  

I can't help but pull out my soapbox and suggest that "ranked voting" is much more likely to achieve the results than the mere "chunking" of the electoral college which seems very subject to Gerrymandering.   And it seems that 2016 and 2000 make it clear that the Electoral College's effect on "tyranny of the majority" is to increase the chance of a "tyranny of the MINORITY"?

I think a ranked voting system with higher thresholds for "mandate" would make for a much better Democracy than what we have now... at least the "majorities" would be more robust?

  So, given those extra words, wiggling between neoliberalism and social democracy should make sense.  Clinton and Sanders are both social democrats, I think, just to differing extents.

I think you are correct, though I think the latter is a great deal more sincere in those sentiments than the latter who might have lost touch with reality on most social issues along the way (albeit nowhere near the level of the extant Buffoon in Chief).

I find that the social media which I only oblique engage in does seem to support a migration of the distribution toward distality.   It is so much easier to keep track of friends distant in time, geography or sociopolitical views than ever, and impersonality of facebookery and twitting seem to *distance* close friends.  "Why did I have to learn on FaceBook that you were pregnant!?" or "You never call, you never write, I have to keep up with you by reading your FaceBewk Posts!  WTF, I thouhgt we were friends!?".

I'm not so sure.  My conception of my meat space friends is colored/augmented by cyber space signals.  But the latter don't cause me to spend less time in meat space with them.  But, again, maybe most people aren't like me.  How would I know?

I agree that *I* don't let social media undermine my meatspace life much but I DO observe that it seems to *sometimes* cause frictions that would not have existed without the odd public/private nature of things like FezBewk.

yes to all of the above...  My ex sensitized me nicely to noticing any sentence with "Just" in it.   I think you are much more than a hypersensitive, delicate snowflake, which is your charm in my estimation... the foreground AND the background of that statement!

I like to think of myself (and all people) as fairly resilient, redundant, Rube Goldberg machines, rather than delicate snowflakes.  I also like the butterfly metaphor better than the snowflake metaphor.  Some of us are butterflies and crude handling will kill them.  But most of us adapt to the crude handling well enough.  Bunions and scar tissue are wonderful things.

I agree.  I was just riffing on your self-description as a snowflake... ultra-unique... and highly ephemeral under many conditions?   I like JD Krishnamurti's description of the soul as a piece of paper and the experiences we have as foldings in that paper and the residual wrinkles being the "self".   A bit like your bunions and scars perhaps?

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -
> "Simulating a sequential process with multiple parallel processes is hard."
>
> The Donald does it all the time.  You just have to relax the coherency requirement.
Well said.


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[gepr]

On 04/13/2017 03:06 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>
> Not just because I want to predict their behaviour, I might want to adopt that part of their memome into my own?

Ugh!  Thanks for reminding me why I hate the idea of memes.  The problem me and Robert argued about extensively awhile ago is important, here.  Memes are unlike genes in a critical way.  Memes are phenomenological.  Genes are mechanistic.  So, if we shot a new gene into your genome, it would (maybe) generate a trait difference.  But there is no meme gun.  A memome is a flat/shallow thing, there's no gen-phen map.  The analogy is so flawed I can't think straight.

> The point of me seeking such understandings would be to divert whatever resources I might be using to *blunt* what I *fear* is their efforts to undermine the development and maintenance of a healthy "commons" to increase my own contributions to said commons?

OK.  On my good days, I mostly agree.  But on my evil days, I can't help but think that the ethical way to do that would be to build a _transparent_ model and be similarly transparent about any attempts to manipulate the trajectory.  Such transparency is exceedingly difficult and expensive.  And even if you could achieve it, you'd be weakened because the red team, not bound by a transparency requirement, would probably win.  Indeed, any innovation you transparently incorporated in your model and manipulations would immediately be co-optable by the red team.  So you'd effectively become the red team's unwitting tool.  Your efforts would become evil in your well-intentioned attempt to do good.

Is it ethical to be a tool?

> I misread your statement:
>
>     teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing democratic socialism is more coherent)
>
> to suggest that you held democratic socialism higher (more coherent?) than social democracy and were perhaps aspiring to move on through from the latter to the former?

No, not higher.  Yes, more coherent.  Self-consistency is laudable when validation data is lacking, but only then.  Just because democratic socialism hangs together in a more rational way does not mean it's a better (more real/realistic) political approach.  Social democracy, like neoliberalism, allows us to leave some parts of the system alone, especially when we're too ignorant to implement a regulatory infrastructure.  The difference is that one allows for a kind of ontological pluralism, whereas the other doesn't.

> Very packed paragraph here.   I think you just said you are preferring a democracy which (happens to/naturally) chooses to have a strong social infrastructure?   In the second part, it isn't clear that the Electoral College mitigates us against buffoons "like Trump" since all indications are that the Electoral College actually *preferred* the buffoon over the ???? .

I said _like_ the Electoral College.  I think we have to change that check/balance because it's broken.  But I think it's silly to simply eradicate it without thinking about it's purpose and what role it was intended to play.

> I can't help but pull out my soapbox and suggest that "ranked voting" is much more likely to achieve the results than the mere "chunking" of the electoral college which seems very subject to Gerrymandering.

I agree, though it's not clear to me what the implications of it would be.  I'm too ignorant.

> I think you are correct, though I think the latter is a great deal more sincere in those sentiments than the latter who might have lost touch with reality on most social issues along the way (albeit nowhere near the level of the extant Buffoon in Chief).

Yes.  Perhaps Clinton ha[sd] lost touch in a way that Sanders had not.  But I also think Bernie had either lost touch or never had touch of many of the things Clinton has mastered, particularly Machiavellian things that may well be necessary evils with a bureaucracy this size.  But we've been over all that.

--
☣ glen

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[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

Glen,

Try something else...

Create Agents that only behave honestly when they think they are under observation.
When they think they have been detected they will weave a rationalization out of standard clichés, that appears as if they were honest but mistaken due to ambiguity
of language. This prevents honest agents from figuring out what happened.
Such an agent should cause untold chaos when slipped into any honest collective.

Over time the collective should disintegrate or be perverted...
If you can create chaos with only the one kind of pervert imagine if half the population were perverted away from honesty.

No real need to immerse yourself in a transparent cloak, just sit back and watch.

vib
Good luck.
Then add violent reprisals and you are back to classic game theory... tit for tat.

These perverts might actually be attempting to evolve into true social parasites. Like Staphylinid beetles in an ant colony.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: April-13-17 5:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

On 04/13/2017 03:06 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>
> Not just because I want to predict their behaviour, I might want to adopt that part of their memome into my own?

Ugh!  Thanks for reminding me why I hate the idea of memes.  The problem me and Robert argued about extensively awhile ago is important, here.  Memes are unlike genes in a critical way.  Memes are phenomenological.  Genes are mechanistic.  So, if we shot a new gene into your genome, it would (maybe) generate a trait difference.  But there is no meme gun.  A memome is a flat/shallow thing, there's no gen-phen map.  The analogy is so flawed I can't think straight.

> The point of me seeking such understandings would be to divert whatever resources I might be using to *blunt* what I *fear* is their efforts to undermine the development and maintenance of a healthy "commons" to increase my own contributions to said commons?

OK.  On my good days, I mostly agree.  But on my evil days, I can't help but think that the ethical way to do that would be to build a _transparent_ model and be similarly transparent about any attempts to manipulate the trajectory.  Such transparency is exceedingly difficult and expensive.  And even if you could achieve it, you'd be weakened because the red team, not bound by a transparency requirement, would probably win.  Indeed, any innovation you transparently incorporated in your model and manipulations would immediately be co-optable by the red team.  So you'd effectively become the red team's unwitting tool.  Your efforts would become evil in your well-intentioned attempt to do good.

Is it ethical to be a tool?

> I misread your statement:
>
>     teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing
> democratic socialism is more coherent)
>
> to suggest that you held democratic socialism higher (more coherent?) than social democracy and were perhaps aspiring to move on through from the latter to the former?

No, not higher.  Yes, more coherent.  Self-consistency is laudable when validation data is lacking, but only then.  Just because democratic socialism hangs together in a more rational way does not mean it's a better (more real/realistic) political approach.  Social democracy, like neoliberalism, allows us to leave some parts of the system alone, especially when we're too ignorant to implement a regulatory infrastructure.  The difference is that one allows for a kind of ontological pluralism, whereas the other doesn't.

> Very packed paragraph here.   I think you just said you are preferring a democracy which (happens to/naturally) chooses to have a strong social infrastructure?   In the second part, it isn't clear that the Electoral College mitigates us against buffoons "like Trump" since all indications are that the Electoral College actually *preferred* the buffoon over the ???? .

I said _like_ the Electoral College.  I think we have to change that check/balance because it's broken.  But I think it's silly to simply eradicate it without thinking about it's purpose and what role it was intended to play.

> I can't help but pull out my soapbox and suggest that "ranked voting" is much more likely to achieve the results than the mere "chunking" of the electoral college which seems very subject to Gerrymandering.

I agree, though it's not clear to me what the implications of it would be.  I'm too ignorant.

> I think you are correct, though I think the latter is a great deal more sincere in those sentiments than the latter who might have lost touch with reality on most social issues along the way (albeit nowhere near the level of the extant Buffoon in Chief).

Yes.  Perhaps Clinton ha[sd] lost touch in a way that Sanders had not.  But I also think Bernie had either lost touch or never had touch of many of the things Clinton has mastered, particularly Machiavellian things that may well be necessary evils with a bureaucracy this size.  But we've been over all that.

--
☣ glen

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[gepr]

Interesting.  So, just to repeat back, to see if I understand.  Steve wondered if there were (a good) model of the evolution of individuals in political state space.  I responded that there are lots of (bad) models.  But the more important point is _why_ model that evolution (including models of the individuals)?  Steve responded that such models might help first comprehend, then manipulate.  Then I responded that to make such comprehension and manpulation ethical, the models and manipulations must be transparent.

With this post, you're suggesting a specific mechanism of one such model, I presume because you think this mechanism will make the model better ... more comprehensive.  And that mechanism is:

• 2 behavior modes, the choice of which depends on whether an agent senses its being watched
• part of the "while they're watching" mode is to construct and express a complicated mapping between the two modes
• that mapping must hide the modality of the behaviors, perhaps only to a 1st order analysis
• that mapping relies on a set of symbols that are ambiguous (multiple meanings)

Then you go a couple of steps further and suggest that, given some objective towards which the collective works, such mappings make reaching the objective more difficult, inefficient, or completely impossible.  Without the mappings, the objective is more easily reached.

Is my repitition adequate?  Or did I miss an important part of your suggestion?


On 04/14/2017 04:36 PM, Vladimyr wrote:

> Create Agents that only behave honestly when they think they are under observation.
> When they think they have been detected they will weave a rationalization out of standard clichés, that appears as if they were honest but mistaken due to ambiguity
> of language. This prevents honest agents from figuring out what happened.
> Such an agent should cause untold chaos when slipped into any honest collective.
>
> Over time the collective should disintegrate or be perverted...
> If you can create chaos with only the one kind of pervert imagine if half the population were perverted away from honesty.
>
> No real need to immerse yourself in a transparent cloak, just sit back and watch.
>
> vib
> Good luck.
> Then add violent reprisals and you are back to classic game theory... tit for tat.
>
> These perverts might actually be attempting to evolve into true social parasites. Like Staphylinid beetles in an ant colony.

--
☣ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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