Eric -
I really appreciate your thorough information on this topic, you
have clearly considered it seriously for some time.
I can accept these trade offs and in fact find my own effective collaborations to be equally distributed between people I can spend facetime with easily and those halfway around the world who I cannot but whose unique skills or perspective makes up for it.I would say that Ronin agrees with the sense of value, and doesn’t take for granted having to give it up. Their main architecture is the internet interface and the legal services of a 501C3 and whatever journal etc. accesses they can get. But they are hosting an increasing number of web-mediated seminars, general chat sessions they call “watercooler” chats on the slack platform, and in-person “meetups” a few times a year, whenever someone takes the initiative to organize one somewhere. Many of those who are within geographical proximity also have the option for more regular contacts. It is a light level of in-person access, stabilized by the low cost and general-purpose internet platform, rather than having the in-person mode be the major center of stabilization.
Although, per-exchange, an internet-mediated interaction won’t have much depth, they are aiming for regularity and predictability as a way to engender longer-term relations, and also to mediate active scientific collaborations, so that people come to get a deeper understanding of each other’s minds.
BitCoin aside (or at best a semi-tangible example for many), the underlying distributed ledger idea seems to reinforce/formalize/extend a social paradigm that worked well in Dunbar Number scale societies without any significant technology to support it.I assume your (Nick's) reference to journal access is to the http://unpaywall.org/ links? LANL (Paul Ginsparg) pioneered the use of WWW for open access to journal articles via the xxx.lanl.gov "physics preprint" server (with an FTP and Gopher server predating that by a couple of years). I don't know the full implication or utility of the subsequent arXiv.org system but in principle it feels like the "perfect" workaround for the Journal system. I think Grigori Perleman's example (publishing two deeply pivotal papers in mathematics *without* a peer-review journal/process) is significant. I'm surprised it didn't revolutionize academia and publication more than it did. Is it inertia or something more fundamental?
I think not only inertia. The idea that you can find, through ad hoc networks, and fully understand by your own agency, everything you should want to work with or use, to my mind vastly truncates the set of possibilities for work. For every step you extend your scope into areas you don’t understand, you add fragility and create problems of validation of qualitatively new types, but you open combinatorial possibilities for guessing and discovery that do not exist at smaller scales.
The new qualitative problems turn (in my view) fundamentally on the limits of human time, attention, knowledge, etc. This is why a library is not the same as a mere warehouse full of books, a (real) librarian is not merely a person tasked with keeping others quiet, etc. Search, sorting, classification, vetting and gatekeeping, are fundamental services. Each of them has fragilities and each of them is indispensable to all but the most localized tasks. There are failure modes in all of these, which blamers love to blame, but I don’t think those invalidate the concepts; they dictate the problems that need work and insights. Since my earliest encounter with “web of trust” cryptographic ideas, I have felt that the interlinked concepts of identity and reputation are vastly richer than these engineering inventions suggest, and it would be great to get more conceptual clarity about their nature. I have taken some tilts at that problem over 20 years, but never produced anything of any worth. It does seem that the social disruption and AI innovations are bringing that discussion to life now in a big way, and I can imagine there will be interesting concepts turned up by it.
I feel like this mismatch between conceptually simple technical problems, and conceptually deep and difficult social system problems, arises for many topics that are of interest to this list. We have seen articles in which people take polarized positions on Bitcoin as being either a new paradigm for money or nearly a scam. I don’t see it as either. It is a cryptographic solution to a specific problem of achieving a certain property in an information system that was once sought in material systems: asymmetric ease of verifiability with difficulty of counterfeiting, and having a predictable supply. But anybody who is serious about what money is would (should, IMO) say that those technical properties are no more the essence of money than the physical properties of Au are the essence of money. There are cognitive, social, and political foundations in real money and credit systems, which employ material or informational properties as a kind of substrate. One doesn’t want to confuse the building medium with the built artifact.
All this, very interesting/heartening, especially for my grandchildren who have not (yet) been raised under the old paradigms... no disrespect to the old paradigms, they just seem to be shifting/dissolving/involuting in the presence of the "universal solvent" of ubiquitous and instantaneous global communication.So here’s another model in case it is of interest:
This one is spearheaded by Piet Hut of IAS Princeton, with significant participation from some Columbia people and several others.
Piet is willing to opine that the university as we currently conceive it is an institution that societies will be unwilling or unable to support on a timescale as short as 25 years. To me that seems unrealistically close, because (as above) they are so interlocked in processes of reputation and vetting with the whole rest of the society, that I think the institutional creep will be slow and it will be much longer before they are cut loose.
But whether right or wrong, that view motivates Piet to build a model for what takes over the academic job when universities no longer do. He conceives something that is more socially embedded, more ad hoc in its membership, somehow negotiates academic autonomy while getting sponsorship from businesses, and I guess some other structural stuff. His test case is about origin of consciousness, which for Piet is the third great Origins problem following OoMatter and OoLife. We can see if he can make this work, and what is learned from the experiment.
The ambitions of Ronin and YHouse could naturally be synergistic, and they know about each other, but I think they are both still solving local problems. The styles of the founders are very different, and the visions and designs as well.
One can imagine a loose affiliation by which there are many local experiments addressing “organically” understood needs by a collection of entrepreneurs, which keep each other in view for support and stability. Something like the clearinghouse of civil society organizations that Paul Hawken wanted to provide:
I like to repeat Steven Levine's mantra "Just this much" when I notice this...
Dunno. Much to do.
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |