Ethan think

May
5th

Sat

Dominance

A system for negotiating social/contextual dominance.

Just list the relevant issues and then state how much you’re going to fight for them.

If dominance is an adaptation that enables us to conserve energy by not having to fight out over every issue,

then creating alternative modes of achieving that impact will likely be acceptable substitute systems.

If we can use subsitute systems for achieving the efficiencies of dominance systems, then we can build alternative systems

and optimize them to be ‘better’ or more applicable or more palatable.

This will increase the efficiency of humanity.

Feb
19th

Sun

Game.

Make a game for humans where you present them with complex social (or business or political or moral) situations and they have/get to input how they would deal with the presented context.

Feb
12th

Sun

I think that there is a special place for “brain trusts” on the Internet; perhaps for ‘trust’ in general.

Free will, self-determination — both great things.

But as odd as it sounds, “Why should I have to make all my decisions for myself?” is a reasonable demand to make of the world.

Maybe these are all just fancy words for ‘friend recommendation’.
But maybe there’s more to it…

I will be thinking more about this.

Feb
5th

Sun

Dimensionality Questions

Hi professor.

I am seeking resources or thoughts on the following; I do not suspect that there will be answers readily available (of course if there are that would be more than awesome):

I was discussing physics the other day and came upon some ideas that I don’t fully understand but that I find interesting. Perhaps you have some thoughts on this or can point me towards resources relevant to the following:

I was thinking about gyroscopes versus vibration sensors.

Gyroscopes can measure all of the dimensional degrees of freedom of what we know as ‘space’.

When you pair a gyroscope with a clock then you can measure all of the dimensions that we typically see that we perceive; time + space.

Now we enter Flatland and consider the difference between vibration sensors and gyroscopes and ask:

vibration sensor + clock:gyroscope + clock :: gyroscope + clock:???

If we ask this question, we are asking about other dimensions that our gyroscopes do not have access to.

These do not have to be ‘higher’ dimensions or ‘lower’ dimensions, it also seems reasonable that they could be ‘lateral’ dimensions. Or it could be that there are all of ‘higher’, ‘lower’ and ‘lateral’ dimensions at all or some of any of the levels of this dimensional ‘stacking’.

Before asking about higher and lower dimensions I ask about lateral dimensions, and specifically ‘lateral’ dimensions of time.

The time-dimension we perceive is quite different from the spatial-dimensions we perceive in that it seems to only have one degree of freedom versus the three of space.

Perhaps this difference is due to a characteristic of the properties that our spatial dimensions have within (/ or in interaction with) the full breadth of the dimensions of space.

Perhaps our spatial dimensions are traveling through a hyperspace of time and the particular energy, trajectory, and angular momentum (+ other properties?) of our spatial dimensions leads us to perceive time the way that we do.

But if our spatial dimensions were to have different properties perhaps we would be traveling along a different vector within timespace and would thus experience time differently.

This of course opens many other questions about gravity and friction in timespace, and the hyperspace within which timespace exists, and about whether there is any form of dimensionally-neutral distance between a point in timespace and a point in spacetime or even a point in any type of space and a point in any other different type of space.

But before asking these questions we should ask if what we perceive as ‘forward’ time is simply an emergent property of the true type of dimensional space that our perceivable space dimensions are traveling through.

Perhaps we are not traveling through timespace at all.

To explore this I thought about what going ‘upwards’ in timespace might mean.

Forwards in time ‘makes sense’ because it coheres with our comfortable conceptualization of causality.

We can imagine ‘Backwards’ in time because we can remember our past, but it challenges our understanding of causality.

Upwards in time or Downwards in time however seem to have very little relationship to our understanding of causality.

It could be then that Causality is the dimension in which we are traveling.

Or it could be that Causality is the dimension in which timespace itself is traveling.

Or it could be that Causality is simply one section/property of yet another ‘more basic’ type of space that we are traveling through (Energy space?).

And now my questions:

• What is the current thinking/resources on multi-dimensional time?

• What do we know about the number of dimensional degrees of freedom of Causality space?

• How might we determine the number of dimensional degrees of freedom of Causality space?

• What would it mean for Causality space to be within Energy space?

• Is Energy space the same as ‘Existence’ space?

• What is the shape of Existence space? (Is it clopen?)

If Causality space is one dimensional then it would seem that there would only be two dimensions of timespace and we wouldn’t have to worry about Upwards or Downwards in space.

If Causality space were ‘zero’ dimensional, then it would seem reasonable to say that there is only one dimension of timespace.

But if Causality space is zero dimensional, does that mean that it does not exist?

Is there a difference between a zero-dimensional object and nothing?

Is there a difference between being zero-dimensional and lacking dimensionality?

And, is there a requirement to have dimensionality in order to exist?

Instead of being zero-dimensional, could something be non-dimensional.

And if something is non-dimensional what does that say about the nature of its interactions with dimensionally-bound entities?

Thanks for any thinking on this.

- Ethan

Jan
24th

Tue

How to Hack Congress

This was written at 5 in the morning after waking suddenly from a near-dream state.

—

I’ve been worrying about how I’m going to maintain my freedoms when every day it seems there’s a new bill being discovered making its way through Congress that’s poised to exert some form of oppression on me and the rest of the American people, if not beyond.

How do you keep up with that?

How do you use technological systems to scale the advocacy efforts that we brought against SOPA and PIPA?

At first it might seem a bit futile.

But then we must remember that Congress too is just a system.

And systems are hackable.

So, how do we hack Congress?

The first step in hacking any system is to identify how it works.

Congress works in many ways, but there are some characteristics that seem interesting to examine:

It is possible to talk with a member of Congress simply by showing up at their office.

You are much more likely to secure a meeting with a member of Congress if you are a voting member from their district.

This is a first level influence point.

How do we hack this level?

When we identify an important bill or issue, we use technology to arrange trips for voters from members of Congress’ districts to go to D.C for them to advocate our positions in person. We practice positions/arguments with these advocates before they go.

We turn going to D.C. into a regular occurrence.

There are a couple of simple challenges involved with going to D.C. that need a systematic way of being overcome.

Travel, lodging, in-location transportation, meeting scheduling (with members of Congress and other cooperative and useful agents (i.e. optimize time there)), return travel.

This can be summarized as:

Kickstarter for advocacy outings + Reddit for issue identification + coop blogging for argument formulation.

Jan
14th

Sat

How to Optimize Human-Machine Compute Systems

Programmable-Humanity

“Programmable-Humanity” — which is to say, human-machine cooperative problem solving where you stack and intermix humans and machines into automated systems designed to complete calculations or tasks — is an emerging and unavoidable reality.

It will change the way we organize ourselves, spend our time, and earn our livings. It will create vast new market-driven demand for human labor and more people will enjoy the benefits of reliable income and retainer-fees.

It will not reduce the value of skill-building, but I do think it will reduce the barriers-to-entry in participating in the work-force for a meaningful amount of time to come.

There is a significant amount to be said on the economics of human-machine cooperative problem solving but I will save that for another time or another person who cares to undertake that task.

Dealing with the ‘Transition’

Programmable-Humanity will be a force for very great good, but like most major technological advances its arrival will surely be quite painful for many people.

The productive way to view this unfortunate consequence is to view it as a challenge to ease this pain as quickly as possible.

There is much effort currently going into building the ‘tubes’ that enable Programmable-Humanity to exist - the infrastructure that enables a human on one side to efficiently distribute tasks to any number of humans and machines on the ‘other’ and economically get back the micro- or macro-services they were after.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service is the current market-leading provider, but new open-source initiatives such as the Jabberwocky framework and CrowdForge are poised to radically alter the competitive and functional landscape of the field.

While the ‘tubes’ are clearly a critically important component to Programmable-Humanity, an equally critical area is the interface stack between the humans and the machines.

If you seek to build a system that incorporates both human and machine compute power, the effectiveness and efficiency of your system will be limited by the computational throughput of both the humans and the machines in your system, but also the router you use to ‘connect’ the humans to the machines.

And that router will be limited by the quality of the data it has about the reliability of the humans it chooses to delegate tasks to.

How to Get Good Data About Human Reliability

Clearly such routers require feedback-loop driven reputation systems to operate efficiently — is this person good at doing that task under current or expected conditions (i.e. Saturday at 6:00pm on a cold, dark, snowy January day). Services such as Humanoid seem like they are attempting to take on just this challenge.

While feedback loops are great, they are nonetheless not the root of the human reliability data collection challenge.

The root source of quality data about human reliability is quite simply data about human motivation and human interests.

Accessing this data is going to be very hard. Most people don’t know for themselves what their motivations and interests are let alone are they interested in committing effort or attention to sharing this data with some sort of inhuman, impersonal, or untrusted ‘router’.

But this is the challenge that needs to be met if you wish to build truly performant human-machine compute systems. And to do this I think you have to make it as easy and as desirable as possible for people to answer some aspect of any of the following six questions:

What do I think is happening?
What do I want to have happen?
What do I think should happen?
What do I think will happen?
What do I plan to make happen?
What am I currently making happen?

Creating and integrating the tools and systems to collect this data is a ‘green field’ area of computer science, human-computer interaction, psychology, and likely a dozen or so other fields.

The extent to which you are able to collect this data — as well as of course the maturity of the rest of the tools up the Programmable-Humanity stack — will determine the extent to which you are able to achieve results in the vast new functional domains that are opened by automating the cooperation of humans and machines.

It is a grand challenge, culturally important, and a golden opportunity.

Jan
8th

Sun

"Do you follow what I’m saying?
Tell me what I’m trying to say."

— Protocol::Human::ModelNormalization

Jan
5th

Thu

Seven Wonders is the greatest game of all time.

The Seven Wonders data model can be used to build interesting tools

Warning: The following is a ‘brain dump’ and comes with absolutely zero warranty that comma splices will be avoided or communication stylization efforts taken.

Raw feed: ON!

The data structure within the Seven Wonders board game models societal resource allocation decision-making processing in a dynamic competitive environment.

The underlying data structure can be explored though under a broader space of environment types and specifications.

It should be useful to run simulations of systems of interacting SevenWonders data objects as well as recurse with this SevenWonder data structure systemization abstraction.

The hurdle to running simulation at each additional level of recursion is in specifying the features of each recursion level.

The first three levels are given by the Seven Wonders board game (if you change them, you’re working with a different data object (although potentially of the same class)).

You define the characteristics of a particular recursion level by defining level-specific objects and object distributions, and composite object interaction value functions.

For the simulation depths that you have actually fully specified, the state of the system at the end of running a game round at each of those levels provides the data that is required to build objects for a simulation round at the next higher-dimension.

To play competitively against humans and machines, players will require tools that take advantage of data generated by the state of systems at the end of game rounds, game round event histories, and perceived/recollected player/object thought-processes on the the history and decision dynamics of game rounds.

Building tools for competitive play means providing interfaces to collect such system and participant data.

Knowing more about Graph Kernels seems like it will be useful.

…

A Conversation:

Ethan => all: Seven Wonders is the greatest board game ever.

Friend1 => Ethan: I feel like the same components you are talking about appear in any board game.

Ethan => Friend1: The key idea is to think of each game and each component of each game as a particular type of data structure, and then ask a question and try to answer it using the various other data structures available to you as tools for constructing models to explore very high-dimensional, yet causal and repercussion-having, decisions you are faced with and actions you are taking.

Ethan => Friend2: Individual SevenWonder objects’ internal dynamics and systems of interacting SevenWonder objects (and systems of those systems, etc) seem like they would provide data that could be usefully applied to real-life individual personal resource allocation decision making tools.

…

Nov
17th

Thu

SOPA is a Disgrace

What’s most shocking about this all to me is not that the RIAA and MPAA would create and lobby for these bills, but that Congress would be at all amenable to them.

That’s the part that really knocks me over.

The fact that these bills are being given any serious amount of attention by members of Congress betrays either that the infrastructure we use to select and interact with our elected ‘representatives’ is broken (enabling such moral dissonance to emerge), or that the legislative power of Congress is genuinely for sale.

Both are bad, and unfortunately, it seems that both may be true.
It’s really, really, really, sad.

And just to make the picture complete, it would seem that our President is also suffering from some amount of moral dissonance with the American people.

At a time when what has become one of our core modes for processing information (which is to say, thinking) is under attack… where is our President?

Where is the man who is supposed to be leading our country and protecting us against aggression?

Why is our President not on TV using the bully-pulpit — his single most powerful tool — to protect our intellectual freedoms?

It’s very worrying.

Oct
11th

Tue

Muscle-Computer Interfaces are a big deal. Combine them with so-called ‘spatial operating environments’ (think: Minority Report) and you have something potentially very very special.