“Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts… There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it,” said Mr Gigaba [Deputy Minister of Home Affairs].
The US head of the House Judiciary Committee has sent a letter to Google and Facebook asking them to ‘co-operate’. Meanwhile the IRS says it wants a cut of all transactions on eBay just as some organisations are beginning to gain traction as they launch their own private currencies.
It’s not at all clear where the limits of government power end or where the competence of private organisations begin. The boundaries between public and private are becoming increasingly blurred (no wonder we’re confused about ‘privacy’). And when boundaries are unclear, people fight for territory.
We know what war between nation states looks like. What will a war between neo-diaspora look like? Would it be more like a Cold War or a civil war? Or would the diaspora mobilise nation states to fight as proxies?
The picture above is an image of the Haitian diaspora. How do we map a world where people have more in common with others on eBay and Facebook than they do with their next-door neighbours?
The perils of Confirmation Bias and an illustration of why it might be that people who specialise in non-specialism are sometimes attacked for “cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies.”
Twin Peaks (You have to imagine the clouds...)
Twin Peaks
The Twin Peaks analogy comes from David Colander described in The Economist:
IN 1996, David Colander of Middlebury College, in Vermont, expressed his dissatisfaction with decades of economics by invoking a lofty analogy. He felt macroeconomists had clawed their way up a mountain, only to discover, when they broke through the clouds, that a neighbouring mountain would have taken them higher. . .
There was gentle resistance from some well-adjusted economists. Mr Colander’s analogy does not imply that economists are getting nowhere: they can make progress up their chosen peak, even if other, higher mountains beckon. . .
The twin peaks image has a further, unsettling, implication. To get from one peak to the other, economists will have to lose a lot of altitude first. To tackle questions in a fresh way, they may have to set aside many of their favourite techniques and methods. . .
A rickety bridge. Let's criticise it.
Hill-climbers and Valley-crossers Steve Hsu paraphrases Lee Smolin:
Using Smolin’s analogy of hill climbing, the dominant strategy today in science is:
1) self-assess own climbing ability
2) choose suitable hill (perhaps inherited from advisor!)
3) climb to local maximum (write some relevant papers with incremental results)
4) squat on hilltop and defend against all attackers (make sure everyone cites your papers; get embedded in small community of researchers defending that hill)
5) train students and postdocs on your hilltop while secretly wishing you understood what other people were doing on their hilltops — suppressing the curiosity that originally got you into science.
And Jessica Palmer quotes Mark Buchanan discussing Lee Smolin:
Some scientists . . . climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. . . In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong scientific intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.
“This is the situation I believe we are in,” says Smolin, “and we are in it because science has become professionalized in a way that takes the characteristics of a good hill climber as representative of what is a good, or promising, scientist. The valley crossers we need have been excluded or pushed to the margins.”
Everybody agrees we need hill-climbers and valley-crossers. However, it seems to me there will always be people resentful at the price we have to pay for both. Conservative incrementalism and potential Confirmation Bias is the inevitable price of a specialism in hill-climbing, fuzziness (or just being plain wrong) and apophenia for the valley-crossers.
Interesting talk from Johanna Blakley on how fashion survives with no copyright. Or, more accurately, how fashion survives because they have no copyright – trademark is enough.
The argument is simple: fashion is too utilitarian to copyright. It would be wrong to allow something so utilitarian to fall into the hands of a few companies and designers.
More information about the Ready to Share project and a PDF of the slides from the talk here.
There are two really interesting slides used in the talk. This one, which shows the ‘two main binary oppositions within copyright law’ (ie utilitarian vs artistic objects / idea vs expression of idea – as shes says, these are unstable oppostions) and demonstrates how little consistency there is in the current copyright framework:
And this one, which will probably be all over the place and is self-explanatory:
If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.
Obliquity recognises that there are no predictable connections between intentions and outcomes. Problem solvers cannot evaluate all available alternatives: they make successive choices from a narrow range of options.
There are some variations on this, but they mostly follow this pattern. I’d imagine your technique is not too dissimilar. I imagined, in fact, everybody had a similar technique.
I watched my daughters fall asleep the other day (by serendipity more than design) and saw that Step 3 (closing eyes) wasn’t yet a part of their sleep Kung Fu. They lie down, fall asleep and then close their eyes.
