Elderblog Sutra: 5

March 18, 2019 By
This entry is part 5 of 13 in the series Elderblog Sutra

One of the challenges of writing an elder blog is that by definition the archives are extensive, and of very mixed quality. At some point, all formally imposed structure — categories, tags, series, “best of year” or “most popular” lists — buckle under the sheer weight of content. Once you’re past a few hundred posts, with reasonably dense internal back-linking, your only hope for recovering some sort of structure from what is essentially a little walled-garden artisanal web is algorithms. Thanks to John Backus, I have an algorithmic lens on the unkempt wilderness of ribbonfarm for you today.

John mined the archives to compute the internal linking structure, which I then massaged further into an internal page rank for the archives. Here’s a little video of John playing with a graph visualization tool.

 

And here’s the spreadsheet with the mined data. Feel free to make a copy and play around with the data and my PageRank-esque formula, which generates this view of the archives:

The “Adjusted Page Rank” here is a function of three variables:

  1. The number of posts linking to a post. A good post should inspire the author, and hopefully other contributors, to cite it in future posts.
  2. The age of the post. If a post doesn’t accumulate backlinks, it sinks into obscurity. About half the posts in our archives have no backlinks.
  3. The “weight” of the author. Contributors who have written more are weighted less, so Sarah and I have the two lowest weights, at 1.0303 and 1.0037 respectively.

Note that external inbound links are specifically not included in this ranking. This is a purely internal measure. If you want the formulas:

Author_weight = 1+1/(num_posts)

Adjusted Page Rank =  Author_weight*num_links/age

Where num_posts is the number of posts with at least 1 backlink.

Obviously, there’s room for enhancements here, but it’s a start. Thanks John!

Domestic Cozy: 2

March 15, 2019 By
This entry is part 2 of 13 in the series Domestic Cozy

Phrases like domestic cozy and  premium mediocre are what you might call world hashes, fingerprints of worlds. They enable you to instantly classify whether a thing belongs in a world, or is an alien element within it, even before you have characterized the world at any significant level of detail.

Take this picture (a screenshot of the landing page of Offhours.co, an “inactivewear” company, ht Adam Humphreys) for instance: domestic cozy or not?

I’m going to say yes, that’s domestic cozy. It’s not an exact science. The associations with inactivity, indoor life, and comfort over presentability put it firmly in the domestic-cozy world.

There are certainly problems at the margins. The well-groomed look of the model, and the non-messiness of the background suggest there’s a residual element of Millennial premium mediocrity in the positioning. It’s more the fake “good-hair” domesticity of a staged Instagram performance than a representation of a genuinely domestic aesthetic. Maybe they’re trying to get some crossover appeal going.

If I had to fine-tune this graphic to strike exactly the right note, I’d pick a more ordinary looking model, perhaps with properly unkempt frizzy hair and freckles. Maybe  a pile of laundry and unwashed coffee mugs/plates in the background (not disgustingly messy, just TV-messy). Maybe softer, darker evening lighting. Maybe a less glossy, more scruffy visual texture. Maybe a board game next to the model. Maybe a note of anxiety.

Still, close enough. This passes the fingerprint matching test.

Domestic cozy is a world hash that picks out a grammar in a world. As with premium mediocre, domestic cozy is tempting to reductively see as just an aesthetic. But if you like where this going, I suggest you check that tendency, because it makes things so much less interesting. To confuse a world hash with an aesthetic is like saying Sherlock’s Holmes ability to read the clues in his clients’ appearances made him a fashion critic rather than a detective.

This grammar is easiest to pick out in visual elements, but it suffuses all aspects of the world. I’ll save more general theorizing about world hashes for the worlding blogchain, but what does the grammar of domestic cozy tell us about the underlying world? What parts of what it picks out are enduring traits of the generation (remember, Gen Z can expect to live into the next century), and what parts are simply a function of life stage and contemporary conditions?

One thing that strikes me about examples I’ve noticed so far is that they paradoxically combine passivity and sense of play. As Visakan noted in a comment last time, there is a dark note of palliative self-care. Instead of Bruce Sterling’s “acting dead“, what we have here is a kind of playing dead. Instead of favela chic, we have mortuary chic.

This is an aspect that, I predict, will not endure. It is an artifact of life stage and 2019 conditions, not the generational temperament.

But the playfulness will mature into a more alive version of itself.

Worlding Raga: 3 — Slouching with God

March 14, 2019 By
This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Worlding Raga

Last week, my wife and I watched the new Captain Marvel movie. It strikes a slightly quieter note than the typical Marvel Cinematic Universe romp, and it occurred to me that that’s because the character is arguably the most powerful in the MCU, like Superman in the DC universe. She’s more like a god than even Thanos or Thor, so the usual wisecracking smart-assery would have struck a false note.

A line in Ian’s Worlding Raga episode last week, What is a World, leaped out at me in relation to this:

This voluntary desire to surf chaos, metabolize it into new order, and then do it all over again, is sometimes called “walking with god.” Maybe it’s more like slouching with god around here.

In the MCU, Nick Fury walks with many gods, and Captain Marvel appears to be the most powerful of the lot, which is why Fury sends a prayer-pager call out to her as his last act in Infinity War. Presumably she’ll play a key role in defeating Thanos in Endgame.

Since I’ve been jokingly referring to Ribbonfarm and its surrounding web zone as the “Ribbonfarm Blogamatic Universe” (RBU), Ian’s characterization immediately provokes the question: am I Captain Marvel or Nick Fury in the RBU? I hope I’m not Hawkeye.

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Predictable Identities: 4 – Stereotypes

March 13, 2019 By
This entry is part 4 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

How do we predict strangers?

Humans evolved in an environment where they rarely had to do this. Practically everyone a prehistoric human met was familiar and could be modeled individually based on their past interactions. But today, we deal with ever-stranger strangers on big city streets, in global markets, online…

We need to make quick predictions about people we’ve never met. We do it using stereotypes.

Early research on stereotypes focused on their affective aspect: we dislike strangers, but less so as we get to know them. But new studies have looked at the content of stereotypes, finding that groups are judged independently on the dimensions of warmth/competitiveness and status/competence. For example, Germans see Italians as high-warmth low-competence, i.e. lovable buffoons; Italians see Germans as the exact opposite, i.e. mercenary experts.

These dimensions are primarily about predicting someone’s behavior and capability. In game theory terms: Will that person cooperate? And can I safely defect on them or do I have to play nice?

Contrary to the well-meaning wishes of most stereotype researchers, there is robust empirical evidence on stereotype accuracy. The short of it is that people’s stereotypes are, in fact, quite accurate, especially stereotypes of gender and ethnicity. Whether stereotyping is good or bad, it cannot simply be wished “educated” away. It is universal because it’s very useful for prediction.

A smart person noted that problems arise from having too few stereotypes, not too many. If you have a single stereotype for “Jews” you’re doing a bad job of modeling Jewish people, and are likelier to mistreat them due to prejudice. If you have separate stereotypes for Hasidic Jews, Brooklyn conservative Zionists, liberal Jewish atheists, secular Israelis etc. you’re one step closer to treating (and modeling) unfamiliar Jews as individuals. Studying cultures is about acquiring many useful stereotypes.

Refactorings Roundup: 1/28/19 – 3/10/19

March 12, 2019 By
This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

It’s been nearly 6 weeks since the last time I did this roundup from our mastodon. It’s now a series, so you can navigate backwards to find good stuff.  Even with some automation (thanks Zach), generating a reasonable curated selection from the hive-mind of a community is not an easy task. Still, I find it’s worth doing for the sheer oddity of the things that get into the dragnet.

In other news, I’ve gotten really good at making omeletes with the Just Egg plant-based egg substitute, which is really good.

Unlike auteur-curated link roundups, which tend to have an impoverished sameness even with the best curators, a reasonable sized community that is sufficiently open tends to have weird shit on its mind if you periodically fMRI it. I’ve been trying to follow a bonsai-style curation approach, trying to reveal the natural tendencies of this firehose rather than filter by my own interests. We have a total of 16 posts from friends of ribbonfarm, and 27 links from around the web.

Among the new posts, I want to call out Chenoe Hart’s post Free Shipping (#1 on the New Posts list), Sarah Constantin’s posts on general intelligence (#7) and Ilia Gimelfarb’s post (#14).

Alright here we go.

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Weirding Diary: 5

March 12, 2019 By
This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series Weirding Diary

In the South Lake Union part of Seattle, where Amazon has its campus, there is a “community banana stand” where anyone can grab a banana for free. Each time I walk by, I read the sign as a philosophical suggestion for the Weirding. When the going gets weird, the weird go pro, but normies go bananas.

But there’s a deeper lesson in the banana stand.

Most people (including me) who grab a banana are not exactly needy, so to the extent “community” suggests a representative sample of Seattle, including the poor and homeless, the banana stand is in the wrong place. It’s a perk for tech-workers, and the service class surrounding it, with a bit of communitarian lipstick.

As elite hypocrisies go, this one is pretty benign, and I’m happy to participate in it. But why do we even need it? Why narrativize free bananas as a “community” perk.

I think the answer lies in the is-ought fallacy operating among elites to counter-program a self-awareness of their own mediocrity: “These free bananas, which we share out of noblesse oblige, demonstrate our exceptional nature!”

This is an elite rationalization, but the urge to deny rather than embrace a sense of mediocrity is a human universal. In fact, I would define normie as “somebody with an urge to deny their mediocrity.”

Mediocrity denial is using exceptional environments to “prove” your exceptional nature to yourself. It leads to bad theories of weird worlds.

The mediocrity-embracing solution, which is a necessary condition to go pro weird, is to resist the urge to ideologically narrativize bananas. Grab a free banana when you can, pay for your banana when you must.

Weirding and mediocrity are entangled in my head. I haven’t entirely sorted out how, but one dimension is certainly the is-ought fallacy in identity formation.

Infinite Machines: 1 – An Introduction

March 11, 2019 By

Like the universe, technology, an extension of the self, is expanding fast.

The infinite machine is the idea that we’re becoming machine-like through the use of human-like machines. It is a phenomenon at the intersection of automation, labor, gratification, and human desire.

In this expansion of technology, I argue that we compromise aspects of our humanity in ways that are hard to see for some, and harder to associate meaning to for others. So the further we ‘progress’, the less we intrinsically understand why we choose to expand.

AI is still evolving (broadly completing narrow tasks) and has done a decent job mimicking human attributes: neural computation, analytical decision-making, and natural language processing to name a few. But despite the rudimentary functionality of AI today, the idea of an AI singularity sparks both fear and allure amongst the world’s top physicists and inventors.

This series explores contending identity attributes between the computer science of AI and spirit of humanity, through a few critical lenses:

  1. Growing emotional and psychological dissonance of laborers involved in the delivery of AI technologies.
  2. Unrealized tension that laborers experience in the process, which range from microaggressions to economic exploitation.
  3. Evolving perceptions of power and free will as AI technologies become more anthropomorphic.

A recurring challenge across these areas, which I’ll examine, is detangling the inherent value from its value proposition: Let’s connect you to the world in ways that you never imagined. For example, last week, I booked a taxi, confirmed a tinder date, and discovered a new music genre – all in three minutes. As the third minute passed, I realized I hadn’t pushed any buttons in the elevator which I was standing in.

I was doing ‘things,’ but going nowhere. This, of course, is a metaphor for the collective human identity.

Predictable Identities: 3 – Prisoner’s Dilemma

March 10, 2019 By
This entry is part 3 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

Much of human interaction is shaped by the structure of the prisoner’s dilemma. We put in place institutions and norms to enforce cooperation. We tell shared stories to inspire it. We evolved moral emotions to achieve cooperation on an interpersonal level: empathy and gratitude to assure cooperators of our cooperation, anger and vengefulness to punish defectors, tribalism and loyalty to cooperate with those we know well.

But the crux of the prisoner’s dilemma is that defection is always better for the defector. We try to get others to cooperate with us, but we also try to defect as much as we can get away with. We want our peers to pay their taxes, admit mistakes, share credit, and stay faithful. We also fudge our taxes, shift blame, boast, and cheat.

There are many strategies for dealing with PD, and some of them can be formalized in code and entered in competitions with other strategies. The simple strategies are named and studied: tit-for-tat responds to each play in kind, tit-for-two-tats forgives one deception in case it was a mistake, Pavlov changes tacks after being defected against and so on and so forth. Which strategy works best?

It turns out that the success of each strategy depends almost entirely on the strategies played by opponents. Each approach can fail to reach cooperation with others or under-exploit opportunities to defect; even a strategy of always defecting is optimal if enough other players always cooperate. If you only knew what your opponent is playing, you could always choose the best option.

And this brings us back to predicting other humans. If we can model their strategies, if we know who will be forgiving and kind, who will be vengeful and dangerous, we can play optimally in any situation. Predicting well is the unbeatable strategy.

Mediocratopia: 3

March 7, 2019 By
This entry is part 3 of 13 in the series Mediocratopia

Mediocrity is, rather appropriately, under-theorized.  An upcoming book by David S. Milo, Good Enough (ht Keerthik), seems set to make it a little less undertheorized. The subtitle is inspiringly underwhelming: The tolerance of mediocrity in nature and society.  Reader Killian Butler sent me this post on being mediocre. Our movement is really slouching along now.

There is a paradox at the heart of mediocrity studies: excellence is not actually exceptional. If you see an excellent behavior or thing, it’s likely to be a middling instance at its level. The perception of exceptionalism is an illusion caused by inappropriate comparisons: you think it is a 99 percentile example of Level 3 performance, but it’s really a median example of Level 4 performance.

Changing levels of performance is self-disruption. The moment you hit, say, the 60% performance point on the current S-curve of learning, you start looking for ways to level up. This is the basic point in Daniel F. Chambliss’ classic paper, The Mundanity of Excellence. People who rise through the levels of a competitive sport do so by making discrete qualitative changes to level up before they hit diminishing returns from the current level. This process of leveling up, has less to do with striving for excellence in the sense of exceptional performance, and more to do with repeatedly growing past limits. The visibly excellent are never at a local optimum.

In Age of Speed, skier Vince Poscente claims he won primarily by practicing his skills at a level above the one he was competing at. So during actual competition, he could win with less than 100% effort.

Making winning a habit is about making sure you’re always operating at a level where you have slack; where you are in fact mediocre. If you’re being pushed towards excellence, it’s time to find a new level.

Worlding Raga: 2 – What is a World?

March 5, 2019 By
This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Worlding Raga

Hi, I’m Ian Cheng. I’m an artist. Over the last six years, I’ve been creating a series of simulations that explore an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent — the emissary — whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of a simulation. In the process, I began to see the edges of a new layer of artistic activity. One that could organize my base ingredients — deterministic stories and open-ended simulations — into something more than the sum of its parts. Something meaningful yet alive, bounded yet transforming. I’ve been calling this activity Worlding.

At Venkat’s invitation, I’m contributing to Worlding Raga with the hope of further developing a literacy around Worlding. As a tourist of this part of the blogosphere, I’ve been drawn to the spiritual dimension of Ribbonfarm again and again. It is the side of Ribbonfarm that is hungry to identify phenomena in the wild that don’t seem to die, and to name them so that they are enduring tools for others to see and act anew. This voluntary desire to surf chaos, metabolize it into new order, and then do it all over again, is sometimes called “walking with god.” Maybe it’s more like slouching with god around here. Either way, it is a spirit I resonate with and one that I believe is highly suited to Worlding.

First things first. What is a World?

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