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RealityApologist posted:The marble economy was meant to illustrate an attention economy, where units of attention were treated as discrete particles. Its more natural (but less memorable) to treat the phenomenon as waves, or more precisely to model behavior in field-theoretic terms. We'd ultimately like a master equation to describe the collective activity of agents. But we're not there yet; the ideas I was proposing were probably a decade ahead of the science. The cutting edge attempts at field-theoretic models of goal-directed behaviors are still dramatically underexplored. Eripsa I already pointed it out to you in different threads, but do not throw out mathematical formalisms that you do not understand in the slightest. Being able to wikipedia an article describing a 'Master Equation' does not count as genuine understanding.
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Dec 2, 2013 10:38
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Tokamak posted:Besides that was not the point of my post, if you read the link then you would know that individual people will be arguing on the proposed solutions.
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Dec 2, 2013 10:40
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iFederico posted:Eripsa I already pointed it out to you in different threads, but do not throw out mathematical formalisms that you do not understand in the slightest. Being able to wikipedia an article describing a 'Master Equation' does not count as genuine understanding. It's like the samples from Fashionable Nonsense except Eripsa wants to run the world on his vague ideas of how math works.
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Dec 2, 2013 11:23
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If there's one group of people I trust to solve social issues it's the group who go out of their way to avoid paying taxes in countries in which they operate, slow starving their economies and social budgets
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Dec 2, 2013 11:38
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Amarkov posted:It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them. Yes it was, it was just discarded, because everyone but Grandma realized how loving stupid it is.
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Dec 2, 2013 11:48
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Pope Guilty posted:It's like the samples from Fashionable Nonsense except Eripsa wants to run the world on his vague ideas of how math works. I also hate that people who unironically describe themselves as 'idea thinkers' somehow never seem to think they should bother actually understanding the nitty gritty details of the theories they are advocating. Eripsa somehow manages to piss off both the sociologists (who think he is full of poo poo) and the scientists (who think he doesn't understand anything that he is talking about, just look at his algorithm).
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Dec 2, 2013 12:20
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Cicero posted:An autonomous cartopia would have fewer accidents and thus fewer injuries and deaths, fewer cars manufactured, more accessibility (to old/young/disabled/drunk), less space allocated for parking lots, and possibly better traffic and less pollution/better mileage per passenger. Ehhh, not so much as you'd think. The Autonomous Cartopia would need to have enough cars to operate at peak capacity, which is actually a fair number of cars. You're better off using public autocars as a supplement for effective public transit, rather than a replacement.
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Dec 2, 2013 14:04
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Cream_Filling posted:HAhahahah yes the NSA will crowdsource national security surveillance. This is an actual thought had by a supposedly intelligent adult human. I did not suggest the NSA will crowdsource surveillance. I suggested that crowdsourced surveillance would do a better job of security that the NSA. These are not the same things, and you are mocking a view I don't have.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:14
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Adar posted:Eripsa, just out of curiosity, did you pay any attention to the last thread where evilweasel pointed out that applying your crowdsourcing traffic plans to the US would result in doubling the death rate in the country as a whole? As you've immediately brought up another car analogy my guess is you did not. Is this perhaps a crack in your theory that the wisdom of crowds rewards good ideas? evilweasel's objections, just like Cream Filling's and yours, have literally nothing to do with the view I've been defending in this thread. In fact, I've given explicit procedures for describing how to avoid the problem of the fat smelly guy hogging all the resources; that's exactly what a distributed system is supposed to fix, and exactly the situations I'm trying to resolve. You are all just obfuscating through white noise and disinformation without actually considering the view being presented. Which is fine, but sorry if I'm not taking it as a knock down objection to the view.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:18
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Adar posted:Posting to claim my attention bux for quoting this post Posting to check my marble balance for the old NSA thread.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:21
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RealityApologist posted:evilweasel's objections, just like Cream Filling's and yours, have literally nothing to do with the view I've been defending in this thread. No, people have accurately summarized your attention economy idea in a single line. It's dumb handwaving bullshit. My description was "a magic black box that is supposed to derive an objective measure of value for all things everywhere based on big data and google glass and, uh, the cloud and stuff." As usual, you selectively respond while ignoring substantive responses you don't have answers to (i.e. almost all of them). And let me repeat your quote for you: RealityApologist posted:I honestly think that in a world run by software, all the NSA cameras and tracking systems are operated on a publicly accessible, open and transparent website, something like Wikipedia, except for security. This is an amazingly stupid idea.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:32
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I gotta say, though, the OP is definitely good at pushing his catchphrases like "in a world run by software..." . It's like I'm getting a bad TED talk in forums post form.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:45
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RealityApologist posted:I honestly think that in a world run by software, all the NSA cameras and tracking systems are operated on a publicly accessible, open and transparent website, something like Wikipedia, except for security. Ladies and gentlemen, the National Security Advisor, "Check Out These Top 50 Teen Girls At The Mall!"
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Dec 2, 2013 15:46
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Why do we even need to spy? Why not just ASK the russians where the nukes are, digitally? Way more efficient. Why do we need wasteful locks on doors? Privacy is an outmoded concept in a world run by software. And as for theft? Just revolutionize society by eliminating property, bam, problem solved. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 15:49
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Tokamak posted:They won't respond because they're lacking the ability to articulate their own thoughts in a technical way. Its easier to chat about attention economy, because it's 'just an idea' and it can't really be critiqued (unlike, say a decision making algorithm). "Attention economy" is the big idea that makes the technical solutions to the consensus problem fit into a larger story of the politics and values of a digital society. Since I'm trying to characterize the alternative at that level of description, that's where most of my efforts lie. But I'm perfectly happy to talk about this at a more technical level. The algorithm that you are critiquing was obviously not a general purpose algorithm, and I was quite clear about the situations in which it is meant to work: a live crowd trying to resolve some discussions in real time, It operates under the assumption that people want to cooperate even where they disagree, and gives an illustration of how such a procedure would work, aimed at a particularly nontechical crowd. Consensus grouping is designed only to fix problems with participation from the crowd, and to work around the problem of the loud obnoxious people who try to dominate the procedure. The procedure might fail for particular divisive issues, and them perhaps some other procedure is necessary. But the point wasn't to resolve all possible debates, it to construct a procedure under which constructive debates might happen. There are obviously similar looping problems and decision procedure failure in other kinds of deliberative bodies (like the house of representatives), so the fact that my simple and context-specific algorithm has the same problems shouldn't be an immediate defeater. Again, the claim isn't that it finds better solutions, only that the procedure is inclusive and distributed. If I had made claims that this algorithm would resolve all disputes or serve as the basis for all governance, I'd be a crank. But I'm not claiming that, and I'm very clear about how it is meant to work. And yes, Boston Masacre style is an appropriate name. I'm not sure why this makes me a crank. iFederico, I know very well what a master equation is, and I've taken graduate level math classes on the subject. A master equation describes a system through a complete description of the relations between all the parts (its state), and the changes its state undergoes over time. This is what we'd like to see for human populations: a description of the relations between all the people and their relevant objects, and the changes in those relations over time. Such a master equation would constitute a model for the attention economy. I don't think I'm making mistake when describing this as the goal, or at least I'm not sure what mistake you think I'm making. In any case, when I said these ideas are 10 years ahead of the science, I mean specifically that scientists aren't ready yet to start giving such a state description of things as complex as the full set of human social relations. I posted articles from the HCOMP conference last month which represents the state of the art on the subject, and people are still dealing with very simple incentive models in high constrained environments where the possible relations are represented in very simple toy models. Extending these models to actually cover the range of cases I'm considering in this thread will take some time. I'm not at all saying that I'm outthinking the scientists; instead, I'm only assuming that these models will extend out in the ways I've described, and I'm trying to talk about the larger social and political ramifications of those changes once they occur. Because I'm not a data scientist, I'm a philosopher. I don't want to misuse these subjects, so if I'm making a mistake I'd love a correction. But I don't think I'm making any technical mistakes, I'm just speculating on how these tools play out over the next decade. In particular, I understand how these methods for organizing populations differ fundamentally from the industrial age tools they are replacing, and that's where most of my theoretical discussion lies. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 15:51
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Eripsa, you aren't an expert at all the aspects required to make a system like this work, so you have no business saying anything about the topic. For shame.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:57
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RealityApologist posted:Eripsa, you aren't an expert at all the aspects required to make a system like this work, so you have no business saying anything about the topic. This is the most accurate thing you've ever written. I'm proud of you.
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Dec 2, 2013 15:58
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I'd post more but I'm out of marbles, what's the exchange rate between bitcoins and attention marbles?
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Dec 2, 2013 16:02
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Look, BSS and the technolibertarians from Silicon Valley haven't given any picture of what they think a world run by software looks like, and I've not seen any comprehensive views being put forward that try to treat the phenomenon at both technical and sociopolitical levels. If anyone knows of such a view, I'm all ears. The most sophisticated version of this discussion you find in the popular media takes the form "Is a star trek-like world without currency possible?", and that's a woefully inadequate framing of the question for doing any real work. I'm not trolling. I'm not talking about bitcoins or the singularity. I'm not just appealing to science fiction scenarios, or making ideological assumptions about human nature or freedom. I'm appealing to real techniques in data analysis and machine learning, and to values and principles familiar from existing consensus-based communities. This is as reasonable as approach as I can imagine to such a large and unwieldy topic. The criticisms thus far have taken the form "this is stupid, you are stupid", which seems a completely unreasonable reaction to the proposal. A reasonable, constructive critique would be something like this: "You know, consensus procedures are really hard. This cited literature shows some constraints and limitations of consensus methods in resolving disputes, which your algorithm doesn't address. But here's another way to organize distributed decision making procedures that avoids these problems...". Instead, I get: "You are stupid for thinking this world work, and thus the whole idea of a software world is stupid and not worth considering. The way things are is perfectly fine, and alternatives deserve no consideration."
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Dec 2, 2013 16:11
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RealityApologist posted:Eripsa, you aren't an expert at all the aspects required to make a system like this work, so you have no business saying anything about the topic. But be expert in like, one aspect to begin with. Actually, be expert in two, these are weighty enough matters that we need a real polymath in the driver's seat, dammit. Get up to the level where you'd get done explaining your entire attention theory to Bertrand Russell or Chomsky and they would respond with something other than "OK?"
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Dec 2, 2013 16:14
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SedanChair posted:But be expert in like, one aspect to begin with. Actually, be expert in two, these are weighty enough matters that we need a real polymath in the driver's seat, dammit. Get up to the level where you'd get done explaining your entire attention theory to Bertrand Russell or Chomsky and they would respond with something other than "OK?" Right, if Eripsa isn't a genius like Chomsky or Russell, he has no business whatsoever holding unpopular political opinions. edit: let's go through the rest of D&D and hold everyone else to this standard too. Should be fun, yeah?
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Dec 2, 2013 16:16
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RealityApologist posted:"But here's another way to organize distributed decision making procedures that avoids these problems...". You are stupid for thinking there is a way to organize distributed decision making that avoids these problems. The idea of a software world isn't itself stupid and not worth considering, but it is stupid to consider any practical such world to be significantly different from our existing world. (The impractical ones give rise to even more extreme objections because they really are stupid.). Software worlds just reify existing systems (including racism and poverty) into code, which is in fact worse than the existing legal systems - this is the essential insight of "code is law" but oddly enough is typically forgotten by the anti-IP people as soon as the discussion moves away from them getting free stuff. The way things are aren't fine, and alternatives deserve consideration, but fetishizing technology isn't an alternative, it's more of the same.
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Dec 2, 2013 16:17
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We're already living in a world run by software, so it will look like the one we live in now. People have turned to mocking you because you fail to respond to any response which is even slightly critical at all. You're demanding people play in your sandbox and ignoring everyone outside it even though the biggest problems with your ideas are so big they encompass the entire concept. "No no see this is my idea for flying cars so I'm ignoring anyone who doesn't have technical objections to the wing assemblies or rotor design and merely explains to me why flying cars are a terrible idea. Also I'm not technically an engineer, I'm a philosopher who wants to wank over how flying cars will revolutionize society, but if you have a non-technical objection then stuff it." Not to mention the fact that none of the stuff you talk about is actually anywhere in the same realm of reality to actual developments in machine learning. Talking about human-level AI that can arbitrarily and accurately identify the semantic relations between all objects in the world everywhere is utter fantasy, not a reasonable extrapolation of current technologies to the future. You're also in no way specific or academic and are in fact indulging in exact the same shallow navel-gazing as the pop media you criticize. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 16:20
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RealityApologist posted:Right, if Eripsa isn't a genius like Chomsky or Russell, he has no business whatsoever holding unpopular political opinions. I'm not saying you have to be a genius, I'm saying that you have to make sense to a genius (or to anybody).
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Dec 2, 2013 16:28
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RealityApologist posted:You are all just obfuscating through white noise and disinformation without actually considering the view being presented. drat this guy really does troll himself.
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Dec 2, 2013 16:38
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RealityApologist posted:Eripsa, you aren't an expert at all the aspects required to make a system like this work, so you have no business saying anything about the topic. Agreed
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Dec 2, 2013 16:38
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Cream_Filling posted:We're already living in a world run by software, so it will look like the one we live in now. The world is not run by software, it is run by legal arcana which has regulatory control over the software that runs it. And a cabal of human beings sit behind that legal arcana, protecting it from being too dramatically changed by the times. This world isn't run by software, but in the last 20 years its become increasingly important in the operation of our lives. A world run by software would involve the deliberate and systematic replacement of that cabal of human politicians with their digital alternatives. This will take the form of both software agents (AI), but also in establishing protocols for public engagement with those digital services, and methods for managing and controlling these services through public feedback. You know, the kind of things I've been talking about in this thread. One example that hasn't come up yet are the attempts to make expert systems replace the judicial process. Another juicy topic under the heading of this thread, but everyone is too eager to burn me to actually bother to debate and discuss the topic. The claim isn't that robots will make all judicial decisions (just like my claim isn't that attention management will solve all problems), but rather that But your flippant claim that we already live in a world run by software is an example of one of the biggest rhetorical problems I have on this forum: its never clear what aspects of the proposal are accepted and which are being rejected, so I'm constantly engaging with moving goal posts that are assuming radically different pictures of the world. Perhaps some of you have paused to consider that I'm arguing against about a dozen different posters, each with their own skewed interpretation of the already unclear and garbled prose I'm producing. You are all at least as smart as I am, but with much different fields of expertise. Keeping a coherent and consistent picture of the proposal is not easy when it is getting ripped from all sides. I'm not saying to take pity on me; I'm saying that if any good ideas at all are coming through to the reader in this process, that's frankly an amazing thing. I can point you to academic articles I've written on the topic, where I have more control over the tone and presentation, if there is interest in actually developing whatever good ideas exist in this thread. In fact, I've already pointed multiple times in this thread to other word I've done in other (non-SA goony/no D&D contrarian bastards) contexts. So far, Tokamak is the only one who appears to have actually looked at any of the other material. He also seems to have comprehended it and sees how it fits into the academic discussion of consensus procedures, and he admits that it isn't radically out of step with the literature. But instead of talking about better alternatives, or even just sharing his knowledge with the thread, he saw fit to jump on the insult bandwagon and call me a crank. I'm not a crank; I'm a nonspecialist talking to an audience of presumably nonspecialists, and that's an important difference. This is a situation where experts should be assisting in the learning process, not heaping on the insults. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 16:44
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iFederico posted:Agreed Let's ask a question I'm sure Eripsa will be able to answer-- How much a year is it to get a grad degree from Full Sail University? (insert other for profit diploma mill as appropriate)
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Dec 2, 2013 16:46
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^^ Oh man another burn! You sure got me pegged!iFederico posted:Agreed I mean, these forums accept only the highest standards of discourse. We wouldn't want anything less than world-expert discussion to take place on the prestigious D&D boards, home to all you nobel laureates and honored scholars. The reputation of this board depends on the silence of anyone less. How presumptuous of me to even consider bringing my mongrel views in here.
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Dec 2, 2013 16:48
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I know you're bad at jokes so I corrected this one to accurately reflect the substantive objection many posters have to you and your work:RealityApologist posted:Eripsa, you aren't an expert at any of the aspects required to make a system like this work, so you have no business saying anything about the topic. It's clear from your journal club thread previously that you're not a good scientist since you've never actually done any scientific research (note: since you've misunderstood this term before, this does not mean a literature search, it means actual experimental work) and you can't read and summarize a paper to save your life. And as a philosopher, judging from your work products (presentations, etc.) and overall quality of thinking and analysis in this and other threads, you're also extremely weak. There is room for a genius polymath to chart the course for the future. You're just not it. Your talents so far seem to be in creating a large volume of text from very little material and inventing new buzzwords. I sincerely hope, for the good of the reputation of academics everywhere, that you either improve significantly or else fail to get a degree.
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Dec 2, 2013 16:51
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RealityApologist posted:How presumptuous of me to even consider bringing my mongrel views in here. Agreed
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Dec 2, 2013 16:52
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RealityApologist posted:I can point you to [url=http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6376]academic articles I've written on the topic[/ur], where I have more control over the tone and presentation, if there is interest in actually developing whatever good ideas exist in this thread. In fact, I've already pointed multiple times in this thread to other word I've done in other (non-SA goony/no D&D contrarian bastards) contexts. Is this an appeal to your own authority?
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Dec 2, 2013 16:56
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RealityApologist posted:The world is not run by software, it is run by legal arcana which has regulatory control over the software that runs it. And a cabal of human beings sit behind that legal arcana, protecting it from being too dramatically changed by the times. This world isn't run by software, but in the last 20 years its become increasingly important in the operation of our lives. A world run by software would involve the deliberate and systematic replacement of that cabal of human politicians with their digital alternatives. This will take the form of both software agents (AI), but also in establishing protocols for public engagement with those digital services, and methods for managing and controlling these services through public feedback. You know, the kind of things I've been talking about in this thread. One example that hasn't come up yet are the attempts to make expert systems replace the judicial process. Another juicy topic under the heading of this thread, but everyone is too eager to burn me to actually bother to debate and discuss the topic. The claim isn't that robots will make all judicial decisions (just like my claim isn't that attention management will solve all problems), but rather that Replace all governments with robots? Maybe I should refer you to the works of Kirk et. al (1967) regarding the weaknesses of such a system. Namely the inability of such systems to deal with love. Also I love that you never finished your thought but didn't even notice. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 16:58
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Cream_Filling posted:There is room for a genius polymath to chart the course for the future. Actually, while I don't object in theory, in practice, I've found that more or less anyone that describes themselves as a polymath is someone who has read a lot of wikipedia articles and books by Malcom Gladwell, and severely overestimates their own abilities. Mastering a field in sufficient depth to be able to give meaningful commentary about its cutting edge is a full time occupation - imagining that someone can give meaningful contributions to quantum loop gravity and Shakespearean literary criticism is pretty difficult. Afaik, Gellman did both with physics and linguistics, but he did it in very different periods of his life.
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Dec 2, 2013 17:00
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iFederico posted:Actually, while I don't object in theory, in practice, I've found that more or less anyone that describes themselves as a polymath is someone who has read a lot of wikipedia articles and books by Malcom Gladwell, and severely overestimates their own abilities. Yeah it's more like "there's always room for a genius polymath." Just like like there's always room for clean free energy sources.
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Dec 2, 2013 17:02
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Cream_Filling posted:Yeah it's more like "there's always room for a genius polymath." Just like like there's always room for clean free energy sources. Oh sure, that I agree with completely.
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Dec 2, 2013 17:03
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RealityApologist posted:But your flippant claim that we already live in a world run by software is an example of one of the biggest rhetorical problems I have on this forum: its never clear what aspects of the proposal are accepted and which are being rejected, so I'm constantly engaging with moving goal posts that are assuming radically different pictures of the world. Perhaps some of you have paused to consider that I'm arguing against about a dozen different posters, each with their own skewed interpretation of the already unclear and garbled prose I'm producing. You are all at least as smart as I am, but with much different fields of expertise. Keeping a coherent and consistent picture of the proposal is not easy when it is getting ripped from all sides. I'm not saying to take pity on me; I'm saying that if any good ideas at all are coming through to the reader in this process, that's frankly an amazing thing. Realtalk: this is entirely your fault. You created the thread, so you have an enormous amount of control over tone and presentation. You simply have failed to narrow the scope to something manageable, as you always do. If you can barely even write about, let alone understand, the topic, then you've overreached. If you want a discussion you can actually handle, pick a single narrow topic. Do NOT talk at all about what you consider the world-changing ramifications of that topic that will revolutionize human civilization, because they make you sound like a literal crazy person. Ask a single narrowly defined and relatively specific question. Then make some actual effort and do at least a basic literature search so you have some idea of what the current state of the answer(s) to that question is/are and summarize for the class. You want to have fun wide-ranging fantasy conversations about "the future"? Smoke a bowl and call your friends, or throw it at a bunch of idiot undergrads when you're feeling lazy and don't want to teach. Or just take it to GBS 2.1. Save that fun stuff to keep you motivated for the grinding, miserable, detailed and specific spergwork and rigorous thought that actual academics is all about. If you don't like that part, then run away now and try to create a career as hype-man for startups or else pretend to love My Little Pony and pander to internet nerds as a futurist blogger and sci-fi novelist. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 17:18
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Cream_Filling posted:If you don't like that part, then run away now and try to create a career as hype-man for startups or else pretend to love My Little Pony and pander to internet nerds as a futurist blogger and sci-fi novelist. But all of those things still take a ton of work. Can't I just get credit as being "the guy who put it all together"? Like at the end of the movie where there's a montage of headlines and magazines "30-YEAR-OLD BOY GENIUS CREATES ATTENTION THEORY" but then the "MAN OF THE YEAR" Time magazine comes up...and it's the one that has a mirror and says "THE MAN OF THE YEAR...IS YOU" *cue Koyaanisqatsi music*
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Dec 2, 2013 17:34
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Cream_Filling posted:It's clear from your journal club thread previously that you're not a good scientist since you've never actually done any scientific research (note: since you've misunderstood this term before, this does not mean a literature search, it means actual experimental work) and you can't read and summarize a paper to save your life. And as a philosopher, judging from your work products (presentations, etc.) and overall quality of thinking and analysis in this and other threads, you're also extremely weak. I'm not claiming to be a genius polymath or a computer scientist. I actually do hold a degree in computer science, and I conducted research in the area as an undergraduate, but that was over 10 years ago. But I do know my philosophy pretty well, and my professional work is largely aimed at particular issues in the philosophy of mind and technology. I am an expert in that area, and I'm pretty confident about it. And it certainly bears on this discussion. So I meet your qualification there, and I think that background licenses at least the kind of discussion I'm having here. But my audience in this thread isn't to other philosophers, it is to a somewhat tech-savvy public, so I'm talking about things outside my domain of expertise to engage the people where they are. I feel the situation is similar to the role philosophy of mind played in the 60's and 70's in the development of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The philosophers weren't expert neuroscientists, but at the time nobody was, and the techniques for even conceptualizing the field were completely underdeveloped. And so the philosophers came in with all their historical baggage and shuffled around the conceptual furniture a bit. And partly through the exchanges between scientists and philosophers, cognitive science was able to take shape in the 80's and 90's and develop into a mature field. The philosophers were there at the beginning because their prescientific theories (about representation, function, language, etc) already had lots of things to say on the topics that neuroscientists would eventually be worried worried about. And those philosophical worries tended to implicate a lot of other fields, like neurology and psychology and linguistics and computer science. It was often through philosophical reflection at the intersections of these domains that they were able to come into dialogue and work together as an interdisciplinary field. It brought the discussion from the abstraction of philosophical theory to everyday scientific practice. Now I feel that philosophers have very little left that's interesting to say about the mind that isn't already an active area of scientific research. There's lots of science to do, and in some sense that means the philosophers have done their job. There are similar circumstances taking place in the budding field of human computation (or "crowdsourcing"). Except this time, the field are implicated are computer science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, and there is philosophical work to be done at the boarders of these fields. I heard someone at HCOMP arguing that MTurkers should unionize (they make, on average, 4 bucks an hour with no benefits), and then promptly worrying about the impact that will have on Microsoft's profit margin. There was little reflection on the theory of labor or value that underlies these crowdsourcing techniques, and little discussion of the impact it might have for the broader economic or sociopolitical circumstance. Often the computer scientists were running what were basically psychology experiments on MTurkers, but without any of the standards of practicing psychologists. This is a science being developed almost entirely within the computer science community, with most of it coming from the industry and not from academia. I'm contending that the computer scientists can't handle this on their own, and that the field could use some philosophical reflection that will attract the discussions of other domains that are better able to handle this work. I just absolutely love the question of whether MTurkers should organize, and its certainly not a computer science question. So this is where I think the value of the philosophy lies, and I'm again more than happy to keep talking about it. The point is that philosophers are relevant to have around especially in transitional situations like these, and that my expertise makes me at least a relevant (but minor) contributor to that process, at least to some extent. And again, my philosophical tastes tend towards the architectonic, so I'm attempting to tell the big picture story of how it all fits together, in an attempt to get as many voices into the discussion as possible. I think the point gets across even if I'm doing a poor job of it personally. I came up with the marble idea specifically to make the view crazy enough to stand out, and it seems to have successfully taken hold in the collective memory here. I'm pretty happy with the way things are going in this thread, to be perfectly honest. =D RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 2, 2013 17:37
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SedanChair posted:But all of those things still take a ton of work. Can't I just get credit as being "the guy who put it all together"? Like at the end of the movie where there's a montage of headlines and magazines "30-YEAR-OLD BOY GENIUS CREATES ATTENTION THEORY" but then the "MAN OF THE YEAR" Time magazine comes up...and it's the one that has a mirror and says "THE MAN OF THE YEAR...IS YOU" *cue Koyaanisqatsi music* Listen, putting things together is something that engineers have to do. I am more of a 'big picture' kind of guy - you know, drawing esoteric connections between different fields that most technical thinkers lack the holistic vision to do. While traditional scholars might spend years polishing a single obscure proof, or digging up archives in search of a particular concept has changed throughout time, I prefer to make my work available to masses leveraging web 2.0 technology... I'm a new kind of academic, really.
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Dec 2, 2013 17:38
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