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I've got my double-barreled attention ball hat on and I'm blastin' away at this thread   
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Oct 16, 2014 17:35
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Kane posted:These threads usually have assholery for the first couple of pages and then real discussion begins, right? You'll be able to tell when it gets good just by counting the marbles.
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Oct 16, 2014 18:22
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Eripsa what's your opinion of the Stackexchange sites? Lots of my marbles go there. [edit] I ask because while it's not really a social network, it's an example of a reputation-based system that's mostly not lovely, and into which lots of people pour a lot of time and expertise.
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Oct 17, 2014 23:50
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uncurable mlady posted:*shoots marbles at fishmech* I almost lost consciousness laughing at this Anyway it's becoming clear to me why Strangecoin had all that weird stuff about
I spend a lot of time on Stackoverflow. It's become my Farmville, basically: something lightweight to do while I'm thinking about a real problem. Most - the vast majority - of questions are from rank novice programmers (at least under the tags I follow; some offbeat programming languages attract more sophisticated questions, but a lot less traffic). Novice programmers usually ask simple (often trivial) questions, so they're easy to answer. A cadre of weirdos like me spans the globe, so if you show up and ask a super-basic JavaScript question that's phrased at least well enough to be intelligible (if barely), you're likely to get an answer in under a minute. Yaay! Valuable social service. Now, those novices can upvote, and their upvotes count exactly as much as my upvotes. A novice can upvote as much as they want (unless they trigger one of various fraud-vote detectors; I don't know exactly how that works, but it's a sophisticated system developed over the years - you should spend time in meta.stackoverflow.com). That vaguely corresponds to the idea that everybody should be able to shoot marbles. If things didn't work that way, new community members would have a difficult time participating in a way that encouraged old people like me to help. An important key to the reason that this works is that those points are worth very close to $0. After some point thresholds, some new capabilities are unlocked, but they're not valuable in any other sense. (I've heard people say that a high rep helps when interviewing for a job, but if I were in that situation even my weak lazy ethical sense would force me to disclose that a huge pile of points just means I have a high tolerance for idiots and the clueless, and that any employer who found that trait valuable would be far less attractive to me.) The primary reason I participate is that participation benefits me directly. I'm glad Stackoverflow exists, and I've found it helpful on many occasions (though the number of questions I've asked is tiny compared to the thousands I've answered), but it wouldn't be some sort of life tragedy for me if it went away. It's made me much sharper at the process of conducting superficial "debugging by inspection", and much, much more familiar with aspects of the software systems I use that normally you wouldn't really ever need to know so long as you've got decent software architecture instincts. So I do it only for me, really. A world in which those upclicks have actual meangingful value would introduce immense problems. Right now it doesn't matter that I've got a big pile of rep points. If they were valuable, the system would have to be designed to prevent all the abuse that could stem from me having four or five orders of magnitude more "money" than new users. My community-driven incentives to play nice and upvote "competitors" would drop to zero. There are downvotes in that system to, and I can't imagine what would come of that - and it's a very valuable part of the system. To me, some clear outlines of how any sort of network with a reputation system could withstand the implications of reputation having transferable, meaningful value would be material actually worth exploring and criticizing in this thread. The Strangecoin thread began to get almost interesting with the discussions involving the idea of some sort of actual software prototype, but either I lost interest before that went anywhere or some healing mechanism is cloaking the memory from my awareness.
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Oct 20, 2014 19:45
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GulMadred posted:
I agree. The system really needs for everybody to be able to "pay attention", with the (curiously) apt use of the word "pay" now. If those who don't or can't create attention-worthy content (or material or popcorn or whatever they're creating) cannot actually pay, then the system really can't move forward. Paradoxically, if they can, then my intuition at least says that the system is inevitably wildly unstable.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:01
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Note that the actual benefits I accrue from answering simple questions are mostly external to the system. Clearly getting better at solving the problems posed by the questions means I can answer even more questions, but I care about that far less than I care about my own ability to exploit the technologies involved (like, for my day job). If reputation has any meaningful value in any domain, then that can be leveraged into the domain of dollars in my pocket. A black market in Stackoverflow rep points is a ridiculous notion. In a system that has some actual economic or political influence, that's not the case.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:17
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Oh, and here's another point drawn from what I know about Stackoverflow. The site has some "leaderboard" features that allows you to check out who's who. One of the things you'll notice if you study that is that the high-rep people on the site are a tiny fraction of the population. Most people aren't big participants, and the number of users over a few hundred rep points isn't that big of a chunk of the overall userbase. Ironically, novice users show up desperate for help all the time ("I have been working on [utterly trivial problem] for three days") and yet show no apparent sense that they've arrived in any sort of "community". Many never figure out the "upvote" button; they don't register with real or even made-up names. Sometimes they don't even wait for answers or clarifying questions  Motivated contributing members of society are rare. [edit] note that I'm generally a lazy worthless slob emfive fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 20, 2014 |
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Oct 20, 2014 20:24
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Sharkie posted:Is it a functioning community? Is facebook? - "OK I think we're really getting somewhere." - "Yea, we should think of a name for this scenario ..." * three hours * - "!!! I HAVE IT: Synereo!!!!!"
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Oct 20, 2014 20:31
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Well my razor comes down on the scenario == synereo side; without that it's just nonsense which is probably more likely but I have to believe in something.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:42
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Numb Three Ers posted:Also would you describe those mega rich as having "Influence" not in your social network way, but in a tangible measurable way? How would your new system prevent the same charismatic sociopaths from amassing the same power again? Strangecoin had some sort of limit, whereby if you got too many you'd explode or become a poor or something.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:56
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Does "AMP" stand for "Attention Marble Protocol"?
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Oct 20, 2014 21:02
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Krotera posted:Use badges to incentivize people to buy 105 new hard drives each half hour. it'll be a marble bonanza for NewEgg
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Oct 28, 2014 23:40
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I'm not a theorist of any sort, but I'm confident in saying that thisEripsa posted:But you will not, for instance, be able to characterize the network of protein interactions in a cell with any amount of English sentences. is an extraordinary claim. Trivially, at least, one could translate the linked graph into a simple list of English sentences that called out each interconnection. That could be done mechanically. An intelligent author could describe the relationships more succinctly, dropping into more detailed explanations when appropriate for clarity. The claim that a human natural language is not up to the task of communicating some artifact of human thought is pretty weird, as people have been using language to communicate extremely complicated concepts for quite a few thousands of years now. emfive fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 22:14
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Ha ha well right, but you know what I mean of course. If a "network" is an understandable thing, then the claim that human language (any one of them) is not up to the task of describing a particular example of a network is frankly bizarre. It's even more bizarre if the claim is that another human linguistic system is capable of communicating the concept. I mean, I just don't know how to even entertain that notion, because it seems so obviously false.
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Nov 1, 2014 22:42
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Nobody can keep that big gnarly image of the protein network in their head any more easily than anyone could keep a textual description of the network in their head. They may be able to more quickly gain an appreciation for the nature of the structure being described, but that's not what we're talking about. The claim was that no amount of English sentences could describe the network. Your proof that that's true was to say, "it's true." A well-written explanation of the protein network would begin by describing the nature of the network in visual language, words and phrases that evoke an image. Then, each key nexus could be explored with descriptions of its nature and the sorts of interconnections that spring from that area of the graph. A good author would attempt, with language, to guide the reader through the structure in a way that helps gain a greater understanding. Ten different talented authors (writing perhaps for different audiences) might employ ten different strategies. Remember: the claim that no amount of English text can describe the nature of the network is a claim that no human being could come to an understanding of the nature of the network by means of that text alone. I'll set aside for now the fairly trivial example of a list of English sentences that instruct the reader, step by step, how to re-create the network diagram with pencil and paper. A thorough description of the network in plain prose will ultimately contain the same information as the diagram (more, indeed, unless the diagram is directly linked to masses of explanatory text to describe the nature of the interconnections as appropriate for something as complex as a biochemical system like that). What exactly is it preventing an astute reader of a well-written text from forming an accurate conception of the network? What, for that matter, is it about a list of well-assembled English sentences that would prevent an astute reader from piecing together a diagram of their own (or some other sort of annotation) based on the information in the text as it's revealed page by page? If it's possible for such a reader to assemble the diagram while the text is read, doesn't that quite succinctly demonstrate that the same information is conveyed? If it's inherently not possible for a reader to do that, why is that? I'm really not sure I understand the point of all these argument threads that spiral off into the weeds. We're introduced (47 pages ago) to a new actual vaporware product that embodies Strangecoin and marble hats and whatever else, and then we're told precisely nothing about how any of it will be implemented or how it will be made to appear to work to the users of the network. We've seen no descriptions of prototypes of any sort, nor how such prototypes had been tested among normal people as potential customers. That's what people who build real systems like this actually do instead of circle-jerking about philosophy of science: they work on actual goals and actual ideas, and they try them out. So what would initial user testing scenarios look like? You can do that with paper prototypes; you don't need any actual software, just ideas clear enough to be drawn as sketches of an interface, with human test controllers simulating how the interface responds. Learning about what Synereo is actually intended to look like and what it's actually intended to do would be way more interesting than these epically tedious derails. emfive fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 01:02
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The amazing thing is that I'm no kind of "scientist" at all, but in these threads (I was here for Strangecoin and I've read the Attention Economy thread, if you can call looking at the screen in bewilderment alternating with hysterics "reading") I just have to wait for a while until something will be claimed by Eripsa that I know is wrong. I mean, I am 100% confident that the claim that English prose cannot describe a complex network is wrong. Again, I am not in any way trained in serious science. I'm an ordinary dumb old programmer. Lots of other stuff goes by that looks wrong, of course, but a lot of it goes over my head. For somebody apparently obsessed with the promise of on-line communication applications, there's astonishingly little discussion of the proposed on-line communication application. I'm starting to wonder whether the Synereo gang was behind this Stackoverflow question I helped close a couple weeks ago. 
emfive fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 01:45
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I'm currently re-reading Bleak House, and it occurs to me that there's something similar about the experience of being sucked into a deranged Eripsa debate and the fatal allure in the book of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce litigation. Oh, and note that I could, if I wanted to, render in several different visual formats an accurate graph of the relationships between characters in that quite complicated novel. I didn't need a picture of the directed graph arcs between Mrs. Rouncewell and Lady Dedlock before starting the book. I read the prose and it all became clear.
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Nov 3, 2014 02:06
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eXXon posted:On the other hand, I can believe that it's impossible to really understand War and Peace without a pull-out network diagram of relations between characters accompanied by English text describing each node and link, dare I add. Well (I'm sure you know this) there's a difference between saying that something is hard to understand, and that something is impossible to understand, from a particular expression in a medium, or from any conceivable expression in a medium.
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Nov 3, 2014 02:58
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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:All those people using the same service doesn't make them a society evolving some kind of community. That's because they don't have AMPs duhh
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Nov 3, 2014 21:26
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CheesyDog posted:No, Ayn Rand finished projects. I almost slipped into a coma when I started thinking about which of the two is a better writer.
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Nov 20, 2014 02:56
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There's a typically breathless Medium post about how "the blockchain" is going to usher in a new tomorrow. https://medium.com/backchannel/how-bitcoins-blockchain-could-power-an-alternate-internet-bb501855af67
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Jan 16, 2015 15:55
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