October 30, 2013

THREE RULES FOR ORGANIZING UNDER AN ATTENTION ECONOMY

A rant inspired by: These Men Are Now Charging People to Look at Banksy’s Latest Stencil (Gawker) These men, heroes that they are, have elevated the original work, turning it into a performance piece about the commodification and hipster-fication of people’s homes. If you’re going to treat a neighborhood like an art museum, why shouldn’t the residents of that neighborhood charge admission like an art museum, particularly when many New Yorkers would never come to that patch of the city but to take a picture of a stencil painting of a beaver? 1) Every recording has value. Every copier is a value-producer. The conventional wisdom is that copies are cheap, implying that they have little value. They have little monetary value, true, but that’s only because their value isn’t coded well in monetary transactions. It doesn’t need to be. The value is recorded in the economy of attention. People are willing to pay money to some dude with a sign in order to make a copy of an image that was already well-documented and freely available on the artist’s own site. The copy nevertheless becomes an extension of the artwork and appreciates the whole enterprise. The draw of the attention makes the financial transaction an afterthought. 2) Money is memory Money is a tool for recording and upkeeping a set of facts about the state of the economy. It doesn’t record all the facts; in fact, it misses so many important aspects of the way the economy behaves and causes so many problems in the process that you’d think we’d have realized that an agricultural-age technology is probably not the best method for managing a global digital population. But I digress. The acquiring of money by these enterprising gentlemen is a way of recording the attention being paid to this […]
October 27, 2013

PLANNING FOR THE OPPORTUNISTS

When people say they are “capitalists”, they usually mean that they believe opportunism is a successful competitive strategy. In Marxist theory the term “opportunist” is often used as a criticism of capitalism, but the term also appears in biology to describe a very sensible strategy for survival found typically among scavengers like rodents and raccoon, who not surprisingly get along quite well in human civilization. Perhaps the capitalists won’t like the comparison to rats, but insofar as both are successful methods for making due with what’s around, the comparison is apt. We might more neutrally describe opportunism as any strategy that seeks to take advantage of situations as they arise. Unlike the picky panda, whose dietary restrictions impose a severe limit on its possibilities, the opportunist remains flexible and vigilant, always ready to pounce when availability strikes. Sometimes this means crawling around the gutters, and opportunists aren’t afraid to get dirty. But being an opportunist means more than just lowering standards; it requires a clever, cunning, and quick mind to spot and act on opportunities. In this characterization, I’ve entirely left the issue of “selfish” or “self-interested” behavior out of it, and therefore (hopefully) the bulk of moral condemnation. I don’t think opportunism is necessarily selfish in any strong sense. A mother rat will take advantage of opportunities she finds to help feed her brood; perhaps this is a way for her genes to act selfishly, but from the perspective of the rat her efforts are altruistic. What matters about opportunism is that the advantages are seized as they arise, not that the fruits of the labor are selfishly spent. When people praise capitalism, they are typically endorsing a system that rewards people who industriously seek to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. The presumption is that acting opportunistically […]
October 22, 2013

STANDARDIZATION AND COERCION

Your Life has Been Designed (via +Winchell Chung) But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. The article is largely pessimistic and critical, but we might approach the issue with a more neutral vocabulary in the hopes of being constructive. Your life has been standardized to fit a particular model: the model of the Ideal Consumer. You aren’t the ideal consumer. You are a real human being, and you fit the model only approximately well. The injustice of our system is not that you are coerced into conforming with the model. If it was, then correcting this situation would be a matter of authentic individual expression, which would presumably be contrary to the model (for instance, buying less stuff, monitoring spending more closely, not watching TV, etc). But of course, none of us conform to the model exactly, so the premise that individual expression is sufficient for correcting the injustice is obviously mistaken. Keeping people tired, broke, and scared makes them malleable; Foucault used the word “docile”, and there’s good psychology backing the idea up. It takes additional time and energy to process decisions independently, and it is much easier to repeat the same behaviors, preferences, and viewpoints that have been consumed through the media. But I don’t think docility explains the failures of the world today much better than a lack of individuality. Presumably, […]
October 22, 2013

PINHEAD PHILOSOPHY

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Aquinas’ ontological framework implies that angels have some spatial presence, and he devotes a section of his Summa Theologica to work out the implications. The question is only significant if you already largely accept the rest of Aquinas’ view; to most of us, the implausibility of the view looms much larger than the results of this particular logical puzzle within its scope. So although Aquinas was just being thorough, the passage has come to represent the idle intellectual activity that is supposedly typical in philosophy. Aquinas’ method applies generally: pick any ontology you like and there will be a variety of logical and metaphysical implications just waiting to be made explicit. Working out the details of a received view can support several lifetime’s– literally multiple named chairs– worth of philosophical work. Attending to minor logical puzzles within frameworks with major methodological failings has become a successful strategy within philosophy for keeping niche positions alive and immune to the consensus of the field. A poorly defended or ill-defined view isn’t a defeater in this world, it is just more fodder for the cannon, further entrenching one’s influence and status in the field. To an outsider this work might look like innocuous intellectual progress, but if it has no traction with what we know about the world from our best science, then it is effectively arguing about angels and pins: a waste of time. Let’s use the term “pinhead philosophy” to describe any philosophical writing that engages with ontological or metaphysical suppositions in a manner that is not directly informed by current scientific and mathematical practice, broadly construed. I’ll call philosophers who engage in pinhead philosophy “pinhead philosophers”. Pinhead philosophy is rampant in the debate over “material objects”, especially ordinary objects […]
October 19, 2013

20,000

I just hit 20,000 followers in my G+ stream. I’ve adopted the habit of celebrating follower milestones with a reflective essay. You can find previous milestone essays in my profile; this will go alongside them. Two years ago I left an adjuncting position in Illinois to focus on my writing and research. I conduct most of that work publicly on my G+ stream and blog. In that time, I’ve published an article, sat through some graduate level math classes, and put myself in a position to defend a doctoral dissertation in the Summer. I won the #ifihadglass contest and brought Glass into a classroom of gifted teenagers, and I’ve started developing a game for wearable computers meant to run on the device. I also moved, first to California to make a freaking movie with +kyle broom , and then to New York to be with +Rebecca Spizzirri and +Jon Lawhead. They have all supported me in uncountably many ways, I don’t know where to begin. During this time I’ve had no fixed source of income, and it’s freed me up to write and learn a lot, and in the process I’ve cultivated one of the most interesting and active digital communities I’ve ever participated in. I’m a little rough around the edges and it hasn’t always made me friends, but I’m honored to be a part of it and I’m optimistic about it’s future. I feel like these two years have been the most productive of my life. But I’ll eventually need a stable source of income if I want to keep doing this. I’m currently leading a single class at Fordham University, but that position ends in December and I have nothing afterwards currently lined up. I currently have no other sources of income; my total income this year […]
October 18, 2013

THE ECONOMY IS A COMPUTER

This is the second in my “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series. See the first here. A computer is any system that takes a set of inputs and performs a series of finite, formally specified operations to produce a set of outputs. For specific goods and services, economist talk about input and output in terms of supply and demand. For the economic computer as a single massively distributed computing system, the inputs are the finite resources available, including human labor, and the outputs are the products we consume and the waste we produce. The operations are all massively complex activities that we do to turn the one into the other. The economic computer is a human computer, in the sense of “human computation” (http://goo.gl/LtEVLp): it is a system in which human agents play computationally salient functional roles. The things we do as we assist in both the production and consumption of various goods are operations in the economic computing machine. This includes our buying and selling and claiming of ownership over various things in competitive markets, yes, but it also includes the eating of a meal and the using of a pen and the chopping of a tree. Those particular behaviors are activities through which we each participate on a continuous basis with the operations of the economic computer. You are a component of this massive machine. Right this moment, you are doing its computing work. The economic computer can be optimized like any other computer to fit a variety of constraints and conditions. We can optimize the machine to maximize potential wealth, or to distribute resources equitably, or to minimize environmental disruption. Like any other computer, such optimization proceeds by revising the set of operations for carrying out a computation, or changing the computations being performed, or […]
October 15, 2013

LADY LOVELACE AND THE AUTONOMY OF MACHINES: PART 1

Machine Autonomy Skepticism 1. Taking autonomous machines seriously According to the US Department of Defense, as of October 2008 unmanned aircraft have flown over 500,000 hours and unmanned ground vehicles have conducted over 30,000 missions in support of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past few years a number of government and military agencies, professional societies, and ethics boards have released reports suggesting policies and ethical guidelines for designing and employing autonomous war machines. In these reports, the word ‘autonomous’ is used more or less uncritically to refer to a variety of technologies, including automated systems, unmanned teleoperated vehicles, and fully autonomous robots. Describing such artifacts as ‘autonomous’ is meant to highlight a measure of independence from their human designers and operators. However, the very idea of autonomous artifacts is suspiciously paradoxical, and little philosophical work has been done to provide a general account of machine autonomy that is sensitive to both philosophical concerns and the current state of technological development. Without a framework for understanding the role human designers and operators play in the behavior of autonomous machines, the legal, ethical, and metaphysical questions that arise from their use will remain murky. My project is to lay the groundwork for building an account of autonomous machines that can systematically account for the range of behavior demonstrated by our best machines and their relative dependence on humanity. Pursuing this project requires that we take autonomous machines seriously and not treat them as wide-eyed speculative fictions. As a philosophical project, taking autonomous machines seriously requires an address to the skeptic, who unfortunately occupies the majority position with respect to technology. The skeptic of machine autonomy holds that any technological machine designed, built, and operated by human beings is dependent on its human counterparts in a way that fundamentally constrains its […]
October 5, 2013

THE VIRTUES OF EXTREMISM

Another essay in the “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series Extremism has been getting a bad rap lately. It gets blamed for acts of terror, for political dysfunction, and for general cruelty and hatred. Few people will admit to being an extremist; the ones who do often appear unreasonable and difficult to work with. Extremism is opposed moderation, which is the reasonable and practical demeanor we are all urged to adopt. Moderation isn’t just the alternative to extremism, it is also claimed to be the tactic best used to counter extremism where it lies. Michael Kazin recently attempted a defense of extremism (and, by proxy, of Ted Cruz) in the New Republic: Sometimes, those who take an inflexible, radical position hasten a purpose that years later is widely hailed as legitimate and just. Extremism is the coin of conviction, whether virtuous or malign. It forces middle-roaders to crush the disrupter or adapt. Kazin goes on to list the examples you’d expect to find in an article like this: abolitionism and the suffragettes, and Goldwater’s pedantic reworking of Cicero in 1964: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” These arguments are all instrumental in character: they purport to show that extremism is a viable and effective tactic for realizing one’s ideological principles, and moreover that extremism has been responsible for what have come to be some of our most important institutional values. The claim is that extremism works, and we are evidence of is success. Ted Cruz might be the punching bag of the moment, but Kazin assures us that history vindicates the extremists that stick to their principles and shun moderation. Given this instrumental argument, one would expect some explanation […]
October 3, 2013

A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT FROM THESE UNITED STATES

There are plenty of stories about what’s going on with the shutdown, both in terms of the banalities of D.C. politics and legal arcana, and in terms of the impact it has and will continue to have on real people’s lives. But none of this really gives us much perspective on the event in terms of the narratives we tell about ourselves, collectively, in order to make sense of it all. So maybe this will help: our country is having a stroke. A stroke happens when a part of the brain loses function due to lack of blood flow. The blockage can happen in a variety of ways, but what matters is that the juice isn’t flowing to the brain, and so parts of it shut down and stop functioning. The analogy to our government shutdown works surprisingly well, if you can stomach its implications. I’m not trying to make a small political point or lay the blame anywhere. Determining whether the blockage was caused by the Tea Party or the medical insurance lobby or the broken and constraining conventions of Congressional procedure at this point is like wondering while it happens whether a stroke was caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, or genetic disposition. The more important lesson going forward is that the system is in poor health and is experiencing trauma as a result. It should be noted that, contrary to certain memes currently being spread, an organic system (like a “government”) is not the sort of thing that can be “turned off and on again” in the way that is default for much of our digital gadgetry. Your computer suddenly works after a reboot because powering off also dumps the memory, and hopefully eliminates whatever corrupt files were causing the problem. In this way, rebooting is […]
September 23, 2013

JASON SILVA BANNED ME FROM HIS G+ STREAM.

About a week or so back, I wrote a longish critique of +Jason Silva‘s philosophy of technology. Although my comment was critical and negative, I don’t believe I trolled, insulted, or otherwise abused anyone in the thread. Nevertheless, my comment has since been deleted. See for yourself: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102906645951658302785/posts/U4EFvbX9pa5 You’ll notice a few direct responses to my comment, and my replies to those comments are still around, but my original comment has been deleted. Luckily, I archived it here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/J2TxJqhSv2D I’m rather disappointed that Silva chose to censor my critique, instead of addressing it and taking it seriously. I think I’m raising legitimate concerns that ought to be addressed. I’ve enjoyed engaging the responses from Silva’s fans, including some G+ science heavyweights whom I respect a lot, like +Fraser Cain. I’ve tried to engage the community in a respectful manner with the goal of discussion and dialogue. I’m not trying to start a fight, I’m just trying to do some philosophy on a topic I care about at least as much as Jason. I’d understand if Jason is too busy to respond, but I don’t understand the need to delete my comment. He’s since reshared the talk, presumably to get a fresh comment thread going without my critique. I’m not trying to troll, so I’ll leave the thread alone. However, Silva’s series of talks makes it clear that he’s willing to stake quite a lot of his intellectual motivation on this idea of “exponential thinking”. In my original critique, I argued that this term is empty, and has no basis in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy. The only academic reference you’ll find for the term comes from the Singularity Institute and their brand of futurism. That’s fine if you’re looking to give motivational speeches to the tech industry, but as a philosophical […]
September 19, 2013

BEWILDERMENT IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

// This essay was originally posted here. I have complex feelings about +Jason Silva. He describes his work as “philosophical espresso shots” of “psychedelic art” conveying wonder and awe in technology “as the manifestation of our dreams”. I’m all in favor of psychedelic art. I’ve honestly found some of Silva’s art to be inspired, and I’ve used it in my classes. It’s started some interesting discussions. But I’ve also found myself needing to say a lot to provide background and context for the claims he makes. Sometimes I can, but too often I find that in fact _there is no background_ for helping to make sense of the claims being made in this work. There is very little theory supporting the stream-of-consciousness style association of infobytes and futurism. Maybe I come from a different school, but for me philosophy is associated with rigor and clarity of thought, in the pursuit of _understanding_. What Silva packages as “wonder and awe” is too often just disguised bewilderment. Perhaps we should encourage a childlike sense of wonder, but I also think we should try to cultivate clear and mature thinking wherever possible. In any case, we should be careful to distinguish wonder from bewilderment. Wonder is a sense of fascination that encourages further exploration. Presumably, that exploration ought to settle into a mature and developed understanding of a field– not to eliminate wonder but rather to mark intellectual progress and to encourage still further exploration of the details. Bewilderment, on the other hand, is the sense of confusion one feels when overwhelmed by experiences one can only just barely process. Bewilderment might be an inevitable aspect of any learning experience (including psychedelic ones), but it is clearly distinct from wonder, and it isn’t so clearly something that we should be encouraging. Learning, done […]
September 19, 2013

THINGS I BELIEVE THAT YOU PROBABLY DON’T: HUMAN CASTE SYSTEMS

Things I believe that you probably don’t volume 1 Human Caste Systems I believe that human beings naturally self-organize into components that tend to accommodate the larger organizations in which they are embedded. That doesn’t mean that people are always altruistic or considerate of others; it just means that people will tend to work together towards organized interests when provided the opportunity. I’m thinking, for instance, about the ways a crowd might distribute itself inside a subway train: how they make room to accommodate incoming and outgoing passengers, or passengers with special needs, and so on. Each individual on the train must consider not just their local territory but also the distribution of other passengers on the car in order to determine where best to settle. Since each of us is in a different position relative to the others and the distribution of people on the train is regularly in flux, the passengers are each performing a slightly distinct balancing act in subtle coordination with all the rest. I’d hardly describe this process as “altruistic”, but it’s certainly an investment in collective, cooperative behavior, and it’s frankly amazing that we not only have the ability to do it, but that we actually do. Not always, but enough to run all the cities. I also believe that what we take to be the “appropriate” distribution of persons in space is influenced at a deep structural level by the conceptual and procedural assumptions shared by all the individuals on that train, and furthermore that many of those structures are socially conditioned. The “appropriate” distribution of persons on a bus, or the accommodations taken to be adequate for persons with special needs, or indeed, whose needs are worth considering at all, are all going to change depending on the social and historical circumstances […]
November 30, 2013

A WORLD RUN BY SOFTWARE

A few days ago I reshared this talk from Balaji Srinivasan, along with my initial comments defending the position against what I took to be a superficial rejection from +David Brin and others. It was my first watching of the lecture, and my comments were borne of the passion that comes from having considered and argued for similar conclusions over the last few years, against those I felt were resisting the alternative framework BSS was suggesting without due consideration. But there is always room for critical reflection, and now that I’ve had a few days to digest the talk I’d like to write a more considered response. I am utterly convinced that a world run by software can be more fair, inclusive, and sustainable than any mode of organization the industrial age had to offer. Nevertheless, BSS says precious little in the talk of what such a world would look like, or what reasons we have for believing the conclusion to be true. BSS’s argument is largely critical about the problems and constraints of the existing system, with the goal of motivating interest in an alternative. I agree with much of his critique, especially his observation that people are already eagerly fleeing industrial age “paper” technologies in favor of digital alternatives. But the Silicon Valley audience to which the talk is directed might give the impression that a world run by software would benefit primarily those privileged few who are already benefiting from our nascent digital age, as yet another way to widen the gap between the wealthy and the rest. I think this is a misleading impression. A positive story that constructively described how a world run by software would operate would go a long way towards helping people imagine it as a real and plausible alternative, with distinct […]
November 25, 2013

TOLERATING EXTREME POSITIONS

Last time I explained that the instrumental value of extremism lies not in realizing extreme ends, but rather in framing the limits of what is considered “reasonable” or “moderate” discussion. The upshot is that extremist views play an important organizing role in the social discourse, whether or not the extremists themselves are successful at realizing their ends. People tend to decry extremism and urge moderation in its place; but a careful understanding of the dynamics of social organization might suggest better strategies for tolerating extreme positions. First, let’s be precise about our terms. I’m using a very simple model of opinion dynamics, specifically the Deffuant-Weisbuch (DW) bounded confidence model from 2002; the figures below are taken from the paper linked here. A more complex and interesting model can be found in the Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model and its extensions, but the simpler model is all we need for this post. The DW model describes a collection of agents with some opinions, each held with some degree of confidence. Individuals may have some impact on each other’s beliefs, adjusting them slightly in one direction or another. The less confident I am about my beliefs, the more room I might move in one direction or another depending on the beliefs and confidence of the agents I interact with. On this model, “extremists” are people who a) hold minority opinions, and b) are very confident about those opinions. Extremists aren’t likely to change their beliefs, but can be influential in drawing others towards their positions, especially when there is a high degree of uncertainty regarding those beliefs generally. In fact, that’s exactly what the DW model shows. In Figure 5, the y axis represents the range of opinions people might hold, centered on 0. The extremists hold their positions with very low uncertainty at […]
November 9, 2013

STEERING THE CROWD

I have been completely enamored with +Jon Kleinberg keynote address from HCOMP2013. It is the first model of human computation in field-theoretic terms I’ve encountered, and it is absolutely brilliant. Kleinberg is concerned with badges, like those used on Foursquare, Coursera, StackOverflow and the like. The badges provide some incentive to complete tasks that the system wants users to make; it gamifies the computational goals so people are motivated to complete the task. Kline’s paper provides a model for understanding how these incentives influence behavior. In this model, agents can act in any number of ways. If we consider StackOverflow, users might ask a question, answer a question, vote on questions and answers, and so on. They can also do something else entirely, like wash their cars. Each of these actions is represented as a vector in high dimensional space: one dimension for each action they might perform. In Figure 2, they consider a two dimensional sample of that action space, with distinct actions on the x and y axis. The dashed lines represent badge thresholds; completing 15 actions of type A1 earns you a badge, as does 10 actions of type A2. On this graph, Kleinberg draws arrows the length and orientation of which represent the optimal decision policies for users as they move through this action space. Users begin with some preferences for taking some actions over others, and the model assumes that the badges have some value for the users. The goal of the model is to show how the badges augment user action preferences as they approach the badge. Figure 2 shows a user near the origin has no strong incentives towards actions of either type. But as one starts accumulating actions and nearing a badge, the optimal policy changes. When I have 12 actions of […]
November 5, 2013

WHAT IS A COMPUTER?

+Yonatan Zunger recently reshared a youtube clip of the Writer, a 200 year old programmable automata that can write arbitrary words on a card. In the comments, someone claimed that the machine wasn’t technically a “computer” because it wasn’t computing anything. But there’s no mistake; the automata is certainly a computer, and it is performing a computation. Computation is defined in terms of the possible performances of a Turing machine. A Turing machine executes a formally specified function: given some starting state, a Turing machine executes a series of procedures (a “program”) that ultimately yield some final state. Any system that is formally equivalent to a Turing machine thus described is a computer. The writer automaton is a computer in this sense. It takes as input the set of characters on the programmable disk, and through a set of finite procedures (rotations of the cam) the machine produces a set of outputs, which involves the performance of writing words on a card. That’s an act of computation; that doll is a computer. Not only is the automata a computer, but any system that can be formally defined in terms of a set of procedures that takes an initial state into a final state can be called a “computation”. Whatever machine carries out those procedures is a “computer”. For instance, consider the water-boiling computer: Initial state: liquid water Final state: gaseous water Program: 1. Put liquid water in a pot sufficintly close to Earth. 2. Put the pot on a working stove 3. Light the stove. 4. Bring the water to 100 degrees celsius Properly executing the program will compute the gaseous water final state from the liquid water initial state. If I’m the one executing this program, than for that time I’m a water-boiling computer. This computer only handles a […]
October 30, 2013

THREE RULES FOR ORGANIZING UNDER AN ATTENTION ECONOMY

A rant inspired by: These Men Are Now Charging People to Look at Banksy’s Latest Stencil (Gawker) These men, heroes that they are, have elevated the original work, turning it into a performance piece about the commodification and hipster-fication of people’s homes. If you’re going to treat a neighborhood like an art museum, why shouldn’t the residents of that neighborhood charge admission like an art museum, particularly when many New Yorkers would never come to that patch of the city but to take a picture of a stencil painting of a beaver? 1) Every recording has value. Every copier is a value-producer. The conventional wisdom is that copies are cheap, implying that they have little value. They have little monetary value, true, but that’s only because their value isn’t coded well in monetary transactions. It doesn’t need to be. The value is recorded in the economy of attention. People are willing to pay money to some dude with a sign in order to make a copy of an image that was already well-documented and freely available on the artist’s own site. The copy nevertheless becomes an extension of the artwork and appreciates the whole enterprise. The draw of the attention makes the financial transaction an afterthought. 2) Money is memory Money is a tool for recording and upkeeping a set of facts about the state of the economy. It doesn’t record all the facts; in fact, it misses so many important aspects of the way the economy behaves and causes so many problems in the process that you’d think we’d have realized that an agricultural-age technology is probably not the best method for managing a global digital population. But I digress. The acquiring of money by these enterprising gentlemen is a way of recording the attention being paid to this […]
October 27, 2013

PLANNING FOR THE OPPORTUNISTS

When people say they are “capitalists”, they usually mean that they believe opportunism is a successful competitive strategy. In Marxist theory the term “opportunist” is often used as a criticism of capitalism, but the term also appears in biology to describe a very sensible strategy for survival found typically among scavengers like rodents and raccoon, who not surprisingly get along quite well in human civilization. Perhaps the capitalists won’t like the comparison to rats, but insofar as both are successful methods for making due with what’s around, the comparison is apt. We might more neutrally describe opportunism as any strategy that seeks to take advantage of situations as they arise. Unlike the picky panda, whose dietary restrictions impose a severe limit on its possibilities, the opportunist remains flexible and vigilant, always ready to pounce when availability strikes. Sometimes this means crawling around the gutters, and opportunists aren’t afraid to get dirty. But being an opportunist means more than just lowering standards; it requires a clever, cunning, and quick mind to spot and act on opportunities. In this characterization, I’ve entirely left the issue of “selfish” or “self-interested” behavior out of it, and therefore (hopefully) the bulk of moral condemnation. I don’t think opportunism is necessarily selfish in any strong sense. A mother rat will take advantage of opportunities she finds to help feed her brood; perhaps this is a way for her genes to act selfishly, but from the perspective of the rat her efforts are altruistic. What matters about opportunism is that the advantages are seized as they arise, not that the fruits of the labor are selfishly spent. When people praise capitalism, they are typically endorsing a system that rewards people who industriously seek to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. The presumption is that acting opportunistically […]
October 22, 2013

STANDARDIZATION AND COERCION

Your Life has Been Designed (via +Winchell Chung) But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. The article is largely pessimistic and critical, but we might approach the issue with a more neutral vocabulary in the hopes of being constructive. Your life has been standardized to fit a particular model: the model of the Ideal Consumer. You aren’t the ideal consumer. You are a real human being, and you fit the model only approximately well. The injustice of our system is not that you are coerced into conforming with the model. If it was, then correcting this situation would be a matter of authentic individual expression, which would presumably be contrary to the model (for instance, buying less stuff, monitoring spending more closely, not watching TV, etc). But of course, none of us conform to the model exactly, so the premise that individual expression is sufficient for correcting the injustice is obviously mistaken. Keeping people tired, broke, and scared makes them malleable; Foucault used the word “docile”, and there’s good psychology backing the idea up. It takes additional time and energy to process decisions independently, and it is much easier to repeat the same behaviors, preferences, and viewpoints that have been consumed through the media. But I don’t think docility explains the failures of the world today much better than a lack of individuality. Presumably, […]
October 22, 2013

PINHEAD PHILOSOPHY

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Aquinas’ ontological framework implies that angels have some spatial presence, and he devotes a section of his Summa Theologica to work out the implications. The question is only significant if you already largely accept the rest of Aquinas’ view; to most of us, the implausibility of the view looms much larger than the results of this particular logical puzzle within its scope. So although Aquinas was just being thorough, the passage has come to represent the idle intellectual activity that is supposedly typical in philosophy. Aquinas’ method applies generally: pick any ontology you like and there will be a variety of logical and metaphysical implications just waiting to be made explicit. Working out the details of a received view can support several lifetime’s– literally multiple named chairs– worth of philosophical work. Attending to minor logical puzzles within frameworks with major methodological failings has become a successful strategy within philosophy for keeping niche positions alive and immune to the consensus of the field. A poorly defended or ill-defined view isn’t a defeater in this world, it is just more fodder for the cannon, further entrenching one’s influence and status in the field. To an outsider this work might look like innocuous intellectual progress, but if it has no traction with what we know about the world from our best science, then it is effectively arguing about angels and pins: a waste of time. Let’s use the term “pinhead philosophy” to describe any philosophical writing that engages with ontological or metaphysical suppositions in a manner that is not directly informed by current scientific and mathematical practice, broadly construed. I’ll call philosophers who engage in pinhead philosophy “pinhead philosophers”. Pinhead philosophy is rampant in the debate over “material objects”, especially ordinary objects […]
October 19, 2013

20,000

I just hit 20,000 followers in my G+ stream. I’ve adopted the habit of celebrating follower milestones with a reflective essay. You can find previous milestone essays in my profile; this will go alongside them. Two years ago I left an adjuncting position in Illinois to focus on my writing and research. I conduct most of that work publicly on my G+ stream and blog. In that time, I’ve published an article, sat through some graduate level math classes, and put myself in a position to defend a doctoral dissertation in the Summer. I won the #ifihadglass contest and brought Glass into a classroom of gifted teenagers, and I’ve started developing a game for wearable computers meant to run on the device. I also moved, first to California to make a freaking movie with +kyle broom , and then to New York to be with +Rebecca Spizzirri and +Jon Lawhead. They have all supported me in uncountably many ways, I don’t know where to begin. During this time I’ve had no fixed source of income, and it’s freed me up to write and learn a lot, and in the process I’ve cultivated one of the most interesting and active digital communities I’ve ever participated in. I’m a little rough around the edges and it hasn’t always made me friends, but I’m honored to be a part of it and I’m optimistic about it’s future. I feel like these two years have been the most productive of my life. But I’ll eventually need a stable source of income if I want to keep doing this. I’m currently leading a single class at Fordham University, but that position ends in December and I have nothing afterwards currently lined up. I currently have no other sources of income; my total income this year […]
October 18, 2013

THE ECONOMY IS A COMPUTER

This is the second in my “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series. See the first here. A computer is any system that takes a set of inputs and performs a series of finite, formally specified operations to produce a set of outputs. For specific goods and services, economist talk about input and output in terms of supply and demand. For the economic computer as a single massively distributed computing system, the inputs are the finite resources available, including human labor, and the outputs are the products we consume and the waste we produce. The operations are all massively complex activities that we do to turn the one into the other. The economic computer is a human computer, in the sense of “human computation” (http://goo.gl/LtEVLp): it is a system in which human agents play computationally salient functional roles. The things we do as we assist in both the production and consumption of various goods are operations in the economic computing machine. This includes our buying and selling and claiming of ownership over various things in competitive markets, yes, but it also includes the eating of a meal and the using of a pen and the chopping of a tree. Those particular behaviors are activities through which we each participate on a continuous basis with the operations of the economic computer. You are a component of this massive machine. Right this moment, you are doing its computing work. The economic computer can be optimized like any other computer to fit a variety of constraints and conditions. We can optimize the machine to maximize potential wealth, or to distribute resources equitably, or to minimize environmental disruption. Like any other computer, such optimization proceeds by revising the set of operations for carrying out a computation, or changing the computations being performed, or […]
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