Gaming communities as educational communities Presented at MAPSES 2014 in Scranton, PA I’m optimistic about massively open online education. There’s been a recent round of skepticism about low rates of completion and other difficulties with the current implementation of MOOCs, but I don’t find these numbers discouraging for two reasons. First, I think it’s good if anyone is learning anything. 13% is a low completion rate, but these courses are sometimes enrolling 100,000 people and regularly have enrollments of around 50,000 students. 13% completion still means that thousands of people are completing these courses, and tens of thousands more are receiving at least some exposure to material they otherwise wouldn’t. I see that as an unqualified positive success. And second, we don’t have standards for comparison for how well these online courses should be performing, and how far we are from meeting those standards. The College de France and the European Graduate School have both been mentioned at this conference as operating on open principles, albeit at smaller scales. But scales matter for evaluating systems as complex as education.So I want to throw another example into the mix in the hopes that it stimulates some more creative ideas in this direction. I want to look at online gaming communities from an educational context. Modern strategy games, like Starcraft and Dota and League of Legends, are deep and difficult games with steep learning curves and extremely high skill ceilings. Performing well at these games requires both quick strategic thinking under pressure and impressive displays of manual dexterity. Starcraft in particular has become a national sport in Korea over the last decade, with professional leagues broadcasting tournaments on television and top performing players earning salaries, sponsorship, and fan followings comparable to top athletes in other sports. Over the last 3 years the […]

About 20 years ago the music world underwent a digital conversion. Our tapes and vinyl records were systematically turned into strings of bits. This conversion made music portable and manipulable in a way it had never been before, and completely transformed our relationship to music. It’s just one of dozens of similar stories about the digital conversion we’ve experienced in so many quadrants of human life. We’ve spent the last few decades uploading some of the most significant aspects of our lives into their digital form: our social networks, our economic infrastructure, our education and communication channels. Despite this historic progress, the digital conversion is far from complete. The trend towards participatory access characteristic of digital conversion is most notably absent from our political and governing infrastructure, even in technologically rich countries where the conversion has otherwise been successful. The cohesion of space and its contents is another gap in the process of conversion, which Project Tango is beginning to address. Unifying objects in a digital space is an extremely important step in the process. Think about how important GPS and digital maps have been in guiding your behavior over the last few decades. That same utility will soon be available for all the spaces you occupy and for all the objects you encounter. But for all the progress we’ve made, little effort has gone into thinking about what we will use these digital technologies for. Without understanding the uses cases which give these technologies context and meaning, a high resolution trail describing a person’s movement through space might appear unnecessarily invasive and foreign, even Orwellian. I want to provide a use case where hopefully the virtues of these technologies are clear. I’ve been talking about this context of use in terms of the attention economy. One of my early […]

Contents: On organisms On organisms of the present. On organisms of the future. 1. On Organisms a. Organisms are persistent complex systems with functionally differentiated components engaged in a cooperative, dynamic pattern of activity. b. Organisms typically[1] play a role as components of other organisms. Similarly, the components of organisms are typically themselves organisms. Organisms may have components at many different scales relative to other organisms. c. The components of organisms can be widely distributed in space and time. Each component will typically play multiple, cascading roles for many different organisms at many different scales. d. There are no general rules for identifying the components of an organism. It may be easier to identify the persistent organism itself than to identify its components or the roles they play. e. The persistence of an organism consists in the persistent cooperation of its components. The organism just is this pattern of cooperation among components. This pattern may be observed without full knowledge of its components or the particular role they play. This resolves the apparent paradoxes in 1d. f. Organisms develop over time, which is to say that the components of an organism may change radically in number and role over its lifetime. This development is sensitive to initial conditions and is subject to a potentially large number of constraints. Among these constraints are the frictions introduced by the cooperative activity itself. g. The cooperation of the components of an organism is also constrained by components that are common to many of the organism’s other components. It is against the background of these common components that cooperation takes place. Common components typically constrain the cooperation of the components of many other organisms, and provide anchors for identifying the cooperative relationships among organisms as a community. For this reason, common components may be […]

In this post I sketch a proposal for a digital currency that works unlike other *coins that have recently become available. I’m calling it Strangecoin, both to highlight its uniqueness as a currency and as a reference to the strange attractor, a special kind of nonlinear system. What’s unique about Strangecoin? Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum. A Strangecoin transaction might result in both parties having more Strangecoin. Strangecoin transactions can be one-sided and can be conducted entirely by only one party to the transaction. The rate of change of one’s Strangecoin balance is a more important indicator of economic influence than the balance itself. Optimal investment strategy in Strangecoin aims to stabilize one’s balance of Strangecoin. A universal account provides all users a basic Strangecoin income, effectively unlimited wealth, and direct feedback on the overall prosperity of the network. I’ve only started thinking through the idea, and implementing it would take more technical expertise than I have alone. For instance, I’m not sure if Strangecoin can be implemented as an extension of the bitcoin protocol, or if some fundamentally new technology is required. If you know something about the technical details, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you might know how to implement something like this, I’d love to help you try. But since I don’t know of anything else that works like this, this proposal is mostly intended simply to put the idea out there, in the hopes of encouraging others to think in these directions. Background and Motivation If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I’ve lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you’ve gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the […]

// I was digging through the SomethingAwful archives and found my first essay on the attention economy, written on April 5th, 2011. At the time, Bitcoin had yet to experience it’s first bubble and was still trading below a dollar, and Occupy Wall Street was still five months in the future. If you don’t have access to the archives, the thread which prompted this first write up was titled “No More Bitchin: Let’s actually create solutions to society’s problems!” Despite my reputation on that forum, I’m not interested in pop speculative futurism or idle technoidealism. I don’t think there’s an easy technological fix for our many difficult problems. But I do think that our technological circumstances have a dramatic impact on our social, political, and economic organizations, and that we can design technologies to cultivate human communities that are healthy, stable, and cooperative. The political and economic infrastructure we have for managing collective human action was developed at a time when individual rational agency formed the basis of all political theory, and in a networked digital age we can do much better. An attention economy doesn’t solve all the problems, but it provides tools for addressing problems that simply aren’t available with the infrastructure we have available today. My discussion of the attention economy was aimed at discussing social organization at this level of abstraction, with the hopes that taking this networked perspective on social action would reveal some of the tools necessary for addressing our problems. . In the three years and multiple threads since that initial post, I’ve done research into the dynamics and organization of complex systems and taught myself some of the math and theory necessary for making the idea explicit and communicable. And in that time the field of data science has grown astronomically, making […]

// From the ongoing SA thread on Strangecoin. > Just out of curiosity, RA, when you discuss ideas like reifying the class structure by assigning people coloured buttons identifying their social class and when you advocate a system that would admittedly make it more difficult for poor people to buy food and basic necessities, are you making any kind of value judgement on the merits of such a system? It’s hard for me to reconcile ‘worried about hypothetical silent discrimination against cyborgs’ RA vs ‘likes the idea of clearly identifying poors with brown badges to more easily refuse to serve them’ RA. // I would only advocate for the idea if I thought it had a chance to change the social circumstances for the better. The reasoning is something like the following: 1) People are psychologically disposed to reasoning about community membership (identity), their status within those communities (influence), and how to engage those communities(culture/convention). This is what significant portions of their brains evolved to do. 2) People are not particularly disposed to reasoning about traditional economic frameworks (supply and demand, wealth, etc), their status within those framworks (class, inequality), and how to engage those those frameworks (making sound economic decisions). They can do this, and the ones that do, do really well, but its hard and most people can’t and suffer because of it. 3) It would be easier for most people to do well in a system that emphasized transactions of the type that people are typically good at reasoning at than ones they are typically bad at reasoning at. 4) Therefore, we should prefer an economic framework that emphasizes reasoning of the former and not the latter type. I’m not saying this fixes all inequality and suffering, but it makes it easier for people to do things […]

// A few weeks ago I saw Bruno Latour give a talk called “Gaia Intrudes” at Columbia. I’ve struggled with the term “Gaia” since I came across Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis while studying complex systems a few years ago. On the one hand, Lovelock is obviously correct that we can and should treat the (surface of the) Earth and its inhabitants as an interconnected system, whose parts (both living and nonliving) all influence each other. On the other hand, the term “Gaia” has a New Agey, pseudosciencey flavor (even if Lovelock’s discussion doesn’t) that makes me hesitant to use the term in my public discussions of complexity theory, and immediately skeptical when I see others use it. Since my skepticism seems to align with the consensus position in the sciences, I’ve never bothered to resolve my ambivalence about the term. And to be completely honest, while I admired Latour’s work (he’s mentioned in my profile!), going into this talk I was also a little skeptical of _his_ use of the term. I’ve been thinking pretty seriously about the theoretical tools required for understanding the relationship between an organism, its functional components, and its environment, what and I have been calling “the individuation problem”. As far as I can tell, not even the sciences are thinking about this problem systematically across the many domains and scales where it arises. That same week I had written a critique of Tegmark’s recent proposal for a physical theory of consciousness; my core critique centered on his failure to distinguish the problems of integration and individuation. So to hear that Latour was approaching the discussion using the vocabulary of Gaia made me apprehensive, if not outright disappointed. I was worried that he would just muddy the waters of an already fantastically difficult discussion, and that it […]

1. You can’t really blame us for building Facebook the way we have. By “we” I mean we billion-plus Facebook users, because of course we are the ones who built Facebook. Zuckerberg Inc. might take all the credit (and profit) from Facebook’s success, but all the content and contacts on Facebook– you know, the part of the service we users actually find valuable– was produced, curated, and distributed by us: by you and me and our vast network of friends. So you can’t blame us for how things turned out. We really had no idea what we were doing when we built this thing. None of us had ever built a network this big and important before. The digital age is still mostly uncharted territory. To be fair, we’ve done a genuinely impressive job given what we had to work with. Facebook is already the digital home to a significant fraction of the global human population. Whatever you think of the service, its size is nothing to scoff at. The population of Facebook users today is about the same as the global human population just 200 years ago. Human communities of this scale are more than just rare: they are historically unprecedented. We have accomplished something truly amazing. Good work, people. We have every right to be proud of ourselves. But pride shouldn’t prevent us from being honest about these things we build–it shouldn’t make us complacent, or turn us blind to the flaws in our creation. Our digital social networks are broken. They don’t work the way we had hoped they would; they don’t work for us. This problem isn’t unique to Facebook, so throwing stones at only the biggest of silicon giants won’t solve it. The problem is with the way we are thinking about the task of […]

Last night I attended a packed screening of The Imitation Game. My thoughts on the movie are below, but tl;dr: I thought the film was great. If you have any interest in mathematics, cryptography, or the history of computing you will love this film. But this isn’t just a movie for nerds. The drama of the wartime setting and the arresting performance from Cumberbatch make this film entertaining and accessible to almost everyone– despite the fact that it’s a period war drama with almost no action or romance and doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. Of course, as a philosopher I have questions and criticisms. But don’t let that confuse you: go see this film. Turning history’s intellectual heroes into media’s popular heroes is a trend I’d like to reinforce. Turing’s story is timely and central for understanding the development of our world. I’m happy to see his work receive the publicity and recognition it deserves. Turing is something of a hero of mine; I spent half my dissertation wrestling with his thoughts on artificial intelligence, and I’ve found a way to work him in to just about every class I’ve taught for the last decade. I know many others feel just as passionately (or more!) about his life and work. I have been looking forward to this film for a long time and my expectations were high. I was not disappointed. The Oscar buzz around this film is completely appropriate. Spoilers will obviously follow. There are minor inaccuracies in the film: Knightley mispronounces Euler’s name; Turing’s paper is titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence“, not “The Imitation Game”; the Polish bombe machine was eventually named Victory, never Christopher. But I’m not so interested in that sort of critique. I’d instead like to talk about two subtle but important themes in the […]

+John Baez worries that +Backyard Brains dodges the hard questions in their ethics statement. I’m not sure they entirely dodge the ethics question, “when is it okay to turn animals into RC cyborgs?” By saying it isn’t a “toy” and emphasizing its educational applications, they’re distinguishing between frivolous and constructive uses of the tool. If you’re just messing around for entertainment, or if you have some malicious purpose (like a cyborg roach based bank heist) then it’s probably not okay. Turning animals into cyborgs is okay when the applications are constructive and educational: when students learn, when knowledge grows. This is a common response from scientists to questions of animal experimentation: to point at the benefits generated by the research. The distinction between frivolous “toys” and constructive uses might be clear enough, but as stated it’s only a rule of thumb. The harder question is how to distinguish the two. One might be skeptical that it’s possible to state the ethical rule any more clearly than this. After all, horribly inhumane and unethical acts have been conducted in the name of science, so obviously science itself can’t be cover for doing whatever you want. The developers also point to high schools and educators mentoring students on their use of these techniques. Indeed, they seem to be marketing primarily to educational institutions aiming to buy RoboRoaches in bulk. In effect, this diffuses the ethical questions by putting responsibility on the institutions and educators overseeing their use. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give those institutions much of a guideline for making that decision themselves. It also somewhat spoils the DIY-ness of “backyard brains”. I do appreciate that they have a dedicated discussion of the ethics at stake! Although I agree that they don’t nail down the ethics questions with complete satisfaction (and they admit […]