Culture

Magic Design

Computers & Internet, Culture, Science & Technology / /

A few weeks ago, I wrote about magic and how subconscious problem solving can sometimes seem magical:

When confronted with a particularly daunting problem, I’ll work on it very intensely for a while. However, I find that it’s best to stop after a bit and let the problem percolate in the back of my mind while I do completely unrelated things. Sometimes, the answer will just come to me, often at the strangest times. Occasionally, this entire process will happen without my intending it, but sometimes I’m deliberately trying to harness this subconscious problem solving ability. And I don’t think I’m doing anything special here; I think everyone has these sort of Eureka! moments from time to time. …

Once I noticed this, I began seeing similar patterns throughout my life and even history.

And indeed, Jason Kottke recently posted about how design works, referencing a couple of other designers, including Michael Bierut of Design Observer, who describes his process like this:

When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!

[emphasis mine] It is like magic, but as Bierut notes, this sort of thing is becoming more important as we move from an industrial economy to an information economy. He references a book about managing artists:

At the outset, the writers acknowledge that the nature of work is changing in the 21st century, characterizing it as “a shift from an industrial economy to an information economy, from physical work to knowledge work.” In trying to understand how this new kind of work can be managed, they propose a model based not on industrial production, but on the collaborative arts, specifically theater.

… They are careful to identify the defining characteristics of this kind of work: allowing solutions to emerge in a process of iteration, rather than trying to get everything right the first time; accepting the lack of control in the process, and letting the improvisation engendered by uncertainty help drive the process; and creating a work environment that sets clear enough limits that people can play securely within them.

This is very interesting and dovetails nicely with several topics covered on this blog. Harnessing self-organizing forces to produce emergent results seems to be rising in importance significantly as we proceed towards an information based economy. As noted, collaboration is key. Older business models seem to focus on a more brute force way of solving problems, but as we proceed we need to find better and faster ways to collaborate. The internet, with it’s hyperlinked structure and massive data stores, has been struggling with a data analysis problem since its inception. Only recently have we really begun to figure out ways to harness the collective intelligence of the internet and its users, but even now, we’re only scraping the tip of the iceberg. Collaborative projects like Wikipedia or wisdom-of-crowds aggregators like Digg or Reddit represent an interesting step in the right direction. The challenge here is that we’re not facing the problems directly anmore. If you want to create a comprehensive encyclopedia, you can hire a bunch of people to research, write, and edit entries. Wikipedia tried something different. They didn’t explicitely create an encyclopedia, they created (or, at least, they deployed) a system that made it easy for large amount of people to collaborate on a large amount of topics. The encyclopedia is an emergent result of that collaboration. They sidestepped the problem, and as a result, they have a much larger and dynamic information resource.

None of those examples are perfect, of course, but the more I think about it, the more I think that their imperfection is what makes them work. As noted above, you’re probably much better off releasing a site that is imperfect and iterating, making changes and learning from your mistakes as you go. When dealing with these complex problems, you’re not going to design the perfect system all at once. I realize that I keep saying we need better information aggregation and analysis tools, and that we have these tools, but they leave something to be desired. The point of these systems, though, is that they get better with time. Many older information analysis systems break when you increase the workload quickly. They don’t scale well. These newer systems only really work well once they have high participation rates and large amounts of data.

It remains to be seen whether or not these systems can actually handle that much data (and participation), but like I said, they’re a good start and they’re getting better with time.

Does Magic Exist?

Culture, Science & Technology / /

I’m back from my trip and it appears that the guest posting has fallen through. So a quick discussion on magic, which was brought up by a friend on a discussion board I frequent. The question: Does magic exist?

I suppose this depends on how you define magic. Arthur C. Clarke once infamously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s probably true, right? If some guy can bend spoons with his thoughts, there’s probably a rational explanation for it… we just haven’t figured it out yet. Does it count as magic if we don’t know how he’s doing it? What about when we do figure out how he’s doing it? What if it really was some sort of empirically observable telekinesis?

After all, magicians have been performing for hundreds of years, relying on slight of hand and misdirection1 (amongst other tricks of the trade). However, I suspect that’s not the type of answer that’s being sought.

One thing I think is interesting is the power of thought and how many religious and “magical” traditions were really just ways to harness thought in a productive fashion. For example, crystal balls are often considered to be a magical way to see the future. While not strictly true, it was found that those who look into crystal balls for a long period of time end up entering a sort of trance, similar to hypnosis, and the human mind is able to make certain connections it would not normally make2. Can such a person see the future? I doubt it, but I don’t doubt that such people often experience a “revelation” of sorts, even if it is sometimes misguided.

However, you see something similar, though a lot more controlled and a lot less hokey, in a lot of religious traditions. For instance, take Christian Mass and prayer. Mass offers a number of repetitive aspects like singing combined with several chances for reflection and thought. I’ve always found that going to mass was very helpful in that it put things in a whole new perspective. Superficial things that worried me suddenly seemed less important and much more approachable. Repetitive rituals (like singing in Church) often bring back powerful feelings of the past, etc… further reinforcing the reflection from a different perspective.

Taking it completely out of the spiritual realm, I see very rational people doing the same thing all the time. They just aren’t using the same vocabulary. When confronted with a particularly daunting problem, I’ll work on it very intensely for a while. However, I find that it’s best to stop after a bit and let the problem percolate in the back of my mind while I do completely unrelated things. Sometimes, the answer will just come to me, often at the strangest times. Occasionally, this entire process will happen without my intending it, but sometimes I’m deliberately trying to harness this subconscious problem solving ability. And I don’t think I’m doing anything special here; I think everyone has these sort of Eureka! moments from time to time. Once you remove the theology from it, prayer is really a similar process.

Once I noticed this, I began seeing similar patterns throughout my life and even history. For example, Archimedes. He was tasked with determining whether a given substance was gold or not (at the time, this was a true challenge). He toiled and slaved at the problem for weeks, pushing all other aspects of his life away. Finally, his wife, sick of her husband’s dirty appearance and bad odor, made him take a bath. As he stepped into the tub, he noticed the water rising and had a revelation… this displacement could be used to accurately measure volume, which could then be used to determine density and ultimately whether or not a substance was gold. The moral of the story: Listen to your wife!3

Have I actually answered the question? Well, I may have veered off track a bit, but I find the process of thinking to be interesting and quite mysterious. After all, whatever it is that’s going on in our noggins isn’t understood very well. It might just be indistinguishable from magic…

1 – Note to self: go see The Illusionist! Also, The Prestige looks darn good. Why does Hollywood always produce these things in pairs? At least it looks like there’s good talent involved in each of these productions…

2 – Oddly enough, I discoved this nugget on another trip through the library stacks while I was supposed to be studying in college. Just thought I should call that out in light of recent posting…

3 – Yes, this is an anecdote from the movie Pi.

Art for the computer age…

4 Comments / Computers & Internet, Culture, Video Games / /

I was originally planning on doing a movie review while our gentle web-master is away, but a topic has come up too many times in the past few weeks for me not to write about it.

First it came up in the tag map of Kaedrin, when I noticed that some people were writing pages just to create appealing tag-maps.

Then it came up in Illinois and Louisiana. They’ve passed laws regulating the sale and distribution of “violent games” to minors. This, of course, has led to lawsuits and claims that the law violates free speech.

After that, it was the guys at Penny Arcade. They posted links to We Feel Fine and Listening Post.. Those projects search the internet for blogs (maybe this one?) and pull text from them about feelings, and present those feelings to an audience in different ways. Very interesting.

Finally, it came up when I opened up the July issue of Game Informer, and read Hideo Kojima’s quote:

I believe that games are not art, and will never be art. Let me explain � games will only match their era, meaning what the people of that age want reflects the outcome of the game at that time. So, if you bring a game from 20 years ago out today, no one will say �wow.� There will be some essence where it�s fun, but there won�t be any wows or touching moments. Like a car, for example. If you bring a car from 20 years ago to the modern day, it will be appealing in a classic sense, but how much gasoline it uses, or the lack of air conditioning will simply not be appreciated in that era. So games will always be a kind of mass entertainment form rather than art. Of course, there will be artistic ways of representing games in that era, but it will still be entertainment. However, I believe that games can be a culture that represent their time. If it�s a light era, or a dark era, I always try to implement that era in my works. In the end, when we look back on the projects, we can say �Oh, it was that era.� So overall, when you look back, it becomes a culture.�

Every time I reread that quote, I cringe. Here’s a man who is one of the most significant forces in video games today, the creator of Metal Gear, and he’s saying “No, they’re not art, and never will be.” I find his distinction between mass entertaintment and art troubling, and his comparison to a car flawed.

It’s true that games will always be a reflection of their times- just like anything else is. The limitations of the time and the attitudes of the culture at the time are going to have an effect on everything coming out of that time. A car made in the 60s is going to show the style of the 60s, and is going to have the tech of the 60s. That makes sense. Of course, a painting made in the 1700s is going to show the limits and is going to reflect the feelings of that time, too. The paints, brushes, and canvas used then aren’t necessarily going to be the same as the ones used now, especially with the popular use of computers in painting. The fact that something is a reflection of the times isn’t going to stop people from appreciating the artistic worth of that thing. The fact that the Egyptians hadn’t mastered perspective doesn’t stop anyone from wanting to see their statues.

What does that really tell us, though? Nothing. A car from the 80s may not be appreciated as much as a new model car as a means of transport, but Kojima seems to be completely forgetting that there are many cars that are appreciated as special. Nobody buys a 60s era muscle car because they think it’s a good car for driving around in- they buy it because they think it’s special, because some people view older cars as collectable. Some people do see them as more than a mere means of transportation. People are very much “wowed” by old cars. Is there any reason why this can’t be true of games?

I am 8 Bit seems to suggest that there are people who are still wowed by those games. Kojima may be partially correct, though. Maybe most of those early games won’t hold up in the long run. That shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re the first generation of games. The 8-Bit era was the begining of the new wave of games, though. For the first time, creators could start to tell real stories, beyond simple high-score pursuit. Game makers were just getting their wings, and starting to see what games were really capable of. Maybe early games aren’t art. Does that mean that games aren’t art?

The problem mostly seems to be that we’re asking the wrong questions. We shouldn’t be asking “are video games art” any more than we’d ask “are movies art.” It’s a loaded question and you’ll never come to any real answer, because the answer is going to depend completely on what movie you’re looking at, and who you’re asking. The same holds true with games. The question shouldn’t be whether all games are art, but whether a particular game has some artistic merrit. How we decide what counts as art is constantly up for debate, but there are games that raise such significant moral or philosophical questions, or have such an amazing sense of style, or tell such an amazing story, that it seems hard to argue that they have no artistic merrit.

All of this really is leading somewhere. Computers have changed everything. I know that seems obvious, but I think it’s taking some people- people like Kojima- a little longer to realize it. Computers have opened up a level of interactivity and access to information that we’ve never really had before. I can update Kaedrin from Michigan, and can send a message to a friend in Germany, all while buying videos from Japan and playing chess with a man in Alaska (not that I’m actually doing those things… but I could). These changes are going to be reflected in the art our culture produces. There’s going to be backlash and criticism, and we’re going to find that some people just don’t “get it” or don’t want to. We’ve gone through the same thing countless times before. Nobody thought movies would be seen as art when they came on the scene, and they were sure that the talkies wouldn’t. When Andy Warhol came out, there were plenty of nay-sayers. Soup cans? As art? Computers have generally been accepted as a tool for making art, but I think we’re still seeing the limits pushed. We’ve barely scratched the surface. The interaction between art, artist, and viewer is blurring, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens.

Novelty

6 Comments / Arts & Letters, Best Entries, Culture, Movies, Music, Video Games / /

David Wong’s article on the coming video game crash seems to have inspired Steven Den Beste, who agrees with Wong that there will be a gaming crash and also thinks that the same problems affect other forms of entertainment. The crux of the problem appears to be novelty. Part of the problem appears to be evolutionary as well. As humans, we are conditioned for certain things, and it seems that two of our insticts are conflicting.

The first instinct is the human tendency to rely on induction. Correlation does not imply causation, but most of the time, we act like it does. We develop a complex set of heuristics and guidelines that we have extrapolated from past experiences. We do so because circumstances require us to make all sorts of decisions without posessing the knowledge or understanding necessary to provide a correct answer. Induction allows us to to operate in situations which we do not uderstand. Psychologist B. F. Skinner famously explored and exploited this trait in his experiments. Den Beste notes this in his post:

What you do is to reward the animal (usually by giving it a small amount of food) for progressively behaving in ways which is closer to what you want. The reason Skinner studied it was because he (correctly) thought he was empirically studying the way that higher thought in animals worked. Basically, they’re wired to believe that “correlation often implies causation”. Which is true, by the way. So when an animal does something and gets a reward it likes (e.g. food) it will try it again, and maybe try it a little bit differently just to see if that might increase the chance or quantity of the reward.

So we’re hard wired to create these heuristics. This has many implications, from Cargo Cults to Superstition and Security Beliefs.

The second instinct is the human drive to seek novelty, also noted by Den Beste:

The problem is that humans are wired to seek novelty. I think it’s a result of our dietary needs. Lions can eat zebra meat exclusively their entire lives without trouble; zebras can eat grass exclusively their entire lives. They don’t need novelty, but we do. Primates require a quite varied diet in order to stay healthy, and if we eat the same thing meal after meal we’ll get sick. Individuals who became restless and bored with such a diet, and who sought out other things to eat, were more likely to survive. And when you found something new, you were probably deficient in something that it provided nutritionally, so it made sense to like it for a while — until boredom set in, and you again sought out something new.

The drive for diversity affects more than just our diet. Genetic diversity has been shown to impart broader immunity to disease. Children from diverse parentage tend to develop a blend of each parent’s defenses (this has other implications, particularly for the tendency for human beings to work together in groups). The biological benefits of diversity are not limited to humans either. Hybrid strains of many crops have been developed over the years because by selectively mixing the best crops to replant the next year, farmers were promoting the best qualities in the species. The simple act of crossing different strains resulted in higher yields and stronger plants.

The problem here is that evolution has made the biological need for diversity and novelty dependent on our inductive reasoning instincts. As such, what we find is that those we rely upon for new entertainment, like Hollywood or the video game industry, are constantly trying to find a simple formula for a big hit.

It’s hard to come up with something completely new. It’s scary to even make the attempt. If you get it wrong you can flush amazingly large amounts of money down the drain. It’s a long-shot gamble. Every once in a while something new comes along, when someone takes that risk, and the audience gets interested…

Indeed, the majority of big films made today appear to be remakes, sequels or adaptations. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that something new and exciting often fails at the box office. Such films usually gain a following on video or television though. Sometimes this is difficult to believe. For instance, The Shawshank Redemption is a very popular film. In fact, it occupies the #2 spot (just behind The Godfather) on IMDB’s top rated films. And yet, the film only made $28 million dollars (ranked 52 in 1994) in theaters. To be sure, that’s not a modest chunk of change, but given the universal love for this film, you’d expect that number to be much higher. I think part of the reason this movie failed at the box office was that marketers are just as susceptible to these novelty problems as everyone else. I mean, how do you market a period prison drama that has an awkward title an no big stars? It doesn’t sound like a movie that would be popular, even though everyone seems to love it.

Which brings up another point. Not only is it difficult to create novelty, it can also be difficult to find novelty. This is the crux of the problem: we require novelty, but we’re programmed to seek out new things via correllation. There is no place to go for perfect recommendations and novelty for the sake of novelty isn’t necessarily enjoyable. I can seek out some bizarre musical style and listen to it, but the simple fact that it is novel does not guarantee that it will be enjoyable. I can’t rely upon how a film is marketed because that is often misleading or, at least, not really representative of the movie (or whatever). Once we do find something we like, our instinct is often to exhaust that author or director or artist’s catalog. Usually, by the end of that process, the artist’s work begins to seem a little stale, for obvious reasons.

Seeking out something that is both novel and enjoyable is more difficult than it sounds. It can even be a little scary. Many times, things we think will be new actually turn out to be retreads. Other times, something may actually be novel, but unenjoyable. This leads to another phenomenon that Den Beste mentions: the “Unwatched pile.” Den Beste is talking about Anime, and at this point, he’s begun to accumulate a bunch of anime DVDs which he’s bought but never watched. I’ve had similar things happen with books and movies. In fact, I have several books on my shelf, just waiting to be read, but for some of them, I’m not sure I’m willing to put in the time and effort to read them. Why? Because, for whatever reason, I’ve begun to experience some set of diminishing returns when it comes to certain types of books. These are similar to other books I’ve read, and thus I probably won’t enjoy these as much (even if they are good books).

The problem is that we know something novel is out there, it’s just a matter of finding it. At this point, I’ve gotten sick of most of the mass consumption entertainment, and have moved on to more niche forms of entertainment. This is really a signal versus noise, traversal of the long tail problem. An analysis problem. What’s more, with globalization and the internet, the world is getting smaller… access to new forms of entertainment are popping up (for example, here in the US, anime was around 20 years ago, but it was nowhere near as common as it is today). This is essentially a subset of a larger information aggregation and analysis problem that we’re facing. We’re adrift in a sea of information, and must find better ways to navigate.

Link Dump

Culture, Music, Video Games / /

Time is short this week, so just a few links I found interesting…

  • Make Me Watch TV: Collaborative torture. This guy lets people choose what he watches on TV. Naturally, voters tend to make him watch the worst of the worst (though it seems that sometimes people are nice and let him watch an episode of Lost or Doctor Who). After each viewing, he blogs about what he’s seen. One interesting thing here is that, if you want, you can “sponsor” a time slot: If you pay him $5 (per half hour), he’ll let you override the popular vote and force him to watch the program of your choice. Democracy in action.
  • Life After the Video Game Crash: In light of recent bloggery, this article in which David Wong recaps the history of video games (including the beloved Atari 2600) also predicts the coming of another Video Game Crash. Basically, it argues that the next generation gaming consoles offer very little in the way of true innovation and Wong is betting that people will stay away in droves. Regardless of what you may think, it’s worth reading because Wong is funny:

    And yet, even with the enormous number of games (Metroid delayed my discovering girls for a for a good 18 months), the gaming experience itself still couldn’t keep our interest for more than a few years. Attention waned again, but this time new, fancier systems arrived just in time, offering a new and novel experience thanks to prettier graphics and character animation. And yet those systems (the Sega Genesis and later the SNES), as great as they were, eventually were retired to closets and attics and the sandy carpets of the Pakistani black market. It was a bitter, dark cloud of Japanese expletives that wafted from the meeting rooms at Nintendo and Sega when they realized their industry effectively lived under a curse.

  • The World’s Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat: Nate Harrison’s fascinating 2004 video explores the history of the “Amen Break,” a six second drum beat from a b-side of a 1969 single that’s been used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music. From there, it spawned subcultures like drum-and-bass and jungle music. Aside from the strange fact that this is a video (there doesn’t appear to actually be a reason for this – most of the video is simply a video of a record playing or a guy sitting in a room, for instance), this is compelling stuff. It covers the history of the break, but also some issues about ownership, copyright, and what constitutes art and creativity…

Apologies for the lameness of this entry. I’ve been travelling this weekend, and I’m exhausted. I’ve got several of these weekends coming up, so I’m going to try and set up some guest bloggers to post in my stead. I think the next one will be in two weeks or so. Anyway, I’ll try to post again later this week…

Wikipedia Meme

Culture / /

Shamus stumbled upon an interesting meme (at Tim Worstall’s blog) relying upon Wikipedia’s ridiculously comprehensive date pages:

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your blog, including the year.

Like Shamus, I won’t limit myself to the numbers above and will instead just list some things I think are interesting about September 13…

Facts

Births

Deaths

Philadelphia Film Festival: Adult Swim 4 Your Lives

Arts & Letters, Culture, Movies, Philadelphia Film Festival 2006 / /

Well. That was interesting. Hosted by Dana Snyder (voice of Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and featuring a veritable plethora of other Adult Swim creators, Adult Swim 4 Your Lives was a show that defies any legitimate explanation. As such, I will simply list out some highlights, as well as some words that I would use to describe the night:

  • The Paul Green School of Rock kicked things off. Yes, Paul Green was the inspiration for Jack Black’s character in the film The School of Rock.
  • Skeletor singing show tunes (notably the song Tomorrow from Annie)
  • In fact, lots of singing was happening tonight.
  • Burlesque.
  • Beethoven vs. Bach (featuring Camel Toe)
  • Evil Monkey Boy (and hula hoops).
  • Suggestive dancing.
  • Twirling tassels.
  • Preview of second season of Tom Goes to the Mayor and a new series, Minoriteam. I got a t-shirt!
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force Feature Film (!?) preview.
  • Did I mention Burlesque?
  • Dana Snyder was either putting on his Master Shake voice all night, or that’s really the way his voice sounds. Also, that man is crazy.

Basically the night was filled with Dana Snyder saying (usually singing) wacky stuff, followed by some sort of weird performance (usually featuring elements of the burlesque). It was quite a night, though from what I understand, last year’s event went on much longer and was even crazier. Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of Adult Swim and if such an event is ever going on near you, I’d recommend it. Unless the thought of watching Skeletor belt out a few show tunes turns your stomach. Then I’d suggest avoiding it.

Update 4.15.06: I’ve created a category for all posts from the Philadelphia Film Festival.

Introverts and a Curious Guy

2 Comments / Culture / /

Time is short this week, so here’s a few interesting links:

  • Introverts of the World, Unite!: An interview with Jonathan Rauch, the author who wrote an article in the Atlantic called Caring for Your Introvert in which he perfectly characterized what it means to be an introvert. The reaction was overwhelming, and the article has drawn more traffic than any other piece on the Atlantic website. From personal experience, I can see that it not only struck a nerve with me, but with several friends (including several Kaedrin readers). Some good stuff in the interview:

    The Internet is the perfect medium for introverts. You could almost call it the Intronet. You know the old New Yorker cartoon with a dog sitting at a computer saying to another dog, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Well, on the Internet, no one knows you’re an introvert. So it’s kind of a natural that when The Atlantic put this piece online, introverts beat a path to it; it’s the ideal distribution mechanism by which introverts can reach other introverts and spread the word.

    [emphasis mine] It is very true that the internet is great for introverts and I’d wager that a lot of bloggers and discussion board frequenters are more introverted than not.

  • Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell: Bill Simmons writes an awesome sports column for ESPN (it can be entertaining even for people who aren’t big sports fans like myself), and every so often he e-mails questions “to somebody successful — whether it’s a baseball pitcher, an author, a creator of a TV show, another writer or whomever” and then he posts the results. A few weeks ago, he went back and forth with Malcolm Gladwell, leading to several interesting anecdotes, including this one which I found fascinating:

    There’s a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger — San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that’s not because they know more about American geography. It’s because they know less. They’ve never heard of San Antonio. But they’ve heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it’s in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another — and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

    Gladwell’s got a new blog as well, and he posted a pointer to the Dan Goldstein research paper (pdf) as well as Goldstein’s blog, where he comments on Gladwell’s reference…

That’s all for now…

Neutral Emergence

Culture / /

On Sunday, I wrote about cheating in probabilistic systems, but one thing I left out was that these systems are actually neutral systems. A while ago, John Robb (quoting the Nicholas Carr post I referenced) put it well:

To people, “optimization” is a neutral term. The optimization of a complex mathematical, or economic, system may make things better for us, or it may make things worse. It may improve society, or degrade it. We may not be able to apprehend the ends, but that doesn’t mean the ends are going to be good.

He’s exactly right. Evolution and emergent intelligence doesn’t naturally flow towards some eschatological goodness. It moves forward under its own logic. It often solves problems we don’t want solved. For example, in global guerrilla open source warfare, this emergent community intelligence is slowly developing forms of attack (such as systems disruption), that make it an extremely effective foe for nation-states.

Like all advances in technology, the progress of self-organizing systems and emergent results can be used for good or for ill. In the infamous words of Buckethead:

Like the atom, the flyswatter can be a force for great good or great evil.

Indeed.

Happy Birthday, Ben

Culture / /

Today is Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday. In keeping with the theme of tradeoffs and compromise that often adorns this blog, and since Franklin himself has also been a common subject, here is a quote from Franklin’s closing address to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia:

I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present; but sir, I am not sure I shall ever approve it: For, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others.

Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. … But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister, said: “But I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right.”

In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, – if they are such, – because I think a general government necessary for us… I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution; for, when you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?

It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our counsels are confounded like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats. Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

There are some people today (and even in Franklin’s time) who seem to think of compromise as some sort of fundamental evil, but it appears to me to be an essential part of democracy.

Update 1.18.06: Mister Snitch points to The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, an excellently designed site dedicated to Franklin’s 300th birthday…