Year: 2006

I mentioned earlier I had started reading Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves” and it seemed promising then. I actually think it’s his best yet. Convincing common-sense and hugely entertaining, with some great laugh-out loud gags for good measure.

He’s working up to the evolution of morality and values, via the arms race and economics of mental evolution. Not quite there yet. 80% through, just reached a section where he is about to explain at length the 300 millisecond “moral void” – the Libet experiment where motor action seems to pre-empt any conscious decision making. Why do I know I’m going to identify with Dennett’s version of events, even though I’ve not read it yet ?

After laying the ground with distinctions around determinism and the very concept of free will, and some basic re-capping of earlier work on how complexity and life can be explained by evolution from the simple and dead, a good part of the book is about evolution of strategies that involve cooperation and enlightened-far-sighted-self-interest, in contrast to “tooth and claw” competition. ie Given that we have free-will what kinds of thing to intelligent entities actually do as “rational agents”. There is a good deal of game-theoretic stuff with variations on the prisoners’ dilemma. Again not new for anyone already interested, just so well written and explained, synthesising the work of others, and with non-intrusive references to other good sources of detail.

Two favourites so far.

In describing how deferred gratification, or resistance of temptation to short-term personal gain, at the expense of longer term interest of yourself and other co-operators, cements greater trust and greater cooperation amongst actual and potential collaborators, he also describes the view from the side of the party doing the tempting. If the Mafia, making you the offer you can’t refuse, but do, recognises your reliability in resisting such temptation, it won’t need to waste a perfectly good horse’s head in any futile future attempt. Win-win.

Quoting “Brain Storm” from Richard Dooling, written 20 years after his own “Brainstorms”, he describes a pang of guilt preventing a husband’s otherwise inevitable act in a steamy clinch with another scientist on the lab floor, when she pipes up (as you would) with a description of how Dennett has proven that free-will doesn’t exists (which he never has of course), and there is no reason to feel such guilt for our actions. Dooling and Dennett tell it much better. As Dennett says, it’s hard enough to explain that fully clothed, standing behind a lecture stand, let alone rolling naked on the floor.

Of course there are plenty of side-swipes at believers in sky-hooks, which will either amuse or annoy, but there’s no denying the good-natured wit, and compared to Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, this aspect of his thinking is more gently understated here. Dennett is more concerned with quality of explanation, than the particular names of the more intangible things that people do or don’t believe exist, so he has learned that people sometimes have misunderstood what he has said about their existence. Reading “Freedom Evolves” can leave little doubt.

[Post Note – More hypocrisy and horses heads. Sorry couldn’t resist this – the current talk of “bungs” (bribes) in UK Soccer dealings has thrown up some quotes that just fit the story so well. Gerry Francis said “Agents soon found out those people who would take inducements and those people who wouldn’t.” and Graham Kelly said ” Clubs generally are hypocritical about this, because they condemn agents and then they work with them.”]

It doesn’t always, perhaps something of Tim Kreider’s Pain gets lost in transatlantic translation, but the latest made me smile.

When I blogged here, but no, The Meta-Memes Guy blogs already.

Found via Stephen C’s infrequently updated Square One blog

Both added to side bar too.

I blogged last April about the idea tha del.ici.ous might work as a means of creating categories, that could include inherited catgories, and that by adding such links the non-hierarchical taxonomy could just evolve from the links.

I noticed on a search cross-hit that Greg, John and Fritz at Freshblog had a detailed summary of ways to exploit del.ici.ous for this purpose. Must follow-up this idea.

Categories was the only reason I moved from Blogger to WordPress. Would I switch back to blogger if I fixed this ? The Swicki (in the header) is part of my experimenting with informal / evolving categories.

Is near the core of my agenda – life’s complicated enough – just enough that is to make it a serious error to work with an over-simplified view in any context, in any environment, in any organisation. Anecdote here has a video link to a presentation on the subject by Michael Crichton (Yes, that Michael Crichton.). [via Johhnie Moore]

His 60 minute talk (plus Q&A) focuses on the topics of fear, misguided predictions and the impossibility of managing the environment with a mindset of linearity. Using the environment as an example of the ultimate complex system, Crichton exposes the inadequacies of conceiving the environment as a predictable and stable system. (Just substitute ‘the environment’ for the name of any large organisation.)

I guess the key caveat must be to stress the qualification of “impossible” and “predictable”. Not possible with the wrong rational objective (linear, static) world view. Roll on Dynamic Quality.

Anecdote looks like an interesting blog itself.
[Post-note – I see Anecdote are a small Australian organisation, with IBM and Dave Snowden / Cynefin connections. The web-linking plot thickens. I see their ideas of Adams and narrative humour refer to Scott, rather than Douglas (DNA) Adams. Pity :-)]

I see Johnnie has more recent posts on imperfection [perfection kills engagement] and trust [experts can miss the obvious] – a running thread here, didn’t I blog that last link a little earlier ?

Interesting further, is this title of a book chapter contributed by Johnnie “Simple Ideas, Lightly Held” – a play on the strong opinions, lightly held idea (also via Johnnie). In the context of the complexity post above, what this is saying that simple ideas are useful and pragmatic, but it’s dangerous to get too wedded to them, because they are almost certainly flawed – oversimplifying reality in any fundamental sense. Same problem with holding a fundamental metaphysical view of an ontology of subjects and objects.

I’ve always used my site monitoring s/w “Site Meter” as a means of identifying cross-links, who’s looking at my site, in the sense of, where have they come from; other web-pages and institutions of interest. I’m rarely interested in spotting individuals physical locations or IP addresses, that would be sneaky, unless the link leads to further contact. The cross-linking of search hits provides me with valuable sources of new links on subjects common to my blog, however useful the hit has been to my visitor.

For a long time, most hits were just that: search engine hits, and if the user has not followed the link to more than one page, I really had no way of knowing if pages were really being looked at or not, unless people commented or corresponded.

Anyway some interesting stats (for me). I had’t really noticed, but compared to about a year ago (this is year 5) everything is about doubled. Averages are running at 60 hits a day, with over 2 page views per hit (120 page views per day) and each visit now over a minute, (and that’s averaged over the whole life !) so increasingly people are actually looking at my site content, not just having their search engine hit it. (That means the averages over 5 years are about twice those over 4. You do the maths for the 5th year. Must do some total stats over current periods, out of interest.)

Thanks folks.

Thanks to a search cross-hit, I picked up this link to Lynn Curry’s Onion Model on Learning Theories. You may know I often use the “onion” for my view that everything comes in layers (even layers), though I have to say when I think Onion I tend to think many layers – onion-skins.

Pirsig and Maslow scholars will understand how I was intrigued that Curry’s Onion involves four layers. Interesting, even though it doesn’t map directly.

Cringley has delayed his 2006 predictions to put up this thought on Google, given that they’ve made a splash at CES.

The key thing is that whatever Google does, it is enabling it to serve content targetted more granularly, and charge premium rates for that granular targetting. It already works with G-Mail, and other Google offerings. And, as IP and TV channels merge, this targetting will be sold into main media streams, not compete with them. targetted ads on your TV or future commercial media device. How granular can you get ? (Part of the capability to get close to doing this locally in real time is what is behind their massive distributed server containers reported earlier.)

Incidentally, Google’s beta-releasing of unannounced new products, and withdrawal if they fail, is visible as a designed strategy of “fast failures”, rather than over-hyped, disappointing late, white-elephant flops.

They aren’t afraid to try new things, and having tried them, also aren’t afraid to shut them down if they don’t seem to be working as intended. All of this is by design. Google has turned beta code into a weapon, creating “beta” programs that in the case of Gmail had more than three million testers signed-up before it went from beta to production. A beta test is a wonderful thing because it can be ended with a whimper but not with a lawsuit. Betas for Google are sometimes real statements of product direction and sometimes not, but Google competitors have no way of knowing which is which until they, too, have devoted resources to competing with something that may have no long-term existence.

As Cringley says, the speculation is not all his. Managed granularity has been an aspect of my info-modelling quest for the last few years.