From 7f04deaf6b9ee6a31043c1644d41e59e23468622 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Wang Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 04:14:32 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] adding Moral Philosophy section and Humane Network drafts --- 5 Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity.md | 100 ++++++++++ 6 The Humane Network.md | 208 +++++++++++++++++++++ README.md | 21 ++- 3 files changed, 322 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) create mode 100644 5 Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity.md create mode 100644 6 The Humane Network.md diff --git a/5 Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity.md b/5 Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..205a80f --- /dev/null +++ b/5 Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity.md @@ -0,0 +1,100 @@ + +Moral Philosophy for Digital Humanity +===================================== + +* Why go so deep? Why talk about philosophy?? + + Many people are expressing feelings of "unraveling". The fabric of society, and their own ability to understand what's going on, and any grounded direction about "what is good?" A mass of humanity still clings to axiomatic hierarchical sense-making structures (religion) or stick their heads in the sand and pretend change isn't happening. Such people take on the risk that when the accumulated change is large enough, they will have no mechanisms to process it and land on their feet. + + For those who have the intellectual curiosity or the broader situational awareness to know that the substrate of humanity *is* indeed shifting, they are left with an unsettled sense that they don't have the right tools to begin to perceive, integrate, and model all the change. If a noisy bar is blasting music from 10 different stations, you can tell there are notes and lyrics, but it's impossible to grasp on to any single thread of melody or even pick up a consistent bass beat. This breakdown of perception is a metaphor for our modern-day breakdown of philosophy. + + I think most people cannot conceive what is even meant by "a breakdown of philosophy". In the Western world, we are taught basic concepts like "freedom", "rights", "property", "government", and because we grow up in a relatively stable environment where these concepts have coherent presentation in many walks of life, we take these philosophical constructs to concrete reality, and not merely subjective constructs. In fact, so many of us live such a life of unviolent privilege that some very smart people will go so far as to claim certain aspects of human law are part of *natural law*. In reality, they have just lived in a environment where most people adhere to the painted lines on the pavement - and those lines were painted hundreds or thousands of years ago by philosophers. + + But in this new virtual reality we've created, human law *is* natural law. Or rather, human have self-elected to participate in a "virtual" (or, more aptly, "informational") plane where natural law is malleable. Typically, the parameters of our online interactions are "frozen accident", laid down by grad students in the 1960s or by haphazard web developers in the 1990s and 2000s. They were almost never designed to optimize for human quality of life when deployed at scale. + + The Matrix really is a perfect metaphor for our times. I have to admit I always found it a bit contrived that when you die in the Matrix, you also die in real life. But now given what I've seen with online interactions, I can believe it, but maybe it plays out differently: when you get ejected from the Matrix, or when a dominant majority of your self-identity is manifest in cyberspace, if that gets trashed, you unplug and lose all will to live. Your biological self continues, but you've died a social death; just as when your body dies, many of your cells will continue living for hours afterwards. ("AFK, soon to be RIP") + +* Human communications have undergone a phase transition. + + * Peak words; semantic density of the human cognitive field is at breakdown voltage + + * Cannot model messages and text as artifacts on their own. The New Medium of communications that has emerged - and this is not strictly social media per se, but social media platforms best demonstrate the phenomenon - allows for messages to resonate with and be modulated by individuals in realtime. + + * Model of humans as bells with memory + + * Cannot simply view humans as individual atoms, and then solve from bottom up (individualist rights) or from top down (collectivism). Instead, we must: + 1. acknowledge that the mesoscale, emergent dynamics of large groups (10x-1000x Dunbar) now dominate civilization + 2. understand the role of information technology in organizing, destroying those groups + 3. build up new philosophy around this recognition: that humans are not atomic individuals unto themselves, but cells in a dynamical soup of loosely-cohered organisms. + + * Both #2 and #3 require a consideration of mereology as a foundational, first-class concern. Furthermore, in the face of the messy metaphysics of cyberspace and digital information, the need to adopt something like Four Dimensionalism becomes critical. We cannot continue to reason about the world by building a metaphysics around "static snapshots", and then approach understanding of dynamics by stringing them together with a timeline. Rather, we have to consider both temporal horizons as well as *sampling frequency* of phenomena in a holistic temporal metaphysics. + +* Groups of people create their own consensus reality. In the first era of humanity, Reality was defined by consensus. In the second era, it was defined by models, prediction, and experiment. Models are needed in order to have Explicit Control. In the third era, we stop needing reality to be defined in a way that fits within people's heads, and simply immerse ourselves in an experiential Present, confident that the structures we've created will enable our collective patterns of behavior to converge on optimal actions. + +* Sensemaking is not optional (draft piece in Civ2.0 evernote) + +* Social Physics + * Trust and Intertrust + * Privacy and Identity + * Identity, Names, and the Social Field + +--------------------- + + +Trust and Intertrust +-------------------- + +Trust and human relationships are two very deep and rich topics. Trust is the foundational mass-energy that occupies and manifests in a social graph of humans. It is outside of this document's scope to deep-dive on Trust (and human relationships, and values). But fortunately, the common connotations of "trust" are generally good enough when we contemplate it in the context of communications technology. + +Core components for humane networking, capable of giving rise to collective/emergent intelligence + +Establishes an explicit metaphysics of what is real and not real in the context of a trust network. + +Trust in such a network is the encapsulation of "settled risk". Generalized Credit. + +As an aside, this "intertrust" phenomenon is also why cryptocurrencies based on blockchain are possible at all. One would not imagine suggesting blockchains replace, say, airplanes, or vitamins, or love. Why do people want to use it for money? See my blog post "An oversimplification of cryptocurrency". + + +Privacy and Identity +-------------------- + +Privacy gives the space for us to become our future selves + +Privacy is critical as part of the mechanism that the digital field lets give rise to identity. This is because the social field is intersubjective, and a lack of privacy means that what we believe about our selves cannot diverge from what others believe about us (and one step further: what we believe about others' beliefs about us). Without privacy, we have no space in which we can innovate and develop our future Selves. We have no space to think, imagine, dream, suffer, reflect, ... + +Digital technologies have the unmatched, almost unimaginably powerful ability to destroy privacy in a single stroke. + +We must advocate for strong privacy (and strong identity) protocols as the basis for a technologically enabled future. + +Identity, Names, and the Social Field +------------------------------------- + +Reflecting on the movie Spirited Away, it's interesting to note the mythical nature attached to the names of things. This is also present in the Earthsea novels, and in the Kingkiller Chronicles, and in many other fantasy novels. + +The idea of a name and a shared name in particular is something that is so taken for granted in the modern-day as to not even be worth a mention. However if we really think about it, there is a lot of power there and it is the power of framing. The name of the thing anchors it and frames it in a way that is subtle and invisible and inescapable. There's a mystique that is real in referring to Voldemort as "He-who-must-not-be-named". + +How a human society decides to arrange and organize the naming rights (and over what kinds of things) actually has a deep impact on the society. This is pretty viscerally obvious when it comes to things like the names of people and buildings and even sometimes maybe even abstract concepts. But when there is no shared value system or social context, simple conflicts in names can create mass confusion. Because all human expression - at least all modern languages - rely deeply and implicitly on a shared name space and a relatively ad hoc way of resolving simple divergences there. But with our communications moving to the internet, and with all of the wildly divergent communities and sub societies there, the very concept of a shared lexicon is starting to dissolve. It used to be cute when the Oxford dictionary would have to add entries for things like email or other technological inventions and things that arise from the internet. But so many modern words that we use in our sub societies really don't have standing to enter into the canonical lexicon for the language. + +What then of the ideas and the sentiments that can only be really captured on the basis of those words? With new words we get new dialects, and with new languages we get new shared small spaces of ideas. By allowing these to diverge and grow like mushrooms are we setting ourselves up for fundamentally intractable problem? + +**Identity is the portion of the intersubjective field that you control** + +Control (or just the perception of it?? control is also intersubjective) is the key factor, at least for western mindsets. We elevate individual agency over virtually all else, and therefore our neuroses tend to stem from when that imperative of perspective runs counter to objective reality. + +American moral systems are also tied, then, to this model of utter individual agency. Because an individual has control over themselves and their lives, then all success and all failure can be attributed to their individual performance. + +One might humbly thank Providence for the opportunity to be successful, but if one is not successful, presumably due to the obstacles Providence has thrown in his way, then he still has a path to virtue, which is to (1) suffer the slings and arrows while (2) all he time re-affirming his faith in the same Almighty which is slinging arrows at him. To fail to do #2 is to opt out of the religious and moral system of the community, i.e. commit social suicide. To fail to do #1 is a sign of individual weakness, or worse, an abdication of your sense of + +**The social order defines "intimacy"** + +And intimacy is only the closest thing to our "self" (at least, the social dimension). There are other well defined zones of relations at varying distances. + +In fact, society could be said to be "the field in which self-hood is a gradient", as opposed to a binary self/not-self world view. Liberalism, i.e. the assigning/ascribing of rights to other individuals, is one way to generate a social fabric which allows for a diversity of outcomes. [TODO: clarify “outcomes”] But it is not the only way. + +A key point here is: Intimacy is subjective. And it’s possible to erode the *possibility* of intimacy for an individual, or within a society. For an individual, that erosion is typically rooted in an selfhood’s inability to contemplate vulnerability. For a society, that erosion is due to social norms which don’t permit the expression, between individuals, of vulnerability. + +What are the failings of societies that lack intimacy? What are their vulnerabilities? + + + + diff --git a/6 The Humane Network.md b/6 The Humane Network.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4a7192e --- /dev/null +++ b/6 The Humane Network.md @@ -0,0 +1,208 @@ +The Humane Network +================== + +* The Fundamental Question: What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence? + +* Motivating use cases: + + * How do I memorialize every piece of content I've ever seen, so I can reference it again in the future? (No one can make me forget) + + * How do I ensure I can always talk to someone else about a piece of information? Both in terms of referring to the information, and also in terms of what I can say about it? + + * How do I ensure that only the intended recipient can view a piece of content? (Have to ensure they are using a secured client that makes a synchronous connection to me, that holds the content) + +* Computer Networks vs. Social Networks + * Connection between entities is primary + +* The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology + * The Internet Is Too Much + * Is the web a place for all people? + * Anomie (in Clipped Articles civ 2.0) + + * Time to end the concept of "the media". Coherent, synchronized messaging turns humanity into a horse that awaits a rider. This is increasingly dangerous. + + * To be a node in a sense-making network, you need tools that manage your information diet, along with explicit management of connectivity, identity, etc. + + You should also be able to bookmark and mark up and mashup content without any fear that it might be leaked. + + If you can’t explicitly manage your information sphere, then you are subject to the broader whims of the narrative sphere. And you also can involuntarily get co-opted into dynamic patterns. + +* "Tone" or oceanic metaphor instead of "network of sites" (evernote) + +* Hard problems + * "Novation Protocol" / Trust -> Reputation [see evernote] + +-------------- + +* You don't "acquire users" in a Humane Network: + (triggered by reading “Announcing the Status Network” https://blog.status.im/announcing-the-status-network-c6dd18e770e) + + It is an antipattern to think of "acquiring users" in a social app. Rather, users entrust you with attention. + +* Different root trade-offs: + * Internet ensures robust decentralized delivery. + * In absence of identity, very hard to build trust and communities. + * With centralized identity, aggregate extremely large amounts of power. + + * New data topology: optimized to ensure decentralized identity, fluid organizations. Zero global copyright: data has no rights; data makers only have rights as stipulated by the trust network they inhabit. + +* Principles: + * Connections considered harmful + * Trust, not bandwidth or storage or latency, is the core commodity. The Trust Topology is the most significant architectural concern. + * If the network is the computer, then users (and their usage) becomes the product. Data and metadata security are architecturally invalid. + +----- + +On Trolling +----------- + +Loomio seems very concerned with trolls. Let’s understand trolling conceptually, and build countermeasures into the platform. + +Is it sufficient to define the conversation platform as an online community that is troll-proof? + +Trolling takes different forms but mostly it seems like online communities are broken because the software platforms provide no -code- level way to communicate and enforce the elements of human interaction that exclude trolls IRL. People who troll IRL develop a reputation. That is a critically important aspect of this. + +There is no such thing as anonymous participation: if an anonymous ID shows up and starts expressing amazing ideas, they develop rep, and are no longer anonymous. Participation itself is identifying; social identity and reputation are one and the same. So online tools that provide anonymity are simply choosing a naive and flawed implementation of certain other features, which include minimizing friction of getting new users. + +Once persistent online identity exists, then we have a surface on which to attach things that make trolling non-existent. + + +Trolling is just burning people’s attention, using asymmetric informational psych techniques. If trolls have to spend 5 minutes crafting a message to waste 5 minutes of someone else’s attention, they would get nowhere. That’s why they gravitate to forums which serve as auto-repeaters to others. + + + +The Internet Is Too Much +------------------------ + +We used to have small local spaces in which to raise our young, let them learn through risk (serendipitous autocorrect from "trial") and error, away from the eyes of the world. Reflecting on how I had to learn concepts and make my own mistakes in the company of friends and a supportive/forgiving community. + +Now the eyes of the world can train upon any small local event, spark global outrage. This is allergic overreaction. Really one set of social patterns bullying another set. + +Warcraft had lowbie training grounds. + +We are not a global community. The would is a community of communities. And until we realize that our information technologies and architecture are at odds with that reality, we will continue to have side and chaos and informational warfare. The disruptions in sense making will continue. + + +Is The Web a Place for All People? +---------------------------------- + +http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40974069 + +This is related to the "free speech fundamentalism" where people treat the freedom of expression as an axiomatic right. + +No such axiomatic right exists. + + +Connection Between Entities Is Primary +-------------------------------------- + +The internet is founded on the principle of end-to-end connectivity. The web is based on servers and content, and a universal addressing scheme in the document format. + +The Humane Network primarily concerns itself with defining the set of concepts and protocols that give rise to a communications network which fits the natural inclinations of human interaction, and scales up and out without creating any number of potential negative outcomes: +- Loss of confidentiality +- Loss of attribution +- Loss of Anonymity +- Centralization of content +- Centralization of traffic flow +- Inappropriate novation of trust into global reputation + +A trusted connection is 90%+ of the signal. + + +A True Collective Intelligence Network +-------------------------------------- + + + * A Pot-Belly of Ignorance (https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-you-spend-time-reading-changes-your-brain-ee2ab4f2aa17#.ljo3lq8zy) + + Network intelligence requires attribution, and durability of long-term learning... + + +- the way the brain cements memory and learning is by applying it to action; to making predictions and when those predictions are right, it quickly reinforces the pathways that led to it + +- this suggests that: + (1) we need a way to do the equivalent of "acting" or "predicting" in an information network, which is difficult because thus far we've conceived such networks primarily as information dissemination mechanisms + (2) we need to keep a provenance and attribute chain for how we came upon certain knowledge, and when those things feed into the analogue of "correctly predicted action", they get bumped up + +So the Principle of Reciprocity in the information architecture could be manifested in users attributing that a thing is "noteworthy", and adding some amount of comment. Additionally, TTL/Duration could be configured by default to be smaller values for things which are merely referenced without comment. + +There is a question of how to reinforce the concept of "long-term memory" in the collective intelligence. I believe that sleep is critical to formation of long-term memory in humans. Is it fundamental, or accidental, because our visual system was not effective at hunting at night, and so we might as well sleep? +- Need some dual concept of The Feed. Like, Archives or Deeps. Amazingly indexed, integrated, with full perspective and commentary. +- Foster a culture of developing deeper contextualization or filtering of new things, through the lens of the Archives. +- Things like Wikipedia and Quora demonstrate a huge amount of latent human capability for doing this. For instance, the excellent Quora discussion around the efficacy of the F-35: why isn't this naturally part of the Wikipedia "article" on the subject? Because of the artificial (and illiquid) concept of an "article" and the editorial/curation process. +- If people could get compensated for their expert contributions more "core" to the understanding of a topic... + +----------- + +A CIN is not a system for remembering; it's a system for selective forgetting +(triggered by reading https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/) + +- Search and index can be used for fast recall +- deciding what to filter out and ignore *is* the core problem +- the “binding problem” or “binding effect” in the collective intelligence network has to be an act of collective ignoring and focus +- in other words, attention is *differentiated perception*, paying much more attention to certain things than others, and at certain frequencies, and in some particular order. +- that ordering, and the frequency/temporal scales, define the subjective metaphysics of the qualia of the collective intelligence + +CIN is also not a corrective action network, or a hierarchical intelligence network. + +Part of the red State CIN is a certain amount of self-reflection to see what things will strengthen its collective narrative. A restorative force, so to speak. Others talk about this as "meme"-craft but it's no different a phenomenon than gangs tagging overpasses with spray paint. Tribal chanting in an internet era. + +The Blue "side" is actually at a disadvantage when it comes to building new online tribalism, because it does not perceive itself as being under seige in that space. It does have lingering dominance in the broadcast information space. + +--------- + +Online networks every originate community without robust trust mechanism + +And all robust trust mechanisms currently require tying out to real world identity or institutions. + +Breakdowns of trust in online communities rely on adjudication or resolution in meatspace. The only exceptions may be in topical domains where there is very strong alignment between the community's values and vision, with some externally-held vision. For technical communities, usually "technical merit" or "adoption and use" serve as final arbiter. + +Other online communities may fork and split and decohere. This can be hard to do real forensics on since the internet has grown up and evolved so quickly. We went from Myspace to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter in less time than... + +So for a real *networked* *digital* community to emerge, thrive, and EVOLVE, then it must be anchored in some rock solid mechanism for connecting human identity. This mechanism - perhaps called the fountainhead of trust - is fundamental. Otherwise, online communities will always be the tail of the dog. And sometimes, as with Trump, the tail may wag the dog.. but it will still be the tail, and the dog does not walk backwards. + +Unlike what many blockchain advocates and adherents may believe, the mechanism for ensuring trust is almost certainly NOT a purely online or digital phenomenon. Instead, it must be a mixed-mode, physical + digital experience, like a weekly mass or some such thing, wherein people then take digital communion. + + + +The goal is to lay out principles for convivial social networks, more than a particular design +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- + +Even if current internet providers put in short term "fixes" over the most dramatic division vulnerabilities their platforms have created for society, it seems pretty obvious to me (and many others) that central control of the Infrastructure for digital society is structurally problematic. In China, it does not even pretend to not be authoritarian. In the USA, we are still drunk on the religion of Growth Capitalism, but even appeals to the profit motive (Deus Ex Capital) cannot mask the sense of decline and social decoherence. + +The point of this site and collecting ideas here is to explore, discover, and structure the principles that should guide the technical designs of a humane network, one that gives rise to and reinforces positive social dynamics within people, regardless of their cultural and political perspectives. + +One of the primary brainstorming approaches I use is quite simple: given that our current tech trajectory is heading towards a dystopian Orwellian future, what sorts of tools and technology will I, my children, and my allies need in order to fend off Big Brother with his benevolent capitalism and debt indenture? + +Different kinds of digital society infrastructure are appropriate for different societies. Just thinking about what the Raj period in India did for its infrastructure and organization. What new physical infrastructure and market arrangements would have arisen if it hadn’t been for (or, in fact, did arise in spite of) the initial build-out of this foreign architecture? Every type of culture and society at this point in time will squeeze into whatever kind of building is made for it; and it will change the building as much as the building changes it. The same applies for our digital infrastructure. + +Right now we have seen what the global impulse-response to “digital commons built on ARPAnet” looks like. The vulnerabilities or flaws at the heart of the Internet architecture - a reliance on centralized namespace management and overemphasis on transport topology - manifest as different kinds of large-scale problems in different countries. In authoritarian regimes, the failure ranges from shut-down of the internet (LINK: when shut off the internet) to wholesale censor public communications, to exploitation of the infrastructure for human rights abuses (LINK: govt using Grindr to target gays). In the United States and western capitalist democracies, the propensity is towards creating an attention market, and exploiting it for the purposes of increasing consumer consumption and demand, to the detriment of mental health, physical wellbeing, and long-term survivability of our species. China is a strange hybrid that exploits the dynamics of an attention economy to create a veneer of a consumer internet, but underneath of which sits a powerful and omnipresent capability for fine-grained surveillance and control of the population. + + +The point of the new dataweb system is to put Identity as a first class concern in the data protocols, and for the intersection of those identities (joining) to occur on a human user's own terms. If we build a digital society, then we must have clear and ironclad rules about identity. Half of society is just defining what is identity; digitally-enabled societies are no different. If we were to draw an analogue to physics, identity isn't the equivalent of mass in meatspace; it's the *coordinate system*. + + +Further Reading +--------------- + + + + +Scratchpad from earlier writings +================================ + +Technology should provide tools to extend the vocabulary of human interaction, and allow us to experiment with and scale out different kinds of social structures. It should amplify and implement aspects of human relationships, which are grounded in social primitives like trust, justice/fairness, social convention, etc. + +Right now we have a broken system where this terribly primitive technology - a always-on, unencrypted, open metadata, glitchy graph of computers - is used as substrate for human interaction. And we are made dumber and more paranoid for it. Because we are limited in the range of interactions we can have, and there is *zero* affordances in the technology to support all of the cues and conventions that are so critical to real human interaction, the reliance of people on this network leads to an erosion and destruction of the social order which we are *built* to want, to expect, to intuitively understand. It's a more corrupt form of Orwellian "doublespeak", because there at least you could explicitly see the trick being played to limit people's expressiveness. The modern conception "social networking" does not fundamentally strengthen or augment those natural human social expressions; rather they are designed to create an attachment to a device, to an app or a site, lock-in to a platform. + + +Identity is a core one of these. Since we have no unified, federated, and robust mechanism for identity on the Internet, we have almost nothing to attach these social concepts *to*. This is why "hard anonymity" in the Internet sense tends to bring out the *worst* in people. The old "flight vs invisibility" thing - on the internet, anyone of sufficient skill can become almost invisible. + +Then building on top of identity, we have trust and trust "paths".... + +-------------- + +The Lagrangian of Social Physics is the delta between person's self-delusion and reality. “The man he is, vs. the man he wants to be” + + + diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 1454e9c..6841f53 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,18 +29,25 @@ I. The Web We Lost II. The Web We Need - 1. The Fundamental Question - What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence? + 1. [Moral Philosphy for Digital Humanity](5%20Moral%20Philosophy%20for%20Digital%20Humanity.md) + + * Why go so deep? Why talk about philosophy?? + * Human communications have undergone a phase transition. + * Peak words; semantic density of the human cognitive field is at breakdown voltage + * Four-dimensionality: Digital Humans are all ships of Theseus + * Sensemaking is not optional (draft) + * Social Physics + * Identity, Names, and the Social Field + * Privacy and Trust + * Self-hood and agency + + 2. [The Humane Network](6%20The%20Humane%20Network.md) + * The Fundamental Question - What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence? * Computer Networks vs. Social Networks * The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology - * Sensemaking is not optional (draft) * The Internet Is Too Much * Anomie (in Clipped Articles Civ 2.0) - 2. Moral Philosphy for Digital Humanity - * Self-hood and agency - * Identity, privacy, and the social field - * Four-dimensionality: Digital Humans are all ships of Theseus - 3. What Could Come Next * What are current stop-gap tech approaches, and why are they not enough? * 4 Layers of Fail