Mar 2004, 12 entries

I’m making a list of 100 things to do before I die and am up to 73. And the first one of them is done. I have published the list somewhere on the Interweb and plan on adding/editing/crossing off things from the list, providing proof for the things I’ve done, and keeping track of how the list changes over time. My number one outwardly verbalized goal (not counting the one I have decided not to talk about) is to keep the list up-to-date at all times. In many ways, I think this is a great way to answer the unanswerable fundamental purpose question that alluded me for so long.

Keeping a list up-to-date seems like a fairly trivial task. Directly, it has no value. But indirectly, it has a few effects that I think are non-trivial, and actually really cool.

• If this list is up-to-date, it means I will have to constantly think about the things on the list and remove/add things as they come up. Finding things that are worth doing will always be at the front of my mind.
• I can keep myself accountable when something on the list becomes possible. Like shaving my head. There is no excuse for something to be on the list and to not do it when it becomes possible. If I don’t do it, then I should take it off the list.
• I can blame the list. Some things on the list are pretty silly or possibly questionable as things that should be done without a good reason. Being on the list becomes the explicit reason, and allows me to keep my ambiguous motivations ambiguous, if there are any.
• If the list runs out of items, I’ll know that my time here is up.

Any suggestions for things that should be added to the list? If anyone else feels like making a list, it might be fun to share notes, but I can’t reveal the entire list to anyone quite yet.

I’ve noticed a trick my mind plays when things become unbearable. Instead of dealing with the unbearable thing in its entirety, my mind cuts it up into smaller pieces (usually designated by some time frame) and deals with each piece individually, one at a time. For example, when my father passed away 10 years ago, I handled it on a day by day basis, and sometimes even on a moment by moment basis. One day at a time, things like the passing away of loved ones becomes bearable. Same thing happens with stressful things, deal with one thing at a time. You can probably measure the pain of a thing by seeing how small the pieces need to be cut up before you can begin to bear it.

The strange thing is that when we imagine other people bearing something difficult, we usually imagine them dealing with it all at once. You see the big picture of a painful event and empathize with them on that level. You can’t imagine how it’s possible. That’s because it may not be. Meanwhile, they’re not even looking at that big picture, and are probably just staying afloat by handling one day or hour or minute of realization at a time. If a closed chamber is filling with water, people will still swim to stay afloat until they hit the roof and can go no higher. The smaller piece is to stay above water. The bigger piece is to deal with the roof. I think, in general, dealing with the smaller pieces is a much more effective strategy because the roof is more often than not imagined.

It applies to physical pain too. In long distance runs I usually deal with the pain of continuing by landmarks on the path. Get to that tree. Okay, now get to that corner. Near the end, these landmarks become more frequent.

One interesting thing I’ve learned about painful things, though, is that the pain/stress/doubt/etc tends to come in waves. This has an interesting affect on the cutting up of unbearable things. You may cut off a piece of the wave which contains no unbearable qualities. I’ve noticed this in myself… all of a sudden I think I may be in the clear, unbearable thing now taken care of, and I lower my guard a bit. But then, a bit later, the thing comes back. And so, after a few waves, you learn to fill in the empty parts of the waves with a different kind of unpleasantness: the anticipation of future waves and the memory of remembered waves. It helps you keep on your toes when the real bad stuff comes back. But, in the end, you’re going to deal with more net pain/stress/doubt/etc than was really in the thing.

I can’t find anything very authoritative on Google about this at the moment, but I remember hearing about a well known historical figure in America’s past (maybe Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin?) that believed that the mind was made up of a bunch of “little people” who had conflicting interests and that fought one another for control of the mind. At the time, I think it was a pretty common belief. Does anyone know more about this? (Later: Aha! It was Thomas Edison and Henry Ford...)

Your brain is not a general-purpose computer with one unified central processor. It is an assemblage of competing subsystems—sometimes called “modules”—specialized for particular tasks. Most of the time, we only notice these modules when their goals are out of sync. When they work together, they coalesce into a unified sense of self.

The module metaphor fits better with software developers (and I suppose the brain people) rather than early America’s country builders, but the concept is the same.

I think I’m a believer in the little people. I think that I’m really just the emergent group consciousness of an entire community of little people in my head. Before you order the straitjacket, let me try to explain why I think this.

I think everyone has some little people in their head that try to accumulate things, and other little people in their head that try to get rid of things. Going to a store with the intent to buy things in essence calls these two groups of little people into a room and tells them to fight it out. May the best little person win. Will you buy the new bike or not? In my head, the little people that tell me to get rid of things are much stronger in number. They constantly beat down the little people who like to accumulate. Hence the recent purge of most of my books, music, and clothes. But sometimes, still, I buy a bike.

It helps explain why people contradict themselves. If you have some little people arguing for one side of an issue, and some little people arguing for another side, it’s inevitable that sometimes one side will win and sometimes the other side will win. From the outside, it looks odd that you’d say act one way sometimes and another way another time, but this empire of little people is constantly in flux... sometimes one party gains a stronger hold on the outcome of debates, but it’s always possible that that hold will slip at some point. Inconsistency in society is inevitable… try making everyone in a family, team, company have the same opinion about something. It takes a great force to make it appear that everyone thinks the same thing all the time… a force of similar strength to that required for a single person to think the same thing all the time.

What happens when people decide that they want to become outwardly consistent? Morally, for example. They want to have a consistent set of beliefs and actions maintained over a long period of time. This, in a sense, requires that some faction of your little people are appointed as rulers over the other little people. And, like any forced leadership, those who are led may or may not be entirely happy with their rulers. How do we (since we are really just an emergent quality of the system and not a member of the little people community itself) change ourselves? Countless books have been written on the topic. But the answer is not as simple as making a single decision during a single moment. You must lobby within yourself… trick the little people into falling in line. Satisfy the unruly and anarchist members of your brain. Think of it this way: there’s always a ruling party in the community and they function as your consciousness (your direct line). When they think that you need to go on a diet, that makes you think that you need to go on a diet. You think it because they think it, not the other way around. The subconsious, then, is what all of the non-ruling little people are thinking. They go behind the ruling party’s back to try to promote their own agendas, and the ruling party only has as much knowledge about what’s going on as you do.

When there is a revolution amongst the little people, and the old management is kicked out and new management is brought in, you’ve officially changed. There are certain periods of my life that I look back onto and think I was a different person. Maybe that’s because different little people were in charge back then. The society stays the same for the most part, evolving over time, but these revolutions mark important dates in the history of your personality. Most importantly, they happen without you necessarily asking for it, because your consciousness is the thing being thrown out and replaced.

On second thought, maybe I don’t want to write an entry. Perfect. Submit.

In the end we ditched 90% of these slides and opted to use them simply as background material for answering a series of questions… but here’s what we were planning on presenting.

Replacing Billboard, Bestseller Lists, and Editors with Robots

The description of the panel goes something like this: Novel approaches to automatic aggregation are poised to replace the zeitgeist tools that large corporations have typically used to identify patterns of opinion and cultural change. Learn about extracting trends and memes (aka: contagious ideas or mind viruses) from weblogs, as well as new approaches to music retrieval that take advantage of buzz and popularity mining. (See the full panel description on the SXSW site.

HTML or PowerPoint, take your pick.

I was incredibly nervous for this presentation… it being my first at a conference. Once it started up, though, it felt just like any other presentation that I’ve given at work or school, and so I quickly got into the groove. Paul and Cameron helped enormously with pulling this all together in the day before the conference and overall I’m happy that I did it and I’m happy with the results. Learning more about how Nielsen Ratings works alone was worth the effort.

Anyway, I said I’d post these slides, and now I have.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

from the Salt Lick in Austin (when you finish one plate they bring you another)

PLEASE READ THROUGH ALL THE WAY! STYLES MAY BE EDITIED BENEATH THE HTML. —>

Originally uploaded by zoey.

Posted by Erik Benson from

Just testing out this “post to blog” feature at flickr…

Wouldn’t it be great to know who was best able to spot good ideas before anybody thought they were good ideas? It’s similar to the claims of having been an early fan of a band, author, or director, or having that idea that the other person ended up building and making a lot of money/fame off of. It’s closely tied with reputation—we instinctively admire people who we think can predict the future by knowing which parties to go to, which websites to build, which people to befriend, which jobs to take, which stocks to buy, etc.

I’m going to try to explain a picture I have in my head of a way to make some of this bet-generated reputation visible on the web. I’d rather talk about it figuratively rather than literally, for now, so here’s a metaphor: imagine that you’re watching an plant growing in time-lapse film, and it starts out a nice baby plant and slowly grows over the period of a couple years. Now, imagine a second plant next to the first orange. It’s a magic plant. The second plant is will attempt to mirror (predict) how the first plant will look several months in the future. So, the way that the second plant looks is its best-guess attempt to look like the first plant in the future. Okay, and just for fun, there’s a little electronic display next to the second plant which, after a couple months goes by, will tell you how well the second plant was able to predict the appearance of the first plant several months before.

The second plant has a lot of feedback to inform it in the present. Some of it is generated by the first plant: how does the first plant seem to be doing… are there any outside influences (wind, rain, animals) around that might have a long-term impact on its growth? How much stability does the environment have in general? What patterns can you find—does the plant act differently seasonally, etc? Finally, it has the electronic display to inform it on how accurate its own previous guesses were. It can learn to trust its instincts or generate new instincts if its natural instincts don’t seem to be working.

The electronic display is the second plant’s reputation. Now, imagine that there are a hundred magic plants like the second plant. Each one trying to predict how the first plant will be in a couple months, and each one receiving reputation based on its ability to create accurate predictions.

What will emerge from this ecosystem? Will certain magic plants emerge as better predictors? What can we learn from the good predictors to help improve the predictive powers of the other magic plants?

I can talk about it a little more literally, I guess. Because I’m getting confused. Think about a bet that has two choices:

1. Seattle will be sunny tomorrow.
2. Seattle will be rainy tomorrow.

Someone places their money on option 1. Another places their money on option 2. You can think of this bet as now having odds of 1:1. The next person puts their money on 1, and the odds become 2:1 that tomorrow will be sunny. Say that the next 10 people all put their money on option 1. The odds become 12:1 that tomorrow will be sunny. Finally, someone puts their money on option 2, and the final odds say that there’s a 12:2 chance, or 6:1, chance of it being sunny tomorrow.

Say that the opposite thing happened and that tomorrow comes and it is rainy. All 12 people that bet on sunny lose 100% of their money. The first person to bet on rainy gets the same amount of money back as they put in because the odds were relatively flat when they bet. The last person to bet on rainy, however, was going up against 12:1 odds and will receive 12 times as much money back for accurately betting on rainy when it seemed least likely that it would actually be rainy.

There’s some weird math going on with dividing by zero that I haven’t figured out yet, but the point is that people should get rewarded based on the perception of the group at the time of prediction rather than the odds at the time that the bet has resolved. You can then create an interesting moving graph that represents how the odds of a bet change over time as additional information is revealed. In the case with the weather prediction, we’re continuously getting more information about the weather, and as we get closer in time to tomorrow, it becomes easier to predict. The graph of how the odds change over time is a representation of how idea evolved over time as new information came in. Going back to the plant example, the variation in odds over time represents the information environment of the idea, like the soil and the rain and the sun that impacted the plant over time.

Why don’t we create a website that lets you place bets on ideas with your reputation? Depending on when you place your bet, and for which side, you can gain or lose reputation. Then, by seeing who is able to maintain a high reputation over time you can see who’s the best idea spotters out there, and begin to trust them more… if the bets are public then you may see that when Person X (who has a high reputation) bets a certain way that they tend to have an impact on the odds that bets carry. Seems like a very interesting application to me.

Just got back from SXSW. I could spend all night updating orkut, friendster, flickr, my blogroll, my rss aggregator, and my buddy list. Or I could spend it telling you about all the new ideas I’m trying to absorb, reorganize, and summarize for immediate application in work, home, and play. But I won’t do either yet because my stomach feels all weird.

(A couple hours later…) Just took K to the airport for her month long trip to New York City (she’s looking for gallery representation). Big final project in Java class is due tomorrow (it’s a game), and we’ve also got a final. After that, I imagine a time of zen-like calmness to wrap itself around my head like a bandage. Now, I just see cobwebs on fire when I close my eyes.

My favorite panel of the conference was Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. Lots of great discussion not only about group forming, but general processes that can be used to design and launch stuff on the web quickly and smartly. Tantek and Joi are both brilliant.

The new big thing at the conference this year by a long shot: camera phones.

More later.

I am here.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Everyone should go on a tour of their friends’ houses and live in each of them for a half-week at a time. Maybe it’s me but it’s slightly overwhelming and intoxicating to participate in people’s spaces like that… especially people that you know well and like. Most of the time we interact with our friend’s personas (no matter how close), but sometimes you can see the people below the personas (even if you really like the persona) and it’s even better. This, so far, seems like a good way to get there. I think that there’s some cut-off point though where the personas adapt to the new situation and living in the same place no longer works that way. Half a week is perfect.

Another thing I’ve noticed by travelling around to friends’ houses is that almost nothing I value is in my house. The familiar bed is nice (as opposed to hardwood floors and tiny couches) but not crucial or even that strongly preferred. Other than that, though, everything inanimate that I value is accessible from my PowerBook, cell phone, or iPod.

We are coming into the age of high-tech mobile bums, and I am their leader.