Sep 2003, 14 entries

I regret to inform you that my morale has been inaccurately reported within the past 24 hours or so… believe it or not, I am not edified by the fact that robot soldiers, manufactured to kill enemy troops, have been designed for the Pentagon. I’ve since turned the + into a — and now my morale is going to spend a few days slightly overcompensating for its own oversight. Apologies from the people who oversee Erik’s morale.

In other news there’s a rumor that Google is going to buy Friendster. Man! I know everyone thinks social software is over-hyped and that Friendster sucks, but I’m in that camp of two or three people who still think it’s under-hyped. And it’s closer than you all think, I swear!

I report the rumor with a - in the morale-o-meter because it makes me so mad (with jealousy) to see other people thinking about (and building, with whole teams of people even! and wads of dough even!) the things I know know know will be big big big so soon soon soon. My own measly contribution to the space (which I haven’t yet seen fully implemented by someone else but which I expect to see any month now) sits idly on my server, collecting spare 60-minute slices of my time here and there. I’m too embarrassed about it to even send out my first cursory hello to the mailing list I created for it. It’s all vanity on my part, I guess… I just want to say, yes, I too think these things are on the right track, and I too have an idea that might contribute to the track, and the idea was not completely built without me. And maybe I know how to make money too. Strange, I can’t tell if I’m being pathetic or falsely modest or overly presumptuous. Two out of those three, most likely.

Ever think about the transportation of information in our world? Do societies have structures in place similar to the nervous system in our body? Say you’re walking down he street and you get brushed on your shoulder from behind. How long does it take for the message to travel to your head? Given the circumstances, how long does it take for your brain to tell your head to look behind you? How long does it take for your eyes to tell your brain that you were brushed by the side-view mirror of a bus that is pulling up right next to you and that might possibly knock you off your feet? How long before you jump out of the way? At which point did the information reach the threshold where all physical activity of your body was attentive to the current needs that were recently brought to your attention by your shoulder? With 9/11, how long did it take for 5% of the nation to know about it? How long before 50%? How long before 90%? 99%? 99.9%? How does that pattern compare with the information’s travel into the rest of the world. Do 99.9% of all people on the planet, even today, know about 9/11? How would the structure of the world have to change in order to allow messages of highest importance to reach 100% of the people in less than a day? Would our world be more efficient if that were possible? I would like to see some graphs: national coverage over the first minute, ten minutes, half hour, hour, and day, same with world coverage. And I want to compare them to other types of information that travels out: Ben & Jennifer’s supposed break-up, the Britney/Madonna kiss, etc. Thinking about the world like this sort of gives me the shivers, it feels dehumanizing to think of people as information receptors and transmitters… but I also strongly believe that some force is making us organize ourselves to behave that way. Is it an evil force or a good force or a neutral force, and can we control it?

I guess another thing I want to know about, out of curiosity, is how I relate to the patterns. Which segment of society was I in for each of these memes. Is it better for an individual to be close to the information, or far from it—both in terms of natural selection and in terms of quality of life. Sitting here… if something really really important were to happen, how would I be notified and how could that be used to reveal parts of the infrastructure around me? If aliens landed in Central Park, how would I find out? The TV’s not on, the stereo’s playing a CD, I’m logged into a secret IM account that only a couple other people know about. My newsreader’s open though, and so is my email client, so I’d probably find out within an hour (my news reader’s update schedule). Say I was on the way to work though… would someone pull over and tell me if terrorists had evaporated the Sound with their secret laser beam, or would I have to wait until I made it all the way to work… and once there, who would be assigned to tell me? Are we assigned to spread information when something important happens?

In other words, is there infrastructure in our social network that makes us feel obligated to call loved ones and post something to our weblog and turn on the news and post some more and IM close friends etc when we learn about certain kinds of information? What kinds of information trigger what kinds of flags in us—I guess I don’t have to look any further than my morale-o-meter to see what types of information I’m sensitized to transmit. On a smaller scale than national crisis, does this same principle hold true? Are low-threshold links an innovation designed to help us with these smaller scale bits of information? When I read a rumor about Google and Friendster, or when a friend gets married or breaks up, is it my own choice to pass this on or is there pressure from our social network that obliges us to pass this information on? How much of our day-to-day routine is specifically designed to pass information on (no matter how trivial) to different people at different levels of urgency depending on the information’s decreed importance?

What interests me is that this structure exists at all. It would seem almost impossible to create such a structure and then make everyone adhere to it… and yet it exists under the surface without us noticing it. If it didn’t exist, how would we create it—through software, operating systems, advertising, government lies, and peer pressure? We stray from the structure fairly liberally, but the point is that we constantly strive to adhere… as if it were natural. We make up excuses on its behalf, we reward peers that excel at their assignments and give us good information, we promote, buy, and listen to those who do a good job. These invisible social structures that influence individual and group behavior, not quite laws, not quite conscious decisions, what are they?

I guess another related question is what exactly the structures are optimizing for. Is it all based on survival, is the structure ingrained in us due to natural selection on both individual and group levels? We pass information along according to this structure because it helps us survive and it helps our group survive (which also helps us survive). We can’t take our own success and survivability and popularity lightly, because the lack of success, life, and popularity is its own punishment.

The structure seems to be optimizing for increased organization. Hence… everything basically. And I come around to the point (the long way)... if information transportation in our societies resembles information transportation in our individual bodies (which I guess I glossed over in my excitement… pretend you believe that assumption), when will our societies begin exhibiting more advanced characteristics of individuals? When will the group turn into an individual? Is that even a phenomenon within the realm of possibility? It seems like our universe is build up out of systems that once worked as individuals (strings, atoms, cells, etc) and eventually began cooperating to the extent that the individuals became so dependent on the group that they could not exist without it. How long could we last without grocery stores, city planners, police forces, etc? We can still get by fairly easily, if uncomfortably. But there may be a point (entirely within our current predictable future path) where we can’t. We will make systems of information, food, etc, so efficient that they rely entirely on the group to provide them to the individuals… some parts of the group (organs) will provide necessary functions for the group so efficiently that the rest of the group can effectively stop trying to provide those necessary functions (and eventually forget about how to provide them even in a crisis), and instead try to find their own valuable contributions for the group so that they can justify their own existence. The struggle to survive in an increasingly segmented and efficient environment alone may be enough to propel us to this end.

But our imaginations aren’t good at imagining this transition (at least mine isn’t) from individual cells into organs within a larger individual. We rebel against losing focus on the individual and would rather die than allow the group to become an individual on the next level up. It requires us to cross our eyes for a second. It’s almost like it requires some unpardonable sin against the individual to be committed… it has to be done subconsciously, when nobody is looking. We fall asleep one night as individuals and wake up as cells in an organism that has an agenda completely its own the next morning.

And I guess I (sub?)consciously want to be in the organ (be it Friendster + Google or some other company/government/friend-circle) that is as much a part of the cognitive awareness of this new idiotic beast as possible. Is that really what this is all about? All this pressure to be involved and contribute and be deemed worthy? Let me in? Please?

I usually don’t broadcast the fact that I’m a Christian because the namespace is so messy. Normally, when a namespace is messy, you can easy correct it suffixing it with an appropriate contradiction like: I work in a cubicle but get to wear shorts and sandals whenever I want, or I have two kids and a dog and live in the suburbs but go to Dean rallies, or… you know. The Christian namespace is so messy, however, that all of the qualified subsections of the namespace have also been corrupted. I don’t want to be associated with Christians, in general, or with people who claim to be Christians but don’t want to be associated with them. Not only are all camps guilty of the same kinds of hypocrisy, stupidity, and evil, but they’ve also been around for long enough that all of camps (including the atheist camp) have established strong opinions about all of other camps, so you can’t say that you belong to a camp without being immediately stereotyped. There’s not a safe inch of space in the Christian namespace. And so I don’t define myself in that regard at all, I avoid the question, I remain silent on the topic, safe on no ground, surviving by merely skirting around any part of the namespace that tries to attach to me. And in that way I’m like Peter, they would say, so that’s why this entry was a bad idea. To even mention the problem in the namespace is to assign you to a part of it.

A list of lists out of context:

Count free aliases for a given contact, implement feedback for any given alias, implement the turning off of aliases in the brain after they’re used, allow purchase of permanent aliases, launch.

Firebird, Thunderbird, and the Holy FeedDemon.

Sewer, telephone, power, credit, radio, social, professional, postal, genealogical, airport, railroad, interstate, file-sharing, circulatory, nervous, intergalactic, molecular, client/server.

Yes, yes, yes.

Find me and talk to me in person (immediate response, though it may take you a while to find me).

Call my cellphone (immediate response, unless I’m incapacitated).

Email me (response-time unpredictable: between 1 minute and 1 week).

IM me (immediate response, if I’m logged in).

Comment on an entry in my weblog (read within an hour, possible response).

Write an entry in your blog and link to me (read within a couple hours, through referrers).

Write an entry in your blog (read within a couple hours if I’m subscribed to your feed).

A couple times this week I came home from work completely exhausted and ended up falling asleep around 10pm on the couch, silly sci-fi novel (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) dangling from my fingertips. It’s not because work is exhausting. I think I’m exhausting myself by self-imposed deadlines for personal projects outside of work and perhaps taking on too many projects at once. Only last week I wrote an entry about how I didn’t feel like I was taking on too many projects, but somehow knew in the back of my mind not to trust my feelings and never posted the entry. It’s a downward spiral, because I work myself in order to try to get over the impression that I’m taking on a lot of projects but not finishing them. By delaying them even further due to being tired I feel like I’m only proving my suspicions right, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe I’m not as good at working on lots of things at once as I have led myself to believe.

Here’s a quick list of projects, as much to jog my own memory as to offer for your own: moblogging site (25% done), double blind email system (25% done), hellomachine (25% done… still!), political site (15% done), man versus himself self-promotion and self-parody (40% done), new novel (still in planning), learning lojban (still reading “what is lojban” book). Soon I’ll be taking up learning how to develop applications in Cocoa on OS X (my new 15” powerbook is on its way as we speak). In the meantime I’ve lapsed in my gym-membership usage, have upped my evening activities with friends, and have brand new cavities (despite my fervent sonicare usage). I need to reign myself in, get my house in order, etc… but what to dust off and what to throw out?

A while ago I gave myself a November 4th deadline for figuring out my next 5 year plan. I have some good leads, here are some keywords in my mind: to be and not to be, building increasingly complex creative objects, focus on no context. Will my 5 year plan help establish a direction that will make obvious which projects are worth doing and which aren’t? Oi.

Anyone that’s been reading this blog for a while recognizes this pattern. I could go dig up the identical entries (with different project names and timestamps) from the last 4 years (have I really been writing this same old nonsense that long?). Each time there’s this hope that I might find the way out of repeating history the next time, since I know this history so well, but I think the two steps forward, two steps back rhythm is a more permanent pattern than that (though I don’t think it’s healthy to admit that, it’s a little like giving up). Each time I walk back and forth between doing nothing and doing everything I just reinforce the groove in the carpet. Maybe I’m not a changing thing, but a static thing that shakes a bit. Getting lost in boring thoughts, what a drag.

I want to talk about loyalty sometime soon. Is loyalty a good thing? Because I have none of it: not to my friends, family, company, country, religion, species, or universe. I think loyalty is just group-imposed lock-in designed to increase perceived exit costs… but loyalty has no value to the individual beyond protecting them from their own bad decisions. If you trust your decision making, loyalty shouldn’t be a part of the equation, should it? I know, random. I bet the group will come kill me now.

One more thing. Nah, nevermind.

Recently converted a couple friends at work to the world of weblogs: Andrej Gregov (my boss) and Jana Kleitsch (our designer). I’m a big fan of the weblogs of Ben Compton (software developer) and Joe Goldberg (web developer) as well. Joe was on TV yesterday for bringing together Doonesbury, flashmobs, Howard Dean, blogging, and an enthusiastic track coach outfit in one brilliant event. Check out all the people on my co-workers list… it’s starting to grow. I’m even the number two result on Google for co-workers in general—I’m therefore an authority on the topic.

I’m pretty bad at conversations unless the interface is clear. I’m not good at defining or building a conversation interface with a new person, and I think that’s the main reason why I consider myself an introvert. A conversation interface, like any other interface, in case it wasn’t obvious, is the visible set of options presented at any given point in the verbal (or visual) interaction between two people. For example, if I walk up to a friend, I can easily launch directly into any number of topics, but each one of those topics was most likely established via conversation contract at an earlier date. With a new person, we all know how dull that interface can be: where do you work, where did you grow up, when did you move here, are you married/dating/single, etc.

Extroverts are creative conversation interface builders. They can take something like “where you grew up” and develop that interface to reveal information that is novel and interesting. They can leap across inadequacies in the interface without hesitating: for example they could jump from “where you grew up” to “youth stories” to “personal philosophies on ideal communities” to “intimate details of unique personal relationships” without getting bogged down by the fact that the interface discourages easy access to the “intimate details stories” unless you’re trusted. So how do some people use the interface more successfully than others?

I suspect there are some meta-interface properties that they’re setting early… for example, good conversationalists usually indicate fairly early on that they are requesting permission to jump wildly from topic to topic. You grant that permission on a jump that is fairly trivial: going from “tales of taking care of ill grandparent” to “new technology advancements in cryogenics and other pursuits of immortality”. Permission granted. But then the jumps become more personal: yesterday a friend of mine, in a conversation with someone he had just met (they were talking about whether or not there was a person for everyone), asked her “have you ever dated anyone that was uncircumcised?” Of course, that’s pushing the conversation interface’s flexibility quite a bit, but because the rest of the table acknowledged the risk of that question, new person didn’t feel too embarrassed to reply. My friend therefore established a fairly solid contract for the rest of the night: he could ask any question, in fact, because we seemed to delight in his creative conversation, we almost expected the jumps to become wider and wider.

The conversation interface persists over time, of course. Permission that is granted between people in one sitting is still granted at another sitting (even if it’s separated by years). That’s why it’s so easy to talk with friends even if you haven’t seen them in a long time.

The best conversationalists can work the interface in such a way as to make it appear as if the other person was the one requesting permissions for wider jump access and personal topics. I’m so poor at it that I’m pretty sensitive to when certain people are making it appear as if I were a good conversationalist myself. I suppose it happens with leading questions that are very easy for me to turn around… and it just happens that those turned-around questions are linked to key permissions. For example, an innocent question about family might not bring up any new information from me, but when I turn it around they may bring up a unique family situation that involves death of a loved one or proximity to fame or other relationship drama. Suddenly it appears that I’ve been given access to a valuable topic even though I wouldn’t have known to ask in the first place. Some people can use this correctly, but of course there are others that use leading questions to constantly lead conversation back to themselves, which is something that can close conversation interfaces down. If the balance of permissions being granted is lop-sided, it’s the responsibility (or rather, the interface encourages) that some work be done to even the balance.

I wonder if I could map actual conversation interfaces between me and people I know. For example, I definitely know the short list of topics that are available with any number of my friends. If I want to talk about the new powerbooks (coming out this tuesday! really!) I know there are certain people who have given explicit permission to discuss that topic, and others (like K) who have expressly forbidden that topic (actually, she allows it, but follows up with much chiding and humiliation on my part, which discourages me from bringing it up). On the other hand, if I want to talk about cats, I have a fairly good idea of the interface that that topic provides with several people: with some it produces more cat stories, with others it turns into meta-cat conversations, with others it becomes general pet/baby stories, and with others it’s not available at all. I can imagine a couple different maps: one organized by person, another organized by topic, that would give an outsider a fairly good understanding of my conversation interface and the interface I see in my relationships with other people.

I know you saw this from a million miles away, but what if this could be captured in software? Either as part of an email or IM client, or as a way to group people with similar interfaces regarding similar topics? How important is the person behind the interface, in other words. The only reason I don’t talk to strangers about some of the things that I talk to friends about is because the interface hasn’t been established… but if we explicitly accepted incoming conversations through a public conversation interface, we wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of being introduced, meeting at a bar, testing the breadth and depth of allowed conversation jumps, establishing permissions contracts, etc, before we could talk about, say, “the purpose of life” or something else that is sensitive and generally requires a lot of trust on both sides.

This weblog, for instance, offers me a much broader conversation interface than I have with any actual person. The things I talk about here I do not have permission to talk about anywhere else. That’s perhaps the essence of the power of weblogs… I get to invent an ideal conversationalist with whom I can talk and anyone can opt in to listen in on the conversation, even contributing according to the established open permissions. It makes me think that my hunch is correct: the people behind the conversation interface are important, but not as important as the interface itself. I know, any statement that claims the universe isn’t people-centric is shunned by the community (I can feel it even now), but that’s my hunch. Sometimes, relationships aren’t about people but rather about the quality of the interface between them. Because the interface can be transferred between people if they converse in groups. It’s easier to transfer an interface to a group of people from an individual that you’ve worked to establish it with than to build each one from scratch.

Which explains why it is easier and oftentimes more successful to meet new friends when you’re with a core group of friends already.

So many different ways of looking at this and finding new interesting connections.

An extraordinary and horrifying dream last night. The world was being taken over by machines, and we (humans) were in a hurry to save ourselves. We only had one spaceship and one friendly machine. But there were so many of us on the planet that wanted saving… not all of us could fit on the ship (though it was pretty large). We opted for the disgusting: to rig up an automated circulatory system with our friendly machine, chop off all of our heads, and attach our heads to the machine. We could then fit more on the ship.

Next scene, spaceship floating away from our solar system, myself a single head on a shelf with millions of other heads, all receiving blood from the same source, our friendly machine. I remember being worried about what had happened to the guy who had to chop off all of our heads. Was he back on earth, horrified by his own deeds, unable to chop his own head off, awaiting the attack of the machines? That’s a situation he probably hadn’t expected to be in in his lifetime.

This morning, I thought of the last line to this book (if I were to write it). “3 days out, power went out on the ship.” A tragedy.

I now have a review and a listmania list on my book’s detail page… both by me. Other strange observations: I like how I’m in the Espionage/Thriller category. My sales rank has been at a static 2,236,899 (pretty good huh?) ever since appearing on the site—even though I know at least one person (me) has bought the book. Sales rank should swing wildly during these first few purchases… maybe it’s broken. Somebody should fix it.

How about this: creativity times reach divided by bullshit.

I just tried to “share the love” at Amazon… it’s a feature that lets you give a discount to your friends on things that you’ve bought. Honestly, I was just trying to give a quiet notice out to friends who might want a discount on my book... but in the process I discovered a bug on Amazon and it ended up spamming everyone with like 10 emails. Beautiful.

Quickly, before I forget. Truth is nothing but a statement that can be validated in a dictionary. It always comes down to semantics. This is that. “Name” is the thing it’s naming. A dog is (point to a dog). Combine reputation rank with a personalized dictionary, and a non-ambiguous language, and you can ask it statements and get back truth probabilities. Each person has their own dictionary to determine truth. Can this be written in software? More later, gotta catch a movie.

I realized today that I’m in the business of fortune-telling. In the world of ecommerce and software development, we call it personalization, but it really is fortune-telling.

The goal of personalization is to get to know you so well that all it takes is a complex algorithm to predict what you will do (usually buy) next. We are trying to outspeed the computation power of your brain and the universe itself. The strange thing is that it sort of works. Why does it work?

The art of predicting the future is really not much more than the application of frequency probability: that you can predict future events by measuring past events… those things that happened most frequently in the past are most likely to happen again. If you buy a bunch of items, we’ll look at each of those items and find what items people often bought in addition to the items you bought. Add them up, filter out things you’ve already bought, and show you the ones that were bought most frequently in addition to the things you’ve bought. We call these Recommendations (and, incidentally, just so you know I’m not giving away company secrets, all of this and more is explained in a paper published by coworkers: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering).

In a sense, by ignoring motivations (we don’t know why you’ve bought any of the things you’ve bought), we allow the complexity of motivations to automatically be inherited by the algorithm. If we didn’t look at what you bought, but instead asked you why you bought things (because you saw this item on TV, you were told by 5 friends to buy this CD, etc) we would be much worse at predicting the future because we would be forced to trust information that was probably more accurate, but less complete. We might not have asked for 50% of the reasons why you really bought that item… you may not even know all of the reasons. Precise but incomplete data is almost worse than no data at all. It’s better to instead look for ambiguous data that represents action at a level above complex motivations. We don’t care why you bought something, because whatever the reason was, some or all of that reason may apply to another person and they may end up doing the same thing that you did if they’ve done things similar to you before.

The tension between ambiguity and precision has a lot of repurcussions in law, in insurance, and in religion. They divide the letter and the spirit of the law, the grace and faith of the law. They determine coverage plans. Ambiguity allows you to make predictions about a group (with a fairly large chance of being wrong for a fairly large percentage of the group), and yet to make a good general, product manager, or day-trader. However, only with precision can you get to the bottom of the individual’s guilt or innocence and make a good judge, people manager, or friend. I guess this is really just another riff on the bits and ideas post.

Still, the part about telling the future. Maybe we can tell the future for groups, in probabilities, using frequency probability or better yet Bayesian probability. I still have reservations about probability of any kind, however, despite this proof in front of me that personalization is a proven model of predicting the future that works better than random or otherwise-motivated targetting.

Just for fun, here’s a fun problem with probability, borrowed from wikipedia. What are the chances that the sun will come up tomorrow: