How can our societies be stabilized in a crisis? Why can we enjoy and understand Shakespeare? Why are fruitflies uniform? How do omnivorous eating habits aid our survival? What makes the Mona Lisa ‘s smile beautiful? How do women keep our social structures intact? Could there possibly be a single answer to all these questions? This book shows that the statement: “weak links stabilize complex systems” provides the key to understanding each of these intriguing puzzles, and many others too. The author (recipient of several distinguished science communication prizes) uses weak (low affinity, low probability) interactions as a thread to introduce a vast variety of networks from proteins to economics and ecosystems. Many people, from Nobel Laureates to high-school students have helped to make the book understandable to all interested readers. This unique book and the ideas it develops will have a significant impact on many, seemingly diverse, fields of study. Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: This book argues that weak links (rather than strong links) are the key to stability of complex networks. This has important implications for social design. Weak Links books.google.com – How can our societies be stabilized in a crisis? Why can we enjoy and understand Shakespeare? Why are fruitflies uniform? How do omnivorous eating habits aid our survival? What make…

#attentioneconomy Jonathan Zittrain originally shared this post: Harvard Library to faculty: we’re going broke unless you go open access Henry sez, “Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council is telling faculty that it’s financially ‘untenable’ for the university to keep on paying extortionate access fees for academic journals. It’s suggesting that faculty make their research publicly available, switch to publishing in open access journals and consider resigning from the boards of journals that don’t allow open access.” Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amou…

Bumping an old thread I should have contributed to earlier. Pasting my comment below. The original post and discussion are worth the read. h/t +Alex Schleber. __ I agree with almost everything that +Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu says. I think he nails both of the critical pins that support #dinomedia . They are, in order of mention: 1) economic rights over properties 2) The Law which enforces those rights. I think both the legal framework and the rights over property that they enforce are obsolete in the digital age; they are a legacy issue, a vestigal organ, a parasite from a paradigm past. The sooner we realize that it is in all of our best interest to systematically dismantle the old system and replace it with a unified organizational model that respects the digital paradigm, the sooner these growing pains will end. It is in the interest of both consumers and producers that property rights be abolished, and that content be shared freely without the pretense of ownership or contract. But these assumptions are fundamntal to the infrastructure of the existing system, and indeed are fundamental to our very conception of governance in a just society, and most people don’t understand how it could be otherwise. Resolving these anomalies will require a fundamental reworking of the basic infrastructure of social and economic organization; the problem is that no one in a position to do anything about it has any real incentive to engage in such fundamental political theory, despite the growing cries for change. It’s a sure sign that revolution is at hand. We are well over a year into a global popular revolution, and its only growing stronger. Frankly, it’s about damn time. I don’t think +Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu would disagree with too much of this, but he is waiting […]

Fascinating work on the consequences of social exclusion. #digitalvalues Ward Plunet originally shared this post: Ego Depletion – Will Power – and Friendships Social rejection and depletion of will power. If you will self-regulate and not be selfish then you get to stay and enjoy the rewards of having a circle of friends and society as a whole, but if you break that bargain society will break its promise and reject you. Your friend groups will stop inviting you to parties, unfollow you on Twitter. If you are too selfish in your larger social group, it might reject you by sending you to jail or worse. The researchers in the “no one chose you” study proposed that since self-regulation is required to be prosocial, you expect some sort of reward for regulating your behavior. People in the unwanted group felt the sting of ostracism, and that reframed their self-regulation as being wasteful. It was as if they thought, “Why play by the rules if no one cares?” It poked a hole in their willpower fuel tanks, and when they sat in front of the cookies they couldn’t control their impulses as well as the others. Other studies show when you feel ostracized and unwanted, you can’t solve puzzles as well, you become less likely to cooperate, less motivated to work, more likely to drink and smoke and do other self-destructive things. Rejection obliterates self control, and thus it seems it’s one of the many avenues toward a state of ego depletion. Ego Depletion The Misconception: Willpower is just a metaphor. The Truth: Willpower is a finite resource. In 2005, a team of psychologists made a group of college students feel like scum. The researchers invited……

I was really digging on the +Jason Silva videos that were going around, but the video linked in the post below rubbed me the wrong way. I started aruing against it in +James Pearn‘s thread below, and let out a rant against the singularity view. Pasting it here for posterity. Comments in either thread are welcome. __ Computation isn’t “based on” matter. There’s nothing mysterious about the process. The singularity crowd is fundamentally a scientifically oriented crowd, but this mystical obsession with consciousness is so completely counterproductive to any genuinely scientific aims that it discredits the whole approach. We already have experienced an unprecedented explosion of intelligent machines, and the abundance of these devices have already broken our world in profoundly unexpected and nightmarish ways, far outstripping our capacity to keep up and understand them, much less control them. Yet the singularity theorists worry about the possibility of artificial entities that far outstrip the power and dynamic complexity of a single human brain. The very idea is so absurd I can hardly contain myself. We’ve known that artificial entities that are more powerful than any human being already exist, and moreover we know that they currently they have control of our lives and our governments, and they are literally destroying the planet. They are called corporations, and they are currently the most powerful, intelligent, cunning, sophisticated, and adaptively successful entities that have ever existed in the history of this planet. They are artificial entities, and they comprise the intelligence of at times thousands of brains and possibly millions of CPUs, all acting in tandem for unified goals of maximizing profits in a hostile environment. Corporations are artificial intelligences, made of swarms of biomechanical systems operating in unison for inhumane ends. Oh oh, you don’t mean that kind of AI, right? […]

The tree-of-life notion remains a reasonable fit for the eukaryotes, but emerging knowledge about bacteria suggests that the micro-biosphere is much more like a web, with information of all kinds, including genes, traveling in all directions simultaneously. Microbes also appear to take a much more active role in their own evolution than the so-called “higher” animals. This flies in the face of the more radical versions of Darwinism, which posit that the environment, and nothing else, selects genes, and that there is no intelligence, divine or otherwise, behind evolution — especially not in the form of organisms themselves making intentional changes to their heritable scaffolding. To suggest that organisms as primitive as bacteria are capable of controlling their own evolution is obviously silly. Isn’t it? John Verdon originally shared this post: Bacteria Facts to Interest & Surprise You – Miller-McCune Research shows that bacteria have astonishing powers to engineer the environment, to communicate and to affect human well-being.

The second distinction between Happiton and reality is this. In Happiton, for fifteen minutes a day to make a noticeable dent, it would have had to be donated by all 20,000 citizens, adults and children. Obviously I do not think that is realistic in our country. The fifteen minutes a day per person that I would like to see spent by real people in this country is limited to adults (or at least people of high-school age), and I don’t even include most adults in this. I cannot realistically hope that everyone will be motivated to become politically active. Perhaps a highly active minority of five percent would be enough. It is amazing how visible and influential an articulate and vocal minority of,that size can be! So, being realistic, I limit ’my desires to an average of fifteen minutes of activity per day for five percent of the adult American population. I sincerely believe that with about this much work, a kind of turning point would be reached – and that at 30 minutes or 60 minutes per day (exactly as in Happiton), truly significant changes in the national mood (and hence in the global danger level) could be effected. I think I have explained what Happiton was written for. Trigger activity it may not. I’m growing a little more realistic, and I don’t expect much of anything. But I would like to understand human nature. better, to understand what it is that makes us so much like stupid gnats dully buzzing above a freeway, unable to see the onrushing truck, 100 yards down the road, against whose windshield we are about to be smashed. Alexander Kruel originally shared this post: THE TALE OF HAPPITON By Douglas Hofstadter, June, 1983 Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival 3 essays exploring cooperation, game […]

eft a comment in the +Jennifer Ouellette‘s thread objecting to the thesis of this article, quoting my comment below: _______ I’m going to have to object pretty strongly to this article. The spirit is in the right place, but the lesson it draws is completely mistaken. There is no tyranny of the majority except as it expressed itself through the centralized authoritarian institutions that levy top-down control over the supposedly consenting masses. The article jumps from the clear fact that the majority is sometimes wrong to the mistaken conclusion that we have something to fear from the majority, or that the prevailing opinion is suspicious. This is an incredibly dangerous leap in logic, and should be examined a bit more carefully. Just for instance, the prevailing opinions of scientists is usually a pretty reliable guide to the truth. It doesn’t give you certainty, but the stronger the majority consensus, the more reliable we can take the conclusions to be. In fact, we take majority consensus to be one of the most impotant thresholds for the acceptance of a scientific theory there is. A mistaken scientific paradigm might be frustratingly difficult to overturn, but this stability is part of what makes scientific consensus such a strongly reliable indicator of the truth. In other words, there is no tyranny of the majority in science; in fact, it is an case where we all expect the majority to rule, even when we grant that the majority can be mistaken. A mistaken majority is only a problem when they wield the kind of power that we usually only grant to institutional bureaucracies like a state. Democratic states are designed to slow down the zeal of the majority to ensure justice and respect of equal rights. For instance, I don’t think so, but you might […]

John Verdon originally shared this post: This is a great book and a perfect complement to ‘Reinventing Discovery’. Weinberger explores the concept of knowledge as it became defined in practice within the age of the limited resources of ‘paper’. How paper required intense processes and structures of filtering in order to fit what was known or posited into the limited space of paper texts. This gave us a powerful illusion that the world was ‘knowable’. Science published primarily results that were confirming hypotheses – and the vast experiments and efforts that resulted in ‘negative’ results had no room in the finite space. Despite the fact that a great deal of utility could be derived from being able to look at results that were less successful in confirming hypotheses. Weinberger explodes the epistemic fiction of the data-information-knowledge pyramid for what it is – a fiction arising from the economic framework that would have knowledge endorse a control hierarchy. What the Internet now enables is the disclosing of everything – positive and negative. This reveals the tremendously ‘contested’ nature of all knowledge – reveals the larger unknowability of the world/universe. What science is – is not certain knowledge, but rather a paradox of both more robust theories and an even vaster horizon of unknowns. No matter how much we know – the horizon of the unknowns recedes faster to vaster spaces. I highly recommend this book – for anyone interested in knowledge and the digital environment. Amazon.com: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (9780465021420): David Weinberger: Books Amazon.com: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is […]

I wrote a long comment in response to +Carl Henning Reschke‘s very insightful questions in the thread linked below. In a few days, I’ll be posting the next in my #attentioneconomy series, and people have already spoken up having difficulty following it. Perhaps the comment below will orient the discussion a bit better; the table below may help. You can find links to the attention economy series to date at the end of this post. I’m worried that the table makes me look crazy. I asked my peers, and they agreed. I’m posting it anyway. Nyah. _______ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/E6QgsCCiN9C +Carl Henning Reschke You are asking some very deep and insightful questions. I’ve got my work cut out for me. =) The most important thing I want to say, if I haven’t been clear, is that the flow of attention is a self-organized phenomenon, with each individual acting autonomously to direct their attention according to their own interests and motivations. So the attention economy would actually realize many of the virtues of a laissez-faire model; in fact, I will argue that the dynamics of attention flows are a better model of “pure competition” than capitalist markets. My next post in the series will carefully distinguish between decentralization and self-organization. Part of the problem with laissez-faire economics in Enlightenment frameworks is that they conflate the two. Although money economies are usually decentralized (and capitalists tend to argue against centralization in the form of state regulations), they are usually not self-organized, and capitalists tend to resist self-organization in the form of labor movements and the like, preferring instead to maintain top-down control of the markets and resources. This has nothing to do wih human greed or goodness, this is the way the infrastructure works: money tends to accumulate in a few to the detriment […]