Cognitive Democracy “This points, we think, to a very clear constructive agenda. To exaggerate a little, it is to see how far the Internet enables modern democracies to make as much use of their citizens’ minds as did Ober’s Athens. We want to learn from existing online ventures in collective cognition and decision-making. We want to treat these ventures are, more or less, spontaneous experiments10, and compare the success and failures (including partial successes and failures) to learn about institutional mechanisms which work well at harnessing the cognitive diversity of large numbers of people who do not know each other well (or at all), and meet under conditions of relative equality, not hierarchy. If this succeeds, what we learn from this will provide the basis for experimenting with the re-design of democratic institutions themselves.” ______ This is absolutely wonderful. Via +Michael Chui Xavier Marquez originally shared this post: Cosma Shalizi and +Henry Farrell make an epistemic argument for democracy (vis a vis markets and hierarchies). I suspect at this level of generality the question is a bit too abstract – the more interesting questions remain below this level, concerning the scope of each mechanism and the mediation of conflicts at the edges between markets, participatory discussion fora, and hierarchies. Nevertheless, a very interesting piece. Cognitive Democracy But the economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by those of its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of…

vis +James Wood. Pasting his comment below: “An effect of the constant advances in technology is a complete restructuring of the way we think about the division of labor and citizens’ roles in a future society. As our lives become ever more digitalized, we realize many real concerns–namely the fear that a handful of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful individuals will take over the world, leaving the rest of us to fight over the few “real” jobs remaining. However, in an #attentioneconomy , such disparity can not exist. First of all, the Internet in future forms can reach the point that it itself functions as an economy–one of attention and attenders. Imagine that machines have evolved to the point at which manual human labor is truly obsolete; they become in a way our “digital” infrastructure. then whatever frontier remains unconquered will become the platform for our human interaction (the Internet). This network will still be just as competitive as any free market system to date, only it will be wholly self-organized, meaning that the behavior of the network as a whole will be more or less equally influenced by each individual node. The main obstruction to this practically in the future is that in this vast digital infrastructure, you might ask, who controls that? Who owns it? Who makes sure it is functioning properly? If a few people do own it, then wouldn’t the very phenomenon we are trying to avoid still happen in an attention economy (other-organized network)? The answer is that no one owns the infrastructure (or anything). The infrastructure will become advanced enough that it becomes essentially self-improving, self-organizing, self-replicating, etc. The technology will become intelligent, or I daresay, alive (oooh). It will become integrated into our very consciousness–it will become us, or rather extensions of us. […]

Matt Uebel originally shared this post: “How is it possible to have any informed democratic debate over a policy about which the U.S. media relentlessly propagandizes this way? If drone strikes kill nobody other than “militants,” then very few people will even think about opposing them (and that’s independent of the fact that the word “militant” is a wildly ambiguous term — militant about what? — though it is clearly designed (when combined with “Pakistan”) to evoke images of those who attacked the World Trade Center). Debate-suppression is not just the effect but the intent of this propaganda: like all propaganda, it is designed to deceive the citizenry in order to compel acquiescence to government conduct.” Deliberate media propaganda The media now knows that “militant” is a term of official propaganda, yet still use it for America’s drone victims

The hybrid ideal Today it is clear that the independence of social value and commercial revenue creation is a myth. In reality, the vectors of social value and commercial revenue creation can reinforce and undermine each other. The social consequences of the recent financial crisis demonstrated with great clarity the danger of “negative externalities”—social costs resulting from corporate profit-seeking activities. But in some cases, “positive externalities” may also exist. It is this possibility that integrated hybrid models seek to exploit. When we talk to entrepreneurs and students about hybrid organizations, a common theme that emerges is what we call the “hybrid ideal.” This hypothetical organization is fully integrated—everything it does produces both social value and commercial revenue.4 This vision has at least two powerful features. In the hybrid ideal, managers do not face a choice between mission and profit, because these aims are integrated in the same strategy. More important, the integration of social and commercial value creation enables a virtuous cycle of profit and reinvestment in the social mission that builds large-scale solutions to social problems. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/in_search_of_the_hybrid_ideal via +Gregory Esau _______________ It is wonderful to see so many people waking up simultaneously to the same basic unified frameworks. People are catching on to it from so many diverse perspective it is very humbling. The overlap and diversity of perspectives is interesting for many reasons. “The Hybrid Ideal”, for instance, is a very clearly transhumanist value, but I imagine that the number of people involved in producing or sharing this content that explicitly recognize it as such is vanishingly small. I personally get this content through the small-but-growing network of businessmen and entrepreneurship whose interesting organizational strategies have been filling my stream. This amuses me somewhat, because I’m an anarchist looking to seize the means of production, yet somehow we’ve […]

Spreading good memes is good. CogSai originally shared this post: Which are deadlier: sharks or horses? Find out now on the debut of +CogSai! Easy share link: http://bit.ly/cogsai1 Cognitive science is a combo of psych, AI, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthro, sociology, and lots more. CogSai includes short illustrated explanations, live interviews with researchers, and group discussions. Coming soon: LIVE interview with a scientist researching how analytical and heuristic thinking compete in the brain. Subscribe & follow to participate live! Go to cogsai.com/q to contribute your questions on this episode & suggestions for future episodes. See you there. 🙂 – +Sai

The Networked Paradigm volume one Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/aSUDwAggmgz This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: “On a more general basis, our results highlight that the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years.” Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not […]

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: On a more general basis, our results highlight that *the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web*. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years. Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not only surprising but fundamentally revolutionary for […]

TECHNICS ? originally shared this post: Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane. This quasicrystal is full of emergent patterns, but it can be described in a simple way. Each frame of the animation is a summation of such waves at evenly-spaced rotations. The animation occurs as each wave moves forward. More ? http://goo.gl/vyccv Quasicrystal ? http://goo.gl/uoHjI

Habits (customs, rituals) are the psychological and behavioral basis for culture. Hence, digital culture just are the patterns of habituated behaviors of digital peoples. When left to their own devices, communities of humans tend to synchronize their habits in ways that might look unusual from the perspective of people who don’t participate in those cultures. Lots of people, including smart and forward thinking techies like +Robert Scoble, tend to immediately implicate the adoption of such habits as a negative trait by referring to them as “addictions”. Addictions are real things, of course, but cultures are real things to, and there is something deeply inhumane about treating the latter like the former. Talking about technology addiction is a growing media and academic niche industry. Using the vocabulary of addiction to talk about technology has just the right mix of hype, science jargon, gossip, and self-loathing to make the meme spread successfully, even among people who should know better. Unfortunately, this is a situation where our concepts are too weak for the phenomena they attempt to analyze. Both technology and habit are deeply fundamental aspects of humanity; treating technology as a disease (or worse, a symptom of some further disease) is categorically the wrong approach to understanding the relations between these processes, and how their dynamics give rise to the full scope of human experience. Alex Schleber originally shared this post: Must-read post on this key metric: “… mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU [Daily Active Users] to MAU [Monthly…] ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits […]

The featured video on this post is absolutely wonderful. It highlights just one of the major issues with Enlightenment models of individuals, and the dreadfully absurd consequences it has for the way we raise our children. Highly recommended if you are interested in #education and #digitalculture . James Wood originally shared this post: A collection of insightful videos about the present state of education and future prospects. “Changing Education Paradigms” (below) as you would imagine focusses directly on this issue. Additionally, these give a well-rounded set of perspectives: Salman Khan at TED Talks (founder of Khan Academy)– Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education Sir Ken Robinson at TED Talks (“Do Schools Kill Creativity”)– Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? RSA animate “The Secret Powers of Time”– RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time More from Sir Robinson (if you can sit through 55 min of witty British humor, with occasional digression into discussion about changing paradigms) Sir Ken Robinson – Changing Paradigms