IdeaFestival

"I, Gamer"

In a brief post at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds wonders what the societal impact will be of a generation of game players that self-identify as "gamers." Without providing any answers - are there any now? - I just thought it was an interesting question, as was the title of his blog post.

Wayne

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

I want to be foolish like this

Writing about the death of MIT computer science professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, Harvard crank Nicholas Carr and Discover columnist Jaron Lanier use Eliza's tale to assay against errors of the computational kind.

Let me explain.

In the 1960's Weizenbaum created a program called Eliza that would rephrase statements as questions and pose them to test subjects in what became an infamous test of computer-human interaction. Some individuals came to believe that the computer program was a human and lessons drawn from the episodes found their way into Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, which Carr references in his post, Eliza's World:

Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks [emphasis supplied].

It's easy now to poke fun at the subjects who came to believe that Eliza was human. But the larger lesson that I take - and the one suggested by Carr - is that reason and logic are only part of the human experience.

That is particularly true when it comes to thinking because it is belief - and theatrically, the suspension of disbelief - that makes us human. Belief combined with experience holds out possible worlds for our examination; it is on the superstructure of belief that we can absorb wisdom, practice empathy, strive for justice and extend mercy where none may be merited.

As cheaply amusing as it might be in hindsight, what Eliza demonstrated was not that we can foolishly ascribe feelings to objects, but that it is the suspension of the facts that makes foolishness - as well as soul-stirring grace - possible. The rules be damned.

An interactive Web-based version of Eliza is here.

Wayne

Generative Linguistics 101

For a quick history on the godfather of linguistics go to Noam Chomsky's website. Here you'll find all of his writings, tons of information on linguistics and many debates on the "Chomskian" theory of linguistics.  Chomsky is given credit for really expanding the science of linguistics and for theorizing that language is an innate, biological process that humans have from birth. Whether you believe that language is innate or that it is a learned process, reading Chomsky's stuff will really make you think about what you think. One has to admit, language, no matter where it develops, develops in a systematic manner.

Tina

Wikipedia: Norm Chomsky, generative grammar

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo

"Obliquity:" To get somewhere, go somewhere else first

Is the best strategy for success and indirect approach to goals? Offering some examples from history, economist John Kay explains "obliquity."

George W. Bush speaks mangled English rather than mangled French because James Wolfe captured Quebec in 1759 and made the British crown the dominant influence in Northern America. Eschewing obvious lines of attack, Wolfe's men scaled the precipitous Heights of Abraham and took the city from the unprepared defenders. There are many such episodes in military history. The Germans defeated the Maginot Line by going round it, while Japanese invaders bicycled through the Malayan jungle to capture Singapore, whose guns faced out to sea. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people. Obliquity is the idea that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly....

Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them.

Wayne

Hat tip: Cognitive Edge

Wikipedia: complexity Merriam-Webster: tact

What's it like to be me?

Wired has just concluded a contest that invited readers to submit self-portraits. Reader favorites are here and editor favorites, here. There are some awfully interesting and skillfully done compositions, so give them a look.

Wayne

Breaking the "mixed reality" barrier

Jaron Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" and we're all familiar with, well, reality. But is there a mixed reality?

In a post yesterday, Jennifer Ouellette describes some experimentation reported at the American Physical Society meeting this week that points to a Matrix-like mixed reality state. Get this:

[University of Illinois professor Alfred Hubler used] a real system -- in this case, a standard mechanical pendulum -- coupled with a virtual system (a virtual pendulum) that was programmed to follow the well-known equations of motion. He and his colleagues sent data about the real pendulum to the virtual one, while sending information about the virtual pendulum to a motor that influenced the motion of the real pendulum. They found that when the two pendulums were of different lengths, they remained in a "dual reality state" in which their motion was uncorrelated, and thus not synchronized....

But then they discovered that when the pendulum lengths were similar, they reached a critical transition point and became correlated, or, in Hubler's words, 'They suddenly noticed each other, synchronized their motions, and danced together indefinitely.'

...Hubler thinks his lab-induced mixed reality states could be used to better understand real complex systems with a large number of parameters, by coupling a real system to a virtual one until their constant interactions result in a mixed reality state -- for instance, modeling neurons by coupling a real neuron with a virtual one.

Being a lapsed private pilot and fan of all-things-flying, my mind went to the transition state reported by 1940's era pilots who approached the sound barrier. There was intense buffeting, poor axis control and no certainty about what might happen next.

Sounds about right.

Alfred Hubler's web site is here.

Wayne

The story of intelligence is the story of compassion

Could the secret to human intelligence be our willingness to cooperate, to restrain the competitive instinct, to set aside societal inequality? Primatologist Brian Hare, recently named by Smithsonian Magazine as one of America's top young innovators, believes the answer may be yes. 

Unlike Chimpanzees, dogs are able to infer human intentions. A dog can, for example, understanding what its owner means when she points to food or to a favorite chew toy hidden from view across the room. And as the result of some really fascinating tests he's developed, Hare believes that dogs - and bonobos, another of his subjects - have developed this ability to read intentions through cooperative strategies that minimize - or at least temporarily set aside - social hierarchies in favor of a mutual goals. Chimpanzees, which are live in strict social orders, often fail, surprisingly, to cooperate to problem solve even when there is a clear benefit for all that can be obtained by working together.

That willingness - or unwillingness - to set aside differences may have enormous consequences.

Smithsonian:

Hare and others have speculated that social and emotional skills led to the evolution of intelligence in the great apes and humans. Since the 1970's, some scientists have claimed that animals are more likely to survive and reproduce if they are able to read social cues - to keep track of what other group members are up to and to deceive them if necessary. But Hare focuses on a slightly different type of social intelligence, the ability to work with others, regardless of whether they are strangers or rank lower in the social hierarchy.

There's a lesson here for us Hare says: 'It's true humans have bigger brains and language, and so forth. But we would not have evolved the kind of intelligence we have - the kind that allows us to use our brains together, to build things, to be mentally flexible - if we hadn't had a shift in temperament....' Controlling one's fears, paying attention to others, finding joy in working with others - that's the path to intelligence, he says, whether for dogs, apes or humans.

Bringing the story forward, Yale psychologist Daniel Goleman has pioneered this understanding of emotional intelligence in his work and publications, and discusses the idea in a popular TED video that may interest you. Have a great weekend,

Wayne