deadletter-j
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How many Engstrom's does it take?
 
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virus: Virus: Comprehensibility
« on: 2005-02-18 18:52:50 » |
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In October of 2004, I began vomiting out information like that below. I
could see, touch, interact with information flow across human systems,
whether it be one person, or even better, multiple systems.
The fact that I can speak comprehensibly now at all is the results of
about four months solid of work. Every person I spoke to everywhere,
all of the time, became an opportunity to practice. Practice hacking
people.
I'm going to try to paint a picture in my mind. I write a story in my
head that painting this picture in my mind will paint a picture in your
mind - that you will 'see' what I am talking about.
It's a methodology for creating metaphor. A key component is to parse
towards comprehensibility.
To 'begin' making sense.
How long I manage to maintain, manage, create positive information flow
before overwhelming the system with the pure quantity of ideas that I
have to spill determines much about the final complexity of that
system.
Unfortunately, there also needs to be a certain sense of 'metahazard'.
With a human being on the bus, I can talk and talk and talk and talk
and talk and watch carefully to see if they are beginning to stir
towards reacting to my words. Then I settle on down and wait for them
to relax, then up the emotional content and layering of my words.
With an online community, there is a different difficulty - either
there is already a quantity of noise in the system, and I have to find
conduits into the conversation, or there is not enough noise, and I
have to generate some.
Entropy has sucked the heart out of the CoV. If the idea of the CoV had
'gone viral', there would be a positive cascade of new people coming
in, and we would have ways of layering them into the community.
memeplex=community
meme = singletons
I'm going to ramble for a bit, to get the flow going. I'm looking for a
holla back from people who get sick and tired of getting too many
emails in their inbox. I am going to dump ideas until I hear back which
ones the community is interested in speaking out.
A single memeplex may come with many different faces - as many
different faces as there are people who know the meme. The meme is
therefore some idea that is central to, or 'at the heart of', those
many people's understanding of it.
Locking a meme into words does not inherently make the meme those words.
Dawkin's vaunted atheism does not lock the fundamental ideas of
memetics into atheism, even though, for him, the two ideas cannot be
separated.
David Lucifer's name for the metahazard symbol, 'ideohazard', does not
lock the symbol itself to that name.
I've started calling it metahazard, and since none of the people I am
talking to know memetics from bananas, metahazards it is.
It's about pushing the meme in many directions and watching for certain
signs that it is recoalescing. Imagine pouring white five gallon
buckets of water onto a clay map of Seattle, while standing on a 15'
ladder. Until the water begins to pour, we cannot see where it may
land. Secondly, if we hit the map, which we know by the splash, we
cannnot see from a distance where the deepest spots are, that we may
pour water into the Puget Sound and not onto the downtown core.
Therefore we have to watch the splashing to get a sense of what the
water is hitting. Third, we have to try to add water to all the right
places, so that we can see the lakes and rivers flowing. Fourth, we
have to make sure we watch the flow of water into the system so that we
do not overload it, as well as deal with the damage done by our first
pouring. Fifth, we have to let the city take over its own water cycle,
flowing and returning. Sixth, we have to ask ourselves - did the
fucking city want water?
If we are floating at a distance from a globe, how far away are we?
Until we interact with the globe, there is no way of knowing.
The goal is to get right up close. And to keep our meta, our connection
to The Big Picture. The astronaut on the moon may have a sense of the
Earth that no one else has. When he is home, he is still weighted down
by the Planet-ness of the structure.
There's more where that came from. I feel almost... irked that I have
to kick this system so hard to get motion. CoV is meta to the entire
planet! We're the people thinking about thinking about ideas about
ideas about spreading ideas about thinking all over the world! We can,
should, and will be a hive of activity.
Seems we've been hung by the neck till we're dead, dead, dead.
We're playing a game. A game called Antivirus. In order to be resistant
to viral memes, we have to have designed a few viral memes. Really
viral memes. The kind that break down the information structures in the
lives around us and build them back up into new articulations.
My goal is to help you win this game. I will even tell you how to win
the game! I doubt you will pay attention when I do.
Remember, if you get tired of the quantity of information coming
through the system...
you can always get off the list.
-b
On Feb 18, 2005, at 12:18 PM, Ben Grad - Dead Letter B wrote:
> I feel bad. Not too bad, though.
>
> Okay - key words to cue you into the structure of the overall picture.
>
>
> The structure of this email matches the structure of this conversation
> which matches the structure of the experience which matches the
> structure of the human mind.
>
>
> 1) Information (root) level - when we see mass amounts of information
> but can't even attempt to make order.
>
> 2) Structure - Bloom's Taxonomy - the mind learns, knows, applies,
> analyzes, synthethizes, evaluates. When you can follow someone's
> thoughts, or almost follow, you 'know' it, you 'understand' it, you
> 'comprehend' it - but you can't articulate it or use it yet in a
> conscious way.
>
> But! didn't the WELL already learn something about information flow?
> If I stopped now, and somebody came along later saying and doing some
> of the same things, it would be much faster to react! This is learning.
> I'm hoping I can make some of these levels obvious - through
> abstraction and meta.
>
> 3) Applying - The scientific method (have info, hypothesize, predict,
> devise experiment, experiment, examine results) has an isometry with
> this - the mind goes through the scientific method all the time to deal
> with life and information. What was never articulated is that these
> steps are META to each other - not a pathway. After we try to
> understand some information, we try to see what it would imply.
>
> 4) Abstracting - The key component missing to be able to watch
> information flow is the concept of META - it's a perspective, a way of
> looking at growth - to notice change over time. I think if I can
> articulate through SHOWING you these stages of dealing with the issue
> of human information flow, that you will begin to notice _extra_ levels
> of information that you already notice ALL the time, but were never
> quite brought to your conscious attention.
>
> 5) Synthesis - A key concept here is that of ZAZZ - how we go from the
> reality we all see to metaphor. Which is why I was so excited when
> that was kicked out - I've been teaching reasoning with symbols for
> years, and suddenly I realized the fundamental missing issue in math
> education - nobody every stepped outside of the symbol manipulation to
> show them the ACT OF PARSING itself. Stepping outside of symbol
> manipulation = meta.
>
> 6) Evaluation - I am going to try to show you how we parse from raw
> data (the Data Dump) to metaphor (word symbols) and then lens outwards
> again to the next level of taking in information. Having this
> information in my head as one symbol makes me now drowning in
> information flow of new levels. I think that if I articulate the flow
> of information to you, you will notice it, and be able to dissect it
> better than my one brain, and be able to apply it to changing the world
> for the better.
>
>
> Go reread this again - but make sure you are thinking in terms of meta
> for each level - not "one after the next". It is one-d, two-d, three-d
> four - five-d, six-d, seven-d, more! It's a dimensionality issue,
> that's the direction of the human nonlinearity.
>
>
>
> Pattern 1 - Information Overload - Data Dump & Reflex Period
>
> 1) dumping too much information makes the mind struggle for meaning
> _around the issue_. There is a reflex period as data goes and swirls
> around, and then understanding swirls out. First, however, there is a
> very visible moment of frustration in which the individual or group
> demands that the information be pared down to structure and pattern
> extraction. The individuals saying, "talk less - where's the pattern?".
> The WELL saying "less topics - you could do this in one". <betsys>
> saying, "I don't get it" but kicking out a definition that I had
> attached to the word-symbol 'isometry' (perhaps wrongly). Don't get
> hung up on the indvidual symbols!
>
> Let me point out some individual word symbols that have kicked out
> information spinoffs in the original level - "hack" "virus" "fractal"
> "WORDS SUCK" "Negative feedback leads to failure" "feedback" "Isometry"
> "troll"
>
> Now here's one of the really cool parts - even as the brain begins to
> parse down the meaning to some simple synopsis, somewhere it is at
> complete synthesis.
>
> Isometries: <flame.ind.440>
>
> Do you want to see the clearest articulation of everything so far?
> These guys are it! They read, synthesize it, and spit it back out in a
> clearer form. When I want to know where we're at, I read these guys!
>
> Example - information in my posts about daniel quinn, neal stephenson.
> In <flame.ind.440> they ran right through a conversation that put the
> two of them together MUCH more powerfully than I could have by fighting
> with words.
>
> Very similar to how <betsys> said she didn't like my word isometry, so
> kicked out a better explanation of the actual intended idea. Which got
> parsed down to zazz.
>
>
>
> So - to parse our experience down into as short of symbols as I can.
> Each level gets simpler and simpler to symbolize - which is why I think
> I will make more sense at this level than at the level before.
>
> The strategize level after this should be easier to read then this one
> - when take what we've noticed about information flow and try to
> articulate how it might fit. That's the level where we look down on
> this and say, "Okay, I need to know what happens if I do 'this' in
> terms of information flow through humans."}
>
> Our experience so far: I came in and affected individuals and the WELL
> itself in a visceral way. Like when somebody smells bad, or talks too
> loud, or is too drunk - the exaggeration of the thing lets you notice
> it consciously. Except I came in saying, "Look at this consciously".
> Which creates much greater information flow than if I was just a
> long-winded jerk.
>
> And then: I'm saying - step out of your visceral reaction and look at
> information flow. It fits patterns! Here's some of the patterns -
> initial information insertion (not symbol insertion - that should come
> last) is most visceral when it makes the mind demand a pattern. Making
> the pattern clear - being able to fit what we know into a framework of
> understanding - is only achieved through meta-level abstraction - not
> by looking for patterns from the level of being _in_ the information
> flow.
>
> Imagine you were standing inside a computer model of a bunch of dots
> in 3d. You could spin round and round, looking for a pattern - but what
> if you could zap back out to the real world and say, "oh - the pattern
> is that it is a computer model of information."
>
>
>
> So - in the structure:
>
> Identify:
> I know: that I caused a reaction
> I know: that the information network reacted as predicted -
> like my students when I overload them with too much talking
> I know: that ideas get bounced around on a level below
> linguistic and often arise as a standing wave somewhere else.
> I need to know: if I can get the information network to leave
> the first discussion and begin looking at the overall conversation as
> involving data flow.
> I need to know: if I overdid it in the first information dump -
> turning people to stasis rather than a discussion.
> I need to know: if you, the members of the CoV, can articulate
> to me how to speak less to get conversation going about the topic. In
> other words - will you just say, "shut up, Ben, we're thinking about
> it"
>
>
>
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