[FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

[Steve Smith]

I am saddened that we don't have a crowd-sourced, convergent/coherent
social media platform to compete with/replace the FB/Twattosphere.  
There are probably very good reasons.

I am a regular Wikipedia *user* but it has been years and years since I
dug deeper than the article I find on a search term.   I used to find
articles I found significantly deficient or misleading and was at least
tempted enough to participate in correcting them to go look at the
discussion page and the history of how the article got to be the way it
was.   A few times I even tried to participate in the commentary and
edit the text.  I discovered abruptly that others involved were MUCH
more committed to shaping the entry than I ever would be, and I learned
to "read around" the (slowly diminishing?) bad/weak entries, and look
elsewhere for generic reference information.

Outside of Wikipedia I haven't seen the original wiki concept to be
nearly as effective at achieving coherence/congruence.   What would a
FriAM wiki look like?   I'm betting it would be almost indistinguishable
from doing a wordnet screen on our archives, entering all the
non-standard terms it found as Wiki articles and then flooding the
discussion section with our entire thread.  

I'm disappointed with Friam-Comic (especially the recent posts) not
getting more at the "essence" of FriAM, and would probably be as
disappointed with Friam-Wiki if it existed.  

Glen has pointed me to RationalWiki which I find a good source of a
certain kind of skeptical reference to some controversial topics.  It
took me a while to identify and calibrate for *it's* biases, but I now
find it a useful resource.



> I would say that companies like Twitter should massively annotate serious offenders and cancel accounts as needed.    It doesn't have to come from top, but it isn't going to come from the bottom.   There should be processes to keep conspicuous liars from ever gaining visibility.   They don't have to involve black vans, as satisfying as that might be.   But maybe advanced natural language processing codes that escalate issues to editors.
>
> On 5/28/20, 9:15 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     The additional power is to mislead someone into thinking an expression is about one thing, when it's really about another thing. I.e. in this context, it's a way to troll and "riff" off some arbitrary string you found in some other post. In some contexts, however, it's more serious. Conspiracy theories use metaphor liberally in order to *trick* suckers into thinking something that's simply not true.
>
>     On 5/28/20 9:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>     > It seems to me like the value of metaphors fits into a sparse dictionary learning approach.   If you want to compress a picture of, say, the new Apple headquarters, it helps if one has seen a circle or a torus in some form, and can just refer to that.   It would also help to have seen pictures of trees and shrubs to tweak, and to have seen solar panels.   Some features will be unique, and simple atoms are needed to refine the image.  I'm skeptical that metaphor is the best enduring representation though.   After one has seen many circles and ovals (or conic sections), a parameterized (even dependent) type becomes evident. 
>
>
>     -- 
>     ☣ uǝlƃ
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