[FRIAM] City University of Santa Fe
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun Jan 7 03:29:12 EST 2018
Eric -
I really appreciate your thorough information on this topic, you have
clearly considered it seriously for some time.
> I would say that Ronin agrees with the sense of value, and doesn’t
> take for granted having to give it up. Their main architecture is the
> internet interface and the legal services of a 501C3 and whatever
> journal etc. accesses they can get. But they are hosting an
> increasing number of web-mediated seminars, general chat sessions they
> call “watercooler” chats on the slack platform, and in-person
> “meetups” a few times a year, whenever someone takes the initiative to
> organize one somewhere. Many of those who are within geographical
> proximity also have the option for more regular contacts. It is a
> light level of in-person access, stabilized by the low cost and
> general-purpose internet platform, rather than having the in-person
> mode be the major center of stabilization.
>
> Although, per-exchange, an internet-mediated interaction won’t have
> much depth, they are aiming for regularity and predictability as a way
> to engender longer-term relations, and also to mediate active
> scientific collaborations, so that people come to get a deeper
> understanding of each other’s minds.
I can accept these trade offs and in fact find my own effective
collaborations to be equally distributed between people I can spend
facetime with easily and those halfway around the world who I cannot but
whose unique skills or perspective makes up for it.
>>
>> I assume your (Nick's) reference to journal access is to
>> the http://unpaywall.org/ links? LANL (Paul Ginsparg) pioneered the
>> use of WWW for open access to journal articles via the xxx.lanl.gov
>> <http://xxx.lanl.gov/> "physics preprint" server (with an FTP and
>> Gopher server predating that by a couple of years). I don't know
>> the full implication or utility of the subsequent arXiv.org
>> <http://arxiv.org/> system but in principle it feels like the
>> "perfect" workaround for the Journal system. I think Grigori
>> Perleman's example (publishing two deeply pivotal papers in
>> mathematics *without* a peer-review journal/process) is significant.
>> I'm surprised it didn't revolutionize academia and publication more
>> than it did. Is it inertia or something more fundamental?
>>
> I think not only inertia. The idea that you can find, through ad hoc
> networks, and fully understand by your own agency, everything you
> should want to work with or use, to my mind vastly truncates the set
> of possibilities for work. For every step you extend your scope into
> areas you don’t understand, you add fragility and create problems of
> validation of qualitatively new types, but you open combinatorial
> possibilities for guessing and discovery that do not exist at smaller
> scales.
>
> The new qualitative problems turn (in my view) fundamentally on the
> limits of human time, attention, knowledge, etc. This is why a
> library is not the same as a mere warehouse full of books, a (real)
> librarian is not merely a person tasked with keeping others quiet,
> etc. Search, sorting, classification, vetting and gatekeeping, are
> fundamental services. Each of them has fragilities and each of them
> is indispensable to all but the most localized tasks. There are
> failure modes in all of these, which blamers love to blame, but I
> don’t think those invalidate the concepts; they dictate the problems
> that need work and insights. Since my earliest encounter with “web of
> trust” cryptographic ideas, I have felt that the interlinked concepts
> of identity and reputation are vastly richer than these engineering
> inventions suggest, and it would be great to get more conceptual
> clarity about their nature. I have taken some tilts at that problem
> over 20 years, but never produced anything of any worth. It does seem
> that the social disruption and AI innovations are bringing that
> discussion to life now in a big way, and I can imagine there will be
> interesting concepts turned up by it.
>
> I feel like this mismatch between conceptually simple technical
> problems, and conceptually deep and difficult social system problems,
> arises for many topics that are of interest to this list. We have
> seen articles in which people take polarized positions on Bitcoin as
> being either a new paradigm for money or nearly a scam. I don’t see
> it as either. It is a cryptographic solution to a specific problem of
> achieving a certain property in an information system that was once
> sought in material systems: asymmetric ease of verifiability with
> difficulty of counterfeiting, and having a predictable supply. But
> anybody who is serious about what money is would (should, IMO) say
> that those technical properties are no more the essence of money than
> the physical properties of Au are the essence of money. There are
> cognitive, social, and political foundations in real money and credit
> systems, which employ material or informational properties as a kind
> of substrate. One doesn’t want to confuse the building medium with
> the built artifact.
BitCoin aside (or at best a semi-tangible example for many), the
underlying distributed ledger idea seems to reinforce/formalize/extend a
social paradigm that worked well in Dunbar Number scale societies
without any significant technology to support it.
> So here’s another model in case it is of interest:
>
> https://www.yhousenyc.org/
>
> This one is spearheaded by Piet Hut of IAS Princeton, with significant
> participation from some Columbia people and several others.
>
> Piet is willing to opine that the university as we currently conceive
> it is an institution that societies will be unwilling or unable to
> support on a timescale as short as 25 years. To me that seems
> unrealistically close, because (as above) they are so interlocked in
> processes of reputation and vetting with the whole rest of the
> society, that I think the institutional creep will be slow and it will
> be much longer before they are cut loose.
>
> But whether right or wrong, that view motivates Piet to build a model
> for what takes over the academic job when universities no longer do.
> He conceives something that is more socially embedded, more ad hoc in
> its membership, somehow negotiates academic autonomy while getting
> sponsorship from businesses, and I guess some other structural stuff.
> His test case is about origin of consciousness, which for Piet is the
> third great Origins problem following OoMatter and OoLife. We can see
> if he can make this work, and what is learned from the experiment.
>
> The ambitions of Ronin and YHouse could naturally be synergistic, and
> they know about each other, but I think they are both still solving
> local problems. The styles of the founders are very different, and
> the visions and designs as well.
>
>
> One can imagine a loose affiliation by which there are many local
> experiments addressing “organically” understood needs by a collection
> of entrepreneurs, which keep each other in view for support and
> stability. Something like the clearinghouse of civil society
> organizations that Paul Hawken wanted to provide:
> https://www.blessedunrest.com/
>
All this, very interesting/heartening, especially for my grandchildren
who have not (yet) been raised under the old paradigms... no disrespect
to the old paradigms, they just seem to be
shifting/dissolving/involuting in the presence of the "universal
solvent" of ubiquitous and instantaneous global communication.
>
> Dunno. Much to do.
I like to repeat Steven Levine's mantra "Just this much" when I notice
this...
Carry On,
- Steve
PS to Nick... thanks (as always) for triggering all of this
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