Search Results for: legibility

The Dead-Curious Cat and the Joyless Immortal

March 13, 2013 By

I’ve been thinking a lot about curiosity lately. Specifically, about curiosity in the sense of  the proverb curiosity killed the cat: a potentially self-destructive pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that leads to unnecessary risk-taking. In humans such risk-taking often threatens not just the individual or even family/immediate group, but the whole species. Some people just have to go around figuring out new ways to blow things up, often with the noblest of intentions.

At a selfish gene level, the trait seems complicated, but not  mysterious. The question that really interests me is this: how do our selfish genes fool us into being curious creatures, who sometimes get themselves killed, to teach our gene pools more about the environment? Altruism, a similar potentially self-destructive trait at the individual level, manifests subjectively as love (especially for kin), a sense of belonging to one’s community, and a capacity for attachment to some notion of greater purpose. What might be the analogous subjective experience for curiosity?

Curiosity does not seem to be a fundamental drive, unlike what I am told are the  three basic biological drives (seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy), so it is probably derived. Curiosity requires a certain energy surplus, since its visible signature is a restless dissipation of energy, but it does not seem directly motivated by energy conservation concerns. So is it derived from pleasure-seeking or pain-avoidance or some mix of the two? Does that make a difference?

I think it does, and I think the answer is that curiosity is primarily derived from pleasure seeking, not pain aversion. This has certain observable consequences.

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Navigating the Holey Plane

October 23, 2012 By

Guest post by Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, an excellent blog about urbanism and cities.

 Although connectedness is the spirit of the city, and will probably remain so, the American version has always harbored a tendency to explode, to atomize, and to spread itself as far as possible. Today this may be exacerbated (or made more possible, if you like) by the media of virtuality.

— Lars Lerup

 “Connectedness” is one of the great buzzwords of the Internet Age. The claim that everyone is now more connected than ever before is the platitude upon which plenty of techno-optimism rests. Count the number of times Mark Zuckerberg uses the word whenever he explains Facebook’s role in the world (on his own profile, for instance). Then, count the number of times he explains what he actually means.

Within the context of Facebook, of course, Zuckerberg shouldn’t have to explain what “connected” means. Everyone knows. If more information can flow between two people via Facebook than was previously possible, those two people have become more connected—at least by the standards of the Facebook universe. Does this mean that Facebook has brought about its stated objective, a more connected world? Has the internet even accomplished that? What about the last century of technological progress in general? What does it mean to be connected, exactly, and what have we given up in order to reach that state?

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Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope

October 15, 2012 By

I’ve been trying hard over the last several weeks to wrestle a very tough idea to the ground: economies of variety. Yes, there is such a thing, and I don’t mean either the Starbucks menu of mass-customized combinatorial choices or some charming favela economy that has variety, but not economies of variety. Economies of variety are related to, but not the same thing as, the idea of superlinearity.

I’ll leave that subject for another post, when I beat the thing into some sort of submission, but the process of wrangling the idea has led me to a much deeper appreciation of the two existing economies — of scale and scope respectively — that characterized the industrial age. So this is a sort of prequel post. If a well-posed notion of “economies of variety” can be constructed, it will need to be really solidly built in order to punch in the same weight class as these two mature ideas. A business that achieves all three will be close to unbeatable by competing businesses that only manage one or two out of three.

Amazon is the first company that is getting dangerously close to 3/3. That should give you a hint about where I am going with the economies of variety idea. But let’s figure out scale and scope first.

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Cloud Mouse, Metro Mouse

September 27, 2012 By

The fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is probably the oldest exploration of the tensions involved in urbanization, but it seems curiously dated today.  The tensions explored in the fable — the simple, rustic pleasures and securities of country life versus the varied, refined pleasures and fears of town life  — seem irrelevant today. In America at least, the “country” such as it is, has turned into a geography occupied by industrial forces.  The countryside is a sparsely populated, mechanized food-and-resource cloud. A system of national parks, and a scattering of “charming” small towns and villages pickled in nostalgia, are all that liven up a landscape otherwise swallowed up by automated modernity.

In America, larger provincial towns and cities that are just a little too large and unwieldy to be nostalgically pickled, but not large enough to be grown into metropolitan regions, appear to be mostly degenerating into meth-lab economies or ossifying into enclaves of a retreating rich.

So the entire canvas of the town mouse/country mouse fable is being gradually emptied out. If there is a divide today, it is between two new species of mice: metro mice and cloud mice.

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Five Years of Blogging

July 3, 2012 By

July 4th, 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of ribbonfarm. Now that I’ve completed a retrospective of five years worth of writing through the last month, I figured it was time to step back and put the whole thing together. Here’s the picture I came up with.

Before I give you a tour of SES Ribbonfarm (that’s “Slightly Evil Ship”), some housekeeping matters. I now have a glossary, which many of you asked for, and a For New Readers page. Links to both are on the menu bar. The latter contains links to the four roundups I did in June, as well as downloadable epubs and links to reading lists of the posts on readlists.com (you can use their app or send the lists to your Kindle or iPad).

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for more than a couple of years or two, and have useful thoughts for new readers, please post them as a comment on that page. This should also be a good page to point people to if you want to introduce them to ribbonfarm.

Now for the ship.

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Glossary

If you see any missing terms that I reuse a lot, let me know. Terms annotated GP are from the Gervais Principle series.

Index of Terms

Ancient Eye
Babytalk
Barbarian
Baroque Unconscious
Clueless
Crucible Effect
Curse of Development
Evil Twin
Future Nausea
Game Talk
Gervais Principle
Gollum Effect
Hackstability		 Hall’s Law
HIWTYL
Legibility
Loser
Manufactured Normalcy Field
Milo Criterion
Posturetalk
Powertalk
Refinement
Scientific Sensibility
Sociopath
Straight Talk
Stream		 Turpentine Effect
Ubiquity Illusion

Entries

  1. Ancient Eye: An approach to perceiving reality that precedes modern categories of professionalized disciplinary knowledge such as science, engineering or art.
  2. Babytalk (GP): The language spoken by Sociopaths and Losers to the Clueless. 
  3. Barbarian: On ribbonfarm, a term of approbation, while “civilized” is an insult. Somebody whose lifestyle pattern is not based on accumulation or externalization of cognition into institutions. The definition is based on Thorstein Veblen’s model in Theory of the Leisure Class.
  4. Baroque Unconscious: The idea that technology can be understood as an entity that behaves as though it is a sentient agent unconsciously groping towards realization of its own extreme baroque form.
  5. Clueless (GP):  Employees who overperform and believe in the benevolence of the organization.
  6. Crucible Effect: A crucible is group of optimal size for doing creative information work. The number of people is about 12. It is too large to be managed and too small to split up, balancing on the brink of chaos. Members of crucibles focus collective attention into an arms race of constant practice, backed by an established culture around its particular kind of information work. The escalation into increasingly more refined crucibles allows for the 10.000 hours of deliberate practice that is needed for elite performance.
  7. Curse of Development (GP): If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose more often than he/she wins.
  8. Evil Twin: Somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference.
  9. Future Nausea: The subjective reaction to being exposed to un-normalized futures. See Manufactured Normalcy Field.
  10. Game Talk  (GP): The language spoken by Losers among themselves.
  11. Gervais Principle ( (GP): The conjecture that Sociopaths promote the Clueless to middle management and fast-track a subset of enlightened Losers to upper management as new Sociopaths.
  12. Gollum Effect: The reduction of a consumer to a subhuman creature defined purely by patterns of consumption. Verb form: gollumize.
  13. Hackstability: A postulated stable equilibrium state created by a balance forces: exponentially increasing technological capability and entropy-driven technology collapse.
  14. Hall’s Law: A speculative Moore’s Law analog for the 19th century, based on the growing sophistication of manufacturing as measured by progress in creating interchangeable parts.
  15. HIWTYL  (GP): Heads-I-Win-Tails-You-Lose, pronounced HIWTYL. The general design principle behind incentive structures designed by Sociopaths.
  16. Legibility: A system is legible if it is comprehensible to a calculative-rational observer looking to optimize the system from the point of view of narrow utilitarian concerns and eliminate other phenomenology. It is illegible if it serves many functions and purposes in complex ways, such that no single participant can easily comprehend the whole. The terms were coined by James Scott in Seeing Like a State. Illegible systems are generally more robust than legible ones, and Scott’s model is mainly about the failures caused by imposing legibility on an initially illegible reality. See State.
  17. Loser (GP): A bare-minimum effort, rationally disengaged employee who seeks fulfillment outside of work.
  18. Manufactured Normalcy Field: A large-scale engineered perception that makes radical technologies appear normal, thereby preventing the future from arriving for most people.
  19. Milo Criterion: Products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt
  20. Posturetalk  (GP): The language spoken by the Clueless.
  21. Powertalk  (GP): The language spoken by Sociopaths.
  22. Refinement: Refinement is a measure of the amount of work that has gone into an artifact. Intelligence in design is fundamentally a predatory quality put in by Barbarians. Refinement in design is a non-predatory quality put in by civilized-Slaves.
  23. Scientific Sensibility: Perceiving reality in a dispassionate and mindful way. I argued that this is a more basic foundation for science than the “scientific method” and formal metaphysical motions like falsifiability or empiricism/analyticity.
  24. Sociopath  (GP): A self-aware employee who understands how organizations really work and takes reasoned risks to acquire power and influence by manipulating it.
  25. Straight Talk (GP): The language spoken between Sociopaths and Losers.
  26. Stream: A sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.
  27. Turpentine Effect: The tendency of practioners of a skilled craft to gravitate to tool-making over application
  28. Ubiquity Illusion: Creating a perception of ubiquity around a new product or service to fake social proof

The Art of Refactored Perception

May 31, 2012 By

When I made up the tagline, experiments in refactored perception, back in 2007, I had no idea how deeply that line would come to define the essence of ribbonfarm. So in this first post in my planned month-long retrospective on five years in the game, I decided to look back on the evolution and gradual deepening of the idea of refactoring perceptions.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I’ve never attempted an overt characterization of what the phrase means, but over the years, I’ve explored it fairly systematically. This sequence of posts should help you appreciate what I mean by the phrase. I’ve arranged the sequence as a set of fairly natural stages. There is some commentary at the end. Here you go:

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Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships

April 25, 2012 By

It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

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Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet

April 18, 2012 By
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Sometime in the last few years, apparently everybody turned into a hacker.  Besides  computer hacking, we now have lifehacking (using  tricks and short-cuts to improve everyday life), body-hacking (using sensor-driven experimentation to manipulate your body), college-hacking (students who figure out how to get a high GPA without putting in the work) and career-hacking (getting ahead in the workplace without “paying your dues”). The trend shows no sign of letting up. I suspect we’ll soon see the term applied in every conceivable domain of human activity.

I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization.

I’ve concluded that we’re reaching a technological complexity threshold where hacking is going to be the main mechanism for the further evolution of civilization. Hacking is part of a future that’s neither the exponentially improving AI future envisioned by Singularity types, nor the entropic collapse envisioned by the Collapsonomics types. It is part of a marginally stable future where the upward lift of diminishing-magnitude technological improvements and hacks just balances the downward pull of entropic gravity, resulting in an indefinite plateau, as the picture above illustrates.

I call this possible future hackstability.

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Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?

March 22, 2012 By

There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

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