Digifesto

May 12, 2008

Words and words and words and words and words and…

I was reading the Singularity Institutes Q1 2008 Update, and noticed the following proud news item:

[Eliezer Yudkowsky] has written 300,000 words as of March on the Overcoming Bias blog. Select material is intended for a popular book; the rest can be used by SIAI for years to come.

When I read this, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the blog, here is how it describes itself.

Over the last several decades, new research has changed science’s picture of how we succeed or fail to seek the truth. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Microeconomics, through the power of statistics, has shown that many facets of society don’t work the way we thought.

Overcoming Bias aims to bring the implications home.

Personally, I find these topics fascinating. The implications of the heuristics and biases program have not permeated society nearly as much as is due, and economic theory still sorely needs more input from behavioral economics and the like to give us better models. Meanwhile, I am passionate about many of the other topics that are discussed on Overcoming Bias, like philosophy of mind and Bayesian statistics and prediction markets.

But despite it’s being on my feed reader, I hardly ever read full posts on that blog.

Why is that? Because Eliezer Yudkowsky, its most prolific contributor, writes a goddam book each time he makes a post. Recently: Exhibit A and Exhibit B. These are typical.

Contrast with Robert Hanson’s latest quip about prediction markets, which adheres much better to the blog’s own style standards:

Ideal posts are short, direct, have a clear thesis, and clear support such as a real-life example, a quote, an analysis, or a pointer to longer treatment.

The portability of text and the efficiency with which it can be transported on the internet make it incongruous to publish it in large chunks. On the contrary, in today’s world, Twitter makes sense. It takes a breed of arrogance to believe that others will want to spend more than two minutes discovering what you have to say.

So mere word count is a terrible measure of one’s contribution to the writing available on the web. That raises an interesting question though. What is a better measure? I’d speculate about an answer here, but this post is already too long.

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May 12, 2008

Ideology, via Toothbrush Debates

My friend Eli Braun recently made a gem of a post to Toothbrush Debates about the use of the concept of dignity in bioethics circles.

Via another bioethics center, I was just invited to a conference on “human dignity and bioethics.” I showed the invitation to a professor at my own bioethics center and asked: “Jesus! Why are these people so obsessed with human dignity?”

“I know,” he replied, “it’s such a clear and unambiguous concept. Why don’t we just define it in law and make everyone observe it?”

A central interest of mine is the role of rational discourse in politics, and especially how technology can assist it. The ideal is that if people just talk things out and provide each other with their reasons for holding various positions, then they can just arrive at consensus and achieve deliberative democracy.

When I talk to people about this, a natural place where conversation flows is, “Well, what happens if people just fundamentally disagree? You know, in their axioms.” It feels like the “dignity” question Eli points is one of deep sticking points.

Are these foundational stones of people’s world views really so immovable? Philosophically, I tend to think not. But sometimes I’m afraid that I’m wrong. If then, then what use is there for politics at all, except as an engine for coercion and war?

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May 10, 2008

Attention economy

The phrase “attention economy” denotes the idea that attention is one of the most important scarce resources at work in the economy, I think this is a profound insight that has not yet been sufficiently developed.

I need to investigate further into what has been written on the subject already, but my impression is that so far the idea has the most currency in the world of slick web business, and almost none in the world of rigorous theoretical economics.

Here are some reasons, off the top of my head, why I think that’s too bad:

Since attention, and the limits of our ability to attend, largely determine what information we are able to pull from the environment and how much we are able to process it, a theory of attention in economics is necessary for an accurate theory of bounded rationality.
Economics has been pretty poor at accounting for the role of advertising in the economy. Since the advertising industry is largely concerned with capturing the attention of audiences, a theory of the role of attention in the economy would provide a lot of explanatory force.
My understanding is that robust results in hedonic psychology show that happiness is primarily a matter of attention and only secondarily a mater of circumstances. To the extent that economic theories attempt to be normative and utilitarian (as many do), these psychological results demand that economics notice what people are attending to.

I think that a rigorous theory of the attention economy could turn a lot of economics on its head. I hope to approach this subject again in future posts.

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May 6, 2008

90’s design and BlockPartyNYC

It’s a rare treat when you stumble upon a web site that is a true relic of the 90’s.

So I was thrilled to discover a web site about New York City street fairs that appears to be regularly updated with new animated .gifs.

Incidentally, a friend and I discovered this site today when trying to see if there was any competition for TOPP’s new BlockPartyNYC site. I’m interested in how this site works out not just because I intend to crash a lot of block parties this summer, but also because it is a great example of a geodaki.

Unfortunately, it does not yet use any OpenGeo products–instead of GeoServer and OpenLayers, it uses a MySQL database and Google Maps. But it’s likely that later this year TOPP will adapt or rewrite that code to use open source geospatial software. The plan is to redeploy the software as a package for the NYCLU, as a way for concerned citizens to inform each other of the location of surveillance cameras in New York City.

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May 5, 2008

Gas Tax Scam

First we must solicit your confidence in this issue. This is by virtue as being utterly confidential and “top secret”.

This is a great parody of the Gas Tax holiday proposal, written in the style of a Nigerian spam scam.

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May 3, 2008

Filtering feeds

About a week ago Subtraction made a long post complaining about the main problem of feed aggregators:

No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds. … The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me.

These are my reactions to this, roughly in order:

I feel the pain of feed bloat myself, and know many others that do. It’s another symptom of internet-enabled information explosion.
It’s amazing that we live in an era when a feeling of entitlement about our interactions with web technology isn’t seen as ridiculous outright. It’s true–it does feel surprising that somebody smart hasn’t solved this problem for everybody yet.
The reason why it hasn’t been solved yet is probably because it’s a tough problem. It’s not easy to program a computer to know What I Find Interesting…

…or is it? This is, after all, what various web services have fought to do well for us ever since the dawn of the search engine. And the results are pretty good right now. So there must be a good way to solve this problem.

As far as I can tell, there are two successful ways of doing smart filtering-for-people on the internet, both of which are being applied to feeds:

Using direct social recommendations to let people know what other people find interesting. Digg is probably the best example of this. In the feed domain, Google Reader’s “Shared items” does this.
Machine learning techniques. Probably the most successful implementation of this on the internet are Bayesian spam filters. The Tao of Mac reports on a writer’s personal experiment to add a Bayesian filter to his feed aggregator. It’s a qualified success.

The most interesting solutions to these kinds of problems are collaborative filtering algorithms that combine both methods. This is why Gmail’s spam filter is so good: it uses the input of its gillions of users to collaborative train its algorithmic filter. StumbleUpon is probably my favorite implementation of this for general web content–although its closed-ness spooks me out.

We’re working on applying collaborative filtering methods to feeds at The Open Planning Project. Specifically, Luke Tucker has been developing Melkjug, an open source collaborative filtering feed aggregator. It’s currently in version 0.2.1. To get involved in the project, check out the Melkjug Project page on OpenPlans.org.

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May 1, 2008

Paul Newell on a roll

In a google search for his name, Paul Newell is finally beating out his novelist competitor.

Meanwhile, Streetsblog shows Paul Newell some more love. Paul describes the fight he expects in June:

So you can start collecting signatures on June 3rd. You hand them in the second week of July. And you spend the next four weeks fighting a court battle against your incumbent, who will try to throw you off the ballot. Even if they think their case has no shot, they will try to throw you off the ballot, just to waste your time and money.

Sounds harrowing. But I have a feeling that any dirty tricks against Paul will ultimately work out in his favor. If he’s getting national attention from the likes of Matthew Yglasias, then there will be enough people watching this election for there to be a national rumble against Silver if he does anything egregious.

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May 1, 2008

The meetup

It’s name still needs a lot of work, but tonight’s meeting of The New York Web 2.0 for Grassroots Causes (Web4Roots) meetup was a huge success.

To be honest, I’ve had some doubts about the effectiveness of the group in the past. But no longer. Tonight’s event focused on the web site and web presence of the NYCLU, represented at the meetup by Jen Carnig, its Communications Director. That concrete task kept a room full of miscellaneous programmers, activists, and pundits grounded in actionable ideas for the entire evening.

As a bonus, I met Lou Klepner, of GatewaytoGov.org.. A fledgling non-profit, they have an ambitious mission:

Gateway to Gov’s mission is to create an electronic public square that promotes civic engagement by enhancing communication between constituents and their elected officials.

Lou seems dedicated, and the cause is certainly worthy. But I worry that he may be biting off too much to chew. If I have learned anything in my (brief!) experience in this world, it is that it pays to start small. A realized service that pulled off the verified users aspect of their mission alone, and even in one state or city alone, would go farther than any amount of Vision. And the best part is…it’s in reach!

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April 28, 2008

Blogs in academia

The machine learning research blog hunch.net humbly describes itself like this:

This is an experiment in the application of a blog to academic research in machine learning and learning theory by John Langford. Exactly where this experiment takes us and how the blog will turn out to be useful (or not) is one of those prediction problems we so dearly love in machine learning.

So Langford‘s introspective post about his own experience with scientific “blogophobia,” as documented by Scientific American is a poignant one. SA and Langford both evidence that the problem is that blogging flies in the face of some crucial scientific virtues. Published scientific works are, at their best, humble, meticulous, and precise. Blogs are, more often than not, self-promoting, off-hand, and gestural.

Nevertheless, the gains to be had by openness and connectivity in scientific research are the same to had by everyone else on the internet: faster and more efficient processing of information. As Langford writes,

…the real power of a blog in research is that it can be used to confer with many people, and that just makes research work better.

What’s interesting is that the social sciences appear to be moving towards blogs much faster than the hard sciences. Perhaps it’s the accessibility of the material, or perhaps its the tradition of social scientists as public intellectuals, but these folks seem to have no qualms about putting out their latest musings. Alex Tabarrok‘s 6-year old reports that blogs are all his dad’s friends talk about at parties. Meanwhile, rockstar blogging economist Tyler Cowen is so optimistic about the role of blogs in academia that he believes that they will replace the literally ancient concept of “schools of thought”:

Overall I don’t believe in schools of thought for modern economics. Think of the notion of a school of thought as a brand. The whole point of the internet is to break down branding into the evaluation smaller units, including individuals and their very particular ideas, even doing cite counts paper by paper. Why move toward more macro branding in that kind of environment? You can think of trustworthy bloggers as another means of branding and also as substitutes for schools of thought.

Of course, these social science blogs aren’t about research–they are fountains of insightful abduction, not earnest induction. But they represent an encroachment of the web into academia which I think can only help the cause. Research has a lot to gain from the openness that the internet facilitates. Blogging academics are an important step in that direction.

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