Disqus - Latest Comments for Skydaemon

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

Skydaemon — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:24:44 -0000

Identity politics is taken to mean subdivisions within America, hence inherently divisive and destructive to policy forming. The American identity is special in that it's a uniting distinction. Anything that group agrees to is politically accomplishable. Nationalism is an important exception.

Re: designing rhetorical technologies of deliberation

Skydaemon — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 23:06:45 -0000

Here you present it as a design choice, and to some small extent it is. However, it's much more about the economics driving the design. It is too cute by half to suggest that you can change the design goals merely by pointing out undesirable elements.

Social media etc make money by a) selling advertising which is tied by the nuts to eyeball counts, b) selling user usage info which also increases in value with constant, pervasive usage. Further, they raise funding and gain clout by being able to claim they have billions of active users involved. These financial motivations are 100% of the orientation of the design. The designers know exactly what their apps push in behaviour and why, they also know how to alter it towards other ends. This is not a question of awareness, the designers are serving their paymasters excellently, and the people writing the cheques are not the users.

If you want a healthier app, change the economics. If people pay to use social media directly, the apps will be designed to benefit the people doing the paying.

Re: John Chen wishes Canadians would support BlackBerry more

Skydaemon — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 01:23:03 -0000

I've always disliked blackberries. They're the intellivision of cell phones, and suck for the same reasons.

Re: changing your mind in social media

Skydaemon — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 11:48:55 -0000

"How do we build structures that support felicity conditions, giving strength and durability to a way of speaking politically that might lead us beyond the shambles of political discourse we currently “enjoy”?"

I would describe this as framing the question wrong. Intentionally "building structures" is essentially the command-economy approach to discourse, and likely to meet with failure for similar reasons. To ask the same question in a capitalistic way, how do we align motivations and incentives to produce the kind of discourse and analysis we desire. Do that right and watch the structures build themselves.

Politics ends up being about either personalities or parties because the metrics that ought to matter aren't the focus. This is a self-feeding loop. If the public doesn't study the outcome of policies, then the details don't matter beyond the soundbite. This is how you get a reality show circus of vapid and meaningless pronouncements, which have little more substance to them than the name. It devolves into identity politics and tribes which is inherently stupid. So how do you generate interest in studying the impact of the proposed policies of politicians?

The chief problem with political discourse is the majority of the voting public do not have a significant and immediate personal stake in the outcome of their personal choice. It sounds counter-intuitive, since politics affect us all, but this is the crux of the problem. There's no personal cost to being wrong that doesn't also affect everyone else in the same direction. Equal losses are viewed as a wash. If the wrong politician gets elected and tanks the economy, "everybody" is worse off, so it doesn't really matter. If they were personally penalized differently than the rest of the public, they would care far more. Rewards and punishments could be financial, or involve voting clout for example. (Remember that experiment where people are paired up and given money, but only if they can agree on a split. Person A offers 60/40 and Person B tells them to go to hell and they both lose it all. Politics is like that, it doesn't matter if you both lose as long as the other guy doesn't win more than you.) Throw in the lack of apparent value to a single vote, and it just multiplies the apathy towards studying policies.

I'll give an example of voting clout rewards. You could alter voting requirements. In addition to voting for a candidate, you vote for expected metric outcomes (gdp growth, debt change, unemployment, etc etc) on both candidates. At the end of each cycle (which could be annually or an election cycle) the actual performance of the elected candidate is compared to your expected outcomes, and the strength of your vote is adjusted. Voter A has unrealistic expectations compared to average, so next election his vote is only worth 0.80 votes. Voter B has very accurate estimations, his vote next election is worth 1.2 votes. The same outcome for the same voters a second election in a row widens the gap. Perhaps now voter A is reduced to 0.7 votes, while Voter B has 1.35 votes. A real model would have a bit more to it, but you get the idea. This is essentially how the stock market works, by removing votes from people who prove themselves to be incompetent judges and passing them to people that are. The key is that you aren't punished for the candidate you choose, only for being out to lunch on the performance of the candidate that is chosen. If the anti-democratic nature bothers you, you could reward/punish people financially instead.

Now imagine how the discourse around politics changes in the system above. It's no longer about how the President ate a burger at fast food joint today, or how good their golf swing is. Suddenly, it's about how an amendment to the budgetary bill to aid a special interest group in a certain politicians riding will affect gdp and potentially screw everyone who bet on it. Or about how a new jobs program will affect unemployment in one direction, and debt in another. Voters vote on, and are judged on, the outcomes of policies, so that's what the discourse revolves around.

Discourse and rhetoric follow substance, not the other way around.

Re: looking at college from the other side

Skydaemon — Wed, 25 May 2016 22:26:58 -0000

Indeed, the course selection process is more an exercise in the illusion of choice. And as you mention, a key culprit is course scheduling. Yet, you don't propose doing anything about it.

Do courses really need to consist of 1h sections 3 times a week? Would scheduling be markedly more flexible if most of your required courses were 3h instead? Or even 2 sections of 1.5h? From what I remember, that was one of the things that changed as I went from 1st to 4th year. Fewer of my courses were mwf and more were single large blocks of time.

It seems like unchaining students from such scheduling restrictions is one of the potential upsides of the digital age. Yet nobody seems to be able (or willing?) to take advantage of it.

Re: students can’t write and other slow news days

Skydaemon — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 11:12:27 -0000

In regards to accessing scholarly research. This is partly a question of onus.

If you view poor research skills as an individual responsibility, then obviously students are to blame, even if they're new at it. The assumption pretty much dictates the conclusion.

However, there is the question raised by sheer numbers. If millions of students who are supposedly the brightest of their lot nearly all fail to do something well, maybe there's a systemic reason at fault.

As you mention, it could be that it's written for another audience. Which I think is a surmountable problem for most students. The lack of context is a much larger issue, and one that, in the digital age, is much harder to excuse.

I suppose I simply consider the idea and structure of a journal to be obsolete and archaic. Not to mention brick and mortar libraries. A lot of that sort of research is as much archeology as the discipline they're actually trying to learn about.

At some point, this stuff needs to be digital, and what starts to matter is improving the signal to noise ratio. There's Google Scholar, which is definitely a step in the right direction. But beyond that, we should be at a point where research is written in a way that is intended to be accessed digitally.

That could mean being search engine friendly. Or it could mean having some kind of link structure built into and through documents. It can also mean presenting the context you are working within, even if it's merely a link to a concept.

If you're going to assume that all scholarly research is tied together in some contextual fabric, then it should be recognized that eventually that fabric grows to the point where no one can view it all merely by looking at all the details. At that point, the solution isn't to spend a decade researching everything ever written about a topic before using any of it. The solution is to reorganize your tapestry so context can be attached without doing that.

Why should research be organized randomly in flat journals or books. Why can't all of it be organized in heirarchical trees where you can drill down from a higher context to where you need to go. In such a system, perhaps a single book isn't necessarily in a single position in the heirarchy, or it could be broken up into sections.

Such a system should be achievable, and it would alter future discussions and undergrad research immeasurably.

I should point out there's 2 ways to build such a system. The first is to go through everything ever written and reorganize it. The second is to simply discard the less adaptable or useful works and start over. The latter may not be as big a deal as we imagine. Especially if nobody actually uses those parts of it anyway.

Re: digital ethics in a jobless future

Skydaemon — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 23:17:15 -0000

It's an interesting question.

As you allude, it's obvious that capitalism will need a replacement, but it's not clear what comes next. Capitalism is quite good in economic systems where the main limiting factor is labour. It really sucks when you have surplus labor available across an entire economy. Take an overall labor surplus, and add a new limiting factor of raw materials (metal, food, etc) and capitalism is pretty much designed to grind the population into poverty.

I wonder about the robotic future when I start thinking of raw material shortages. Sure, having a robotic factory is neat. But automating the entire economy may not be economically viable. Even if you could do it, the maintenance costs as a whole would be insane. Imagine what we spend on maintaining roads that are relatively inert. Now imagine the maintenance cost of holding up a robotic economy. Still, I suppose we can assume we avoid that sort of problem through ingenuity.

So with an automated economy, the question becomes one of purpose for the population at large. Perhaps we discover warp engines, and the problem is avoided by gifting us with a universe wide colonization push. But what if it isn't?

The question may well become how to make socialism work. When you look at why socialism fails, there may actually be an answer. Socialism is said to fail for a few basic reasons. 1) production quality, corruption, and motivation issues, and 2) a lack of price signals to tell you when the economy isn't doing it's job properly, hence you invest large amounts of resources towards unwise ends.

With humans at the helm, such problems are generally insurmountable. But what about with robots? Can we become smart enough to plan our economy with the kind of transparency you get from robots? Obviously it would need to be done well, but it might actually be possible. Robots don't need to be motivated, don't have to be corrupt, and their production quality isn't a huge issue. That leaves price signals, which is really a way of tracking what everyone in the economy is doing and balancing their competing needs for available resources. Say we figure this out too, or build a giant AI to take care of it. We still have the issue of purpose.

I can only think of bad answers.

Re: language, programming, and procedure

Skydaemon — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 21:51:42 -0000

IMO this is a poorly explored topic which relates to thought disenfranchisement of the general population.

That is to say, large swaths of the population feel incompetent in basic decision making. These people are highly persuadable because they substitute external assistance in decision making for internal critical thinking and research ability. Part of this deal is learning not to care about getting ideal outcomes.

In short, the faster the world turns, and the more that is expected of people in their daily lives, the more people get left behind. They simply fail to reach the effort and critical thinking thresholds to "do life" on their own terms. And many would gladly trade luxury concepts like privacy and autonomy for a voice on their cell phone telling them what to do.

I guess this is a long way of saying that not all humans are equally susceptible to persuasion. Or at least, the amount of effort you'd have to invest in persuading people varies a great deal.

Re: Net Neutrality and the Public Sphere

Skydaemon — Wed, 28 May 2014 21:53:30 -0000

The proof is in the pudding.

The internet has been a very destabilizing system, which has forced many industries to stare mortality in the face and make radical changes. Few if any of those would have done so willingly if they could've paid to shut out competitive alternatives instead. Television never had the potential to force disruptive changes, the internet has proven it does.

The net neutrality question, is about whether the disruptive ability of the internet should be eliminated. That is what happens if access becomes primarily about money, and barriers to offering content are raised above what an average citizen can afford.

If it was up to deep pocketed corporations who had willing partners in internet providers running oligopolies, that's how it would be. It's expensive, hard and risky to compete on innovation and quality offerings. It's much easier to avoid change by paying to push competitors off the digital road instead.

It's why you see the biggest outcry from companies like netflix. If traditional television providers can pay to have them shoved off the road, netflix is over.

That, is what we're trying to save with the status quo - the disruptive ability of the internet. It's the ability of the internet to force giants to accept change instead of bunkering down and focusing on milking their monopolies which is valuable. In this era of oligopolies and excessive capital inequalities this has done more than we could've hoped for from "competitive market forces" (which is increasingly becoming an oxymoron). The internet has been a trump card which has shattered monopolistic behavior in a way markets and governments have failed to do.

Re: software evolution and software epistemology

Skydaemon — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 20:31:38 -0000

I do like a broad definition of evolution, but it's not my term of choice for this.

Digitization isn't so much a hybridization or evolution as it is an abstraction, removing media from the physical to the conceptual, and shedding physical limitations along the way. It's important in a different way than breeding a new kind of dog, or grafting 2 plants together. It's formless.

Once something is abstracted into a computer, regardless of whether it uses the same file format or not, it is just ones and zeros. The abstract world of math is straightforward to apply to it in any direction. Even if two media types were in separate file formats, they are a conversion algorithm away from being directly comparable. The point about common file types being important feels like a throw-back to concepts of the physical world where form mattered.

To expand on your Photoshop example. Yes, you can use a spray-can algorithm on a painting or a photo. But you can also feed your digital photo into an algorithm to translate it into music and play it through your headphones.

This also opens the door for anything in math to be translated back into media. A math formula can become a picture for example. For an interesting time, check out implementations of fractals which do exactly that.

Of course, you always could map the physical media to math, it was just too unwieldy and difficult to get any meaningful use out of it for anyone to bother.

Re: Chrysler cancels request for financial help from Ontario, feds

Skydaemon — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 20:16:11 -0000

If we have to fund a car company's production plant it should be for a start up, not an established car company.

Re: confusing and combining media and genre

Skydaemon — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 21:39:51 -0000

"Is that media determinism, or is it just media agency?"

Determinism is such an absolute word that it almost requires us to call it media agency.

Is media agency following the path of least resistance? If agency and determinism are the only choices, then yes.

I guess I'd choose to think about this in terms of innovation inertia. How much effort is it to build a replacement for a smartphone and get it distributed to the masses? If you could quantify that sort of thing you'd have a label to attach for the degree to which technology is determining our default choices. Using what's there is the default choice, the path of least resistance.

By contrast, I watch a show called Gold Rush, which is about strip miners in places like Alaska. They have equipment such as excavators that break down all the time. Yet, the time and expense of getting replacement parts (the technological default) is high enough that they usually fix their problems with scrap metal or whatever parts are at hand, welding a custom fix together.

In any situation where the technologically suggested option is not the path of least resistance, it usually gets ignored. It really can't be called determinism, at least not in an absolute sense. I suppose you could give it a rating on some grey scale of innovation inertia though.

To tie it back to ebooks, I'd liken that to the creation of social media. You may not have the selfies you want yet, but you do have the facebook to post it on when you do. At some point the remaining innovation inertia is low enough that it happens.

Re: higher education’s multiple futures #futureEd

Skydaemon — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 01:18:23 -0000

"...what are going to be able to sell? And who will buy it?"

If this was in my marketing courses they'd talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I'm sure other disciplines have similar theories. In this model, you're selling self-actualization before the students have dealt with security issues (employment). Vocational training on the other hand speaks directly to where the students are at: securing stable employment.

In that context, maybe the question is structural. You're simply pushing something at the wrong time in the students life. They aren't ready to hear that sort of message.

If you believe the hierarchy, ideally you'd want to sell liberal arts to married homeowners with stable jobs. That's the point where people ought to be ready to seek that sort of education, at least according to the model. Perhaps it's the middle managers in their 30s who need exposure to the liberal arts, rather than the 18 year olds. Come to think of it, aren't those the people creating half the problems anyway?

Terrible background for the picture, so I'll label it here: Top blue = self actualization, purple = esteem, teal = love/belonging, red = safety, and orange = physiological.

Re: Levi Bryant’s 3 models of the subject

Skydaemon — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 18:27:11 -0000

"But agency isn’t something that we have as a ontological quality."

Ontologically, it might be represented as a difference in the type of relation between controller and agent. Neither object is different per se, but their relation is. An object with no agency is controlled and driven, an object with agency might take requests.

In programming it's common to recognize different types of relationships formally, and that relations do exist in both modelling and in practice. Changing the relation would be an ontological change if you accept that relations _exist_.

Even if you don't accept the existence of relations, major structural differences can occur to account for the differences in nature of relations.

In programming, there is a type of system architecture we call a transactional system. In a transactional system, there are no commands or direct calling of functions between asking objects and performing objects. The requesting object makes a type of transaction, and hands it to a message passing server controller (basically a mass mailer). The server controller passes the transaction to every object in it's list, and those objects decide what if anything to do with it. The requesting object doesn't know the complete list of objects that it's transaction will be sent to, and that list can change without notice.

Say a request for a report is packaged into a transaction, and passed around internally to all kinds of different objects. Some objects like a logger, might record seeing the report request, other objects might answer the report request and fill in the needed data, still another reporting object might actually send a filled in report to a printer. The original requesting object, has no control over what objects do to the request, it cannot ask to be excluded by the logger for example. The logger decides that. In fact, a year after, you could add another object that would send a message to a pager every time the report was requested, and the original requester would never know that pager service existed. A transactional system has objects with agency by design.

Ontologically, this is represented very differently than another system which wasn't transactional. Notably the existence of a central message passer (server controller), which other architectures generally lack. Sometimes the entire architecture is framed to create the agency in question even if not identified directly.

In any situation where agency is _structurally required_ (such as a transactional system where there is no direct communication), that agency is identifiable ontologically even before considering the types of relations. If agency is not structurally required, then the only place you'd see it is in the type of relations.

For a human system example, consider voting. In Canada, Elections Canada or a local equivalent sends voting information (dates, locations etc) to Canada Post. Canada Post delivers it to you. You can do anything you want with the mail, including throw it away. You have the agency to choose whether to go to the location specified and vote at the date specified.

Canada Post doesn't care what you do with the mail. Elections Canada doesn't send someone to your house to escort you to the voting booth. This process has some degree of structural agency, and you could see it ontologically by the presence of Canada Post, and the lack of direct relation between me and Election Canada.

Re: eportfolio networks

Skydaemon — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 20:23:17 -0000

"So can the eportfolio foster such a system? That’s my question."

A portfolio is intentially about the ends. How do you convert that to displaying the means?

A business student can find external consumers of their work fairly easily if they can make a real business the subject. Comp Sci students could potentially create their own useful apps and publish them for use on the web.

But what about the philosophy student? Should she be required to find her own external consumer? Philosophy is more about the means than ends. There are no real corporations or marketplaces for that which come to mind. Really it's an issue the entire discipline has. Philosophy just isn't meant to have an immediate consumable use. It's measured more in lifetime spanning choices and adaptability.

Is philosophy lacking in formal ends? Or are eportfolios lacking the ability to display means?

Re: what would college be like without majors?

Skydaemon — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 18:32:13 -0000

University degrees have always been a 2 sided coin. There's what the student does for actual learning on one side, and what gets presented to the outside world for credentialing on the other. Removing disciplinary studies would break the credentialing aspect, so if you're going to do that you need to replace it somehow.

How do you tell external parties that didn't go to your university what you did, and tell them in a way that doesn't require them to do 5 hours of research on you?

There may well be an answer. I'm just curious what it would be. Perhaps a really powerful student portfolio? Turn the hiring process for everyone into a sample reel? Or does a degree dissolve into a series of specializations, say 5 course bundles strapped together. Instead of a computing science degree, maybe you have 8 specializations representing 40 courses (computing structures, algorithms, hardware, software, architecture, AI, databases, breadth gen ed).

Re: object-oriented marketing... sort of

Skydaemon — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:01:57 -0000

When reading the article I couldn't help but feel nostalgic. It's a long ways off yet, but it seems the slow trend is for traditional marketing research to fall in favor of big data. Google analytics is already pointed to as eroding marketing firm profit margins by "taking the magic out of it". Then move into a future where Facebook knows your IQ and political affiliation from the kind of fries you eat at Wendy's, and toss in actually wearing Google glasses as you walk around examining in-store displays and using products. Who needs focus groups when you can log on to a potential customers glasses (presuming they become web enabled). Yet, this article is a throwback to old-school methods of manual gruntwork. I can see several sides of value to this, but it strikes me as more of a niche than a big part of the future.

If anyone cared to do so, I suspect they could overlay your concept of OO marketing research methods with big data. Seems like they would fit almost hand-to-glove. "Persons with these affiliations/status markers/need sourcing choices prefer ad X."

Re: MOOCs and the general education economy

Skydaemon — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:49:00 -0000

"The upshot of this is that the humanities need to start developing a new economic model, one that will not depend on 1000s of undergraduates taking composition or western civ or whatever."

Perhaps the answer is simply a question of scope. Maybe there is a MOOU(niversity) instead of a MOOC, and - to pull an idea from your earlier post - courses are manifested as guilds within the MOOU.

The advantage of something like this, is it lends itself to a subscription model rather than pay per course. The whole idea of paying per course is tied to the physical need to cleanly segment classes, and have time limited outcomes with direct teacher-student relations. Who's to say a student has to finish 5 courses in one semester instead of 10 concurrently over 2 semesters and multiple profs?

To examine the subscription model more, why shouldn't alum continue having access to the MOOU if they're willing to pay a subscription fee for access to the virtual world. Not only does lifelong education start to mean something, but they potentially pick up the subsidizing slack for current students. Throw in real world experience brought back to the atmosphere merely though participation and maybe there's a way to improve the level of overall value to students too. If you ditch the class model in favor of a world approach, everyone present doesn't necessarily have to be a student.

Re: mathematics and evil

Skydaemon — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:17:46 -0000

I can understand the association of math and evil in some way.

In previous times the prospect of reducing the humanities to a commodity via algorithms didn't hold the fear that could exist today. If writing instruction becomes a combination of algorithms, then it becomes a free downloadable app on your iphone, not something you pay someone to teach in a university.

One of the 'evil' parts of capitalism, is just it's insistence that anything which is widely available and easily obtainable should have a low price, even if it's powerful. Which raises a moral question, is it right to hoard information and expertise and dispense it selectively and at great cost when possible to do otherwise? Is that less evil than capitalism? For individuals, hoarding probably is better, for the human species as a whole, it probably isn't. Capitalism doesn't serve individuals so much as it does the whole. Humanists tend to regard that as a bad thing, but I'm no longer certain that it is.

Another issue, is that turning information into a commodity inverts 'the natural order of things'. Ie, the work of thinking people is worth little, potentially resulting in poverty level renumeration, and the work of manual laborers (miners etc) is elevated relatively. Would we expect thinkers to accept this as how things should be? In a world where information is free and widely available, this very much is the natural order.

One of the topics that's interested me a lot lately is the idea of the.. for lack of a better word... 'subsumation' of sentience. The idea is that human individuals exist as part of a larger emerging organism. The individual humans need to be just smart enough to get the larger whole 'online' as it were. After which, being an individual capable of independent thought becomes a liability rather than a boon, or at minimum, a very selective role. Essentially, you end up with an evolutionary imperative to pass higher order thought and sentience up the chain, from individual humans, to the larger emerging meta-human. We don't think of the cells in our body as having independent sentience. But maybe they did originally, at least more so than their current obedient form. The more I look, the less difference I see between cells and humans. For humanists who embrace the values of individualism, I could see why this would be a frightening prospect. Perhaps in some sense, humanists are simply anti-evolutionists?

Re: on the reality of language

Skydaemon — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:36:05 -0000

I was thinking more about the amoeba, human, unicron perspective and thought about language. It occurs to me that creatures of different scales are likely to use different communication methods based on their scale.

Small organisms use chemical communication, human sized creatures use vocal sounds, and if I had to guess at how planet-sized creatures communicate, it would probably be gravitational waves.

It's noteworthy that the smaller creatures generally lack the capability to communicate with larger scale creatures through the larger method. If they say that language is related to thought, how much more true is that for creatures using wholly different basic methods of communication.

Re: on the reality of language

Skydaemon — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:53:21 -0000

In programming, OO is a system modelling approach or language. You lay out an object representation that suits the purposes of the system you are trying to create. If two different designers have two different purposes, it's entirely possible to look upon the same data and required methods as composing different object structures. Some of your peers call this the withdrawing nature of objects, it is just a roundabout way of saying that objects are inherently tied to the perspective and needs of the modeller. Some people seem to want to argue that there is no perspective in OO, but there is a bounded one. OO is a conceptual and mechanical modelling approach, you can't make anything that pleases you, but you do have a fair amount of leeway in how you lay out the objects.

To a human, a river is a source of fishing, transportation, irrigation, and all other manner of important things. To Unicron (a planet eating robot). a river is just a flavor feature of his latest meal, and probably unworthy of noting as an object itself. The important thing to recognize is that the human perspective, and unicrons perspective aren't just different features of one object, they are incompatible representations of the same thing. Species of different scales will have radically different perspectives and models of the universe (an amoeba, a human, and Unicron will see very little the same way).

People don't model for no reason, not ever. I suppose they could confuse themselves into believing they have no conscious intent behind their models, but they do. Even if it is just to create a universal system of objects from a human perspective (Unicron doesn't see objects your way). That is essentially an embodiment of what humans find important or noteworthy, at that moment. It would be inherently tied to their technology of the day. If tomorrow we invented a super-car that was fueled entirely on the white husks of juice-drained oranges, the orange husk would very quickly become its own object.

So you or your peers bring up questions, which to me, appear to be shifting the purpose of the model. The idea you raise of words as objects looks that way to me. Could words be objects? Sure. In the same way that rivers could be a flavor feature instead of a transportation system. If you are intent on creating a model where words are a central element it might make perfect sense. The answer to whether words are objects or not is the question: "What is the purpose of your model?"

One thing I haven't seen the OOO people grasp yet is the fuzzy centrality of objects. One of the common things that arises in OO modelling, is the choice of what to make into objects, and what to make into attributes. Is the graffiti an object, or merely an attribute of the wall? Well in OO modelling, if the graffiti has no external purpose of it's own, or except for one thing (ordering cleaning) it is of no interest to your model. In that case it's quite likely that you make it an attribute of the wall instead of designating it as its own object. But if you're modelling marketing systems, including graffiti as a separate object might make a lot of sense. The graffiti might be more important than the wall. In fact, the wall may be an attribute of the graffiti in that kind of model. So you see, here we have the wall, and the graffiti. We have decided we need to include them both, but we have 3 choices as to how to identify objects (wall with attribute, graffiti with attribute, or wall and graffiti), and which we choose is based on the purpose of modelling and which is primarily important, versus something we're doing our best to marginalize or ignore.

And yes, rendering something as an attribute of another object is an admission of marginalization. It's a statement that your object model is not going to create whole new systems for that particular difference, that you're going to package the handling of it into the object it is affixed to. Creating special systems entails an expense, both in overhead and maintenance. This is an expense we undertake for objects of primary importance, and almost never for mere attributes. This is also one of the ways to reverse-engineer how 'the world' sees objects. The existence of systems created purely for a type of object, implies that it is recognized by that model as a separate object.

Back on the subject of words as objects. Models are oriented towards purposes, and those purposes can have a particular nature. The traditional way of modelling the world (in my opinion) would revolve around the physical manipulation of the world, not the mental manipulation. In physical manipulation, words don't require object status. As in any model of the world, it will be a function of our technology. When we can manipulate the world with our thoughts, perhaps mental manipulation will be the dominant theme of modelling the world, but until then physical traits rule.

Re: Telecom Debate: An alternative to the cable giants | FP Comment | Financial Post

Skydaemon — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:36:00 -0000

"We’ve announced multiple benefits that will flow from the transaction, including a new made-in-Canada service to compete with Netflix, Apple and Google;"

Canadians don't view this as adding to the competitive mix, it's seen as Bell attempting to expand it's oligopoly position to avoid serious competitive choice from gaining footholds. Make sure that everything can be bundled together with Bell to leverage existing oligopoly power, or risk leaving a chink in the armor that a competitor could build a consumer base from and force real competition.

The basic issue is that the major providers in Canada are unrepentant gougers that provide poor value for the services provided. Their main concern in life appears to be eliminating competition, limiting and capping data access and usage, and lowering caps to elevate themselves from mere gouging to wholesale (internet) highway robbery as fast as they can get there. Stifling internet-based innovation and suffocating any data-intensive services in their cribs is just a side-benefit I guess.

I see the existence of "veritically integrated" media and communication providers as a bad thing. I see no reason to desire Bell or any of the others to gain market share in anything, and view additional "veritical integration" as even worse.

As for a borderless world, I can't help but wonder what you're talking about. Ever viewed a video on the internet? There are plenty of border-based restrictions erected. The fact that you haven't (collectively) sealed national internet borders yet is hardly an argument in your favor.

On the borderless world topic, if I was to travel to Taiwan, are you implying that some Bell service would be accessible from there? Do tell! Other than a bit of worldwide internet traffic being routed though some fibre optic cable that you intend to meter and charge for (like a troll on a bridge), I have no idea what you could possibly mean.

As for needing to be big enough to compete against international competitors, name a single manner in which that matters to a Canadian consumer. One related to your actual business will do (no, buying hockey teams isn't a reason to grant you larger monopoly-type powers).

Re: critical thinking is bogus

Skydaemon — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 14:07:05 -0000

The more interesting question to me, is 'what categories of critical thinking exist'. Perhaps both writing and critical thinking are due for hyphenation.

I think having a fully enumerated list, would not only help people who want to discuss it, but it would also help point out serious holes in degree programs. Would any liberal arts degree accept not teaching all categories or facets of critical thinking? I expect they do now without realizing it. The reason it's interesting to me is because you'd likely need a list if you ever wanted to build it into an AI, but that's a theoretical future thing.

Here's a tentative initial draft of mine:
-As you point out, there's some sort of rhetorical-critical thinking skillset related to communication and audience analysis.
-There's some sort of deductive-critical thinking ability related to walking through logic paths. -Reductive-critical thinking, the ability to decompose a problem or object of study into parts to gain a better handle on it. This is also essential for identifying the boundaries of a problem.
-One programmers frequently use is systemic-critical thinking, the ability to recognize or assign structure to problems and solutions. "Going meta" on problems is also an example of systemic-critical thinking, as you raise yourself up a level of abstraction to systemic patterning. Abstraction and patterning are just a tools of the more general systemic-critical thinking ability.
-Another one programmers often use is what I'll call refactoring-critical thinking, the ability to convert one type of problem or solution, into a different form. For example, a lengthy procedural solution, can sometimes be restructured as a recursive solution. Both might be operationally correct, but one will be cleaner or more efficient or more readable etc.
-Finally, there's what I'll call iterative-critical thinking. The ability to consider multiple stages or factors in deriving problem solutions. It's the ability to arrive at and solidify intermediate stages of solutions, before jumping off from there again. Essentially, the ability to compartmentalize and chain critical thought exercises on top of each other to get to a distant solution.

Then there must be field-dependent experience buttressing critical thinking. Being familiar with how a discipline or profession does business on a deep, practical level feeds into critical thinking fairly broadly. Rhetorical-critical thinking depends on knowing the audience, and how better to know them and relate to them than having walked a mile in their shoes. However, this would also feed into deductive-critical thinking and others. If you're solving a problem in a discipline, it helps a great deal to have some insight into the real nature of the problem and structures involved. Solutions tend to be superficial and wrong when you don't know the field you're dealing with well. I'm not sure if this is actually a form of critical thinking, or just a frequent informational requirement that people often lack. I suspect it's the latter.

Re: ethos and the reputation economy

Skydaemon — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 17:40:03 -0000

It seems to me that what you're bumping up against here is our industrial era employment arrangements. After all, that's what degrees/badges etc are largely aimed at nowadays - the mindless zombies assumed to be operating HR departments. It's not even about whether they _could_ judge skills of applicants, it's about them not having the authority to do so because they're assumed not to be capable. Really, outside of employment-style arrangements, credentials don't and shouldn't have much use.

The whole employee-as-cog-in-industrial-process model assumes that there is nothing special about any employee walking in the door, and that hiring managers are not capable of judging qualities without credentials. Two people couldn't be replacable cogs if they weren't equivalent, and without that, the whole process model is undermined (or rather, exposed to risk, which while it may be there anyway, the industrial-cog model largely depends on believing it isn't).

Relying on judgment, or anything non-reproducable or non-replaceable is the ultimate sin in the industrial model.

To wrap this thought up with a bit of a leap, I suspect that your second nonmodern ethos would require replacing our industrial-cog model with something new. That may be coming, but probably in the old style of progress - by waiting for the stewards of the previous model to die off.

As for badges, the problem with the concept of badges isn't the positive attributes they intend to denote, it's their corruptability and lack of standards and meaning. The quality of credentials isn't defined by what they claim, it's defined by what they reject. A degree is only worth something if slackards fail to earn one, so too with badges. Not only do they need a reliable mechanism to deny the unworthy from earning badges, they probably also require a means to remove them from frauds. This again runs smack into the sin of judgement. Who is qualified to judge badge earners? Judges that elect themselves to the role are rarely worthy, even less so when driven by money in an unregulated capitalist market. I could see individual companies having badges that they judge themselves, for their own employees. It could become sort of an extended resume, incorporating the reputation and standards of known employers. Other than that, I don't see much value in the badge thing currently.

-----

I'll share one other spooky thought. Imagine if badges/credentials were commonplace for everything, and imagine if they were also public in the facebook sense. (Recall that facebook started auto-tagging names on photos by facial recognition not long ago.) Now imagine a pair of sunglasses with a digital readout and a wifi that does a lookup on people you view, and displays their credentials in real time as you walk around the street. You sit down on a train, and get to view the accomplishment list of the student, the lawyer, and the artist that are on the train with you, all without their consent.

Obsessive credentialling of everything has implications in an anonymous-less connected world. You are creating a peer-to-peer panopticon of sorts, is that good or bad? One thing is certain, legislators won't do anything about it pre-emptively, it will exist in practice long before they consider it.

Re: first-year composition: writing discovers its own purpose

Skydaemon — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 08:24:17 -0000

This is an old post but I'll reply anyway.

FYC writing courses have always had muddled objectives. Those
objectives, for whatever reason, never get named out loud. Almost as if
naming them would invite attack or require extensive justification.

I'd say that learning to actually write, in the technical sense, is at
best the 3rd most important objective in a typical FYC writing course. I
see the primary goal as learning to inject external content into an
exposition and use it to expand an argument. It's developing the
ability to extend an argument outside of your own brain. After you've
core-dumped and the paper is not long enough, this is the next step in
continuing. This is also the step students never learned to do in high
school, and have no idea where to begin. All that nonsense about
becoming better, more informed citizens? Well this is it right here.
The ability to research and expand sophisticated understanding into a
topic of interest. This is probably the most valuable and subtly
transferrable part of the course.

The second objective, I'd name as enhancing critical thinking. A long
time ago on Alex's blog, the comments discussed the definition of
critical thinking. It boiled down to learning how to evaluate success
criteria given limited information. The very act of determining what
you're supposed to be doing is what separates those who can think
critically from those who can't. Merely having a grading rubric doesn't
make them critical thinkers. Furthermore, it's a multi-faceted
skillset, you have to develop it separately in different domains, and it
becomes richer and deeper as you do so. The very act of spoon-feeding
direct instruction and correction, and removing the fuzziness, removes
the opportunity to deepen critical thought for the students. Writing
instruction happens to be complex and the rules are difficult to
discern. The complexity and vagueness itself is fertile ground for
developing critical thought.

In my opinion, the gains you make in technical writing abiliity (3rd
most important, and least broadly useful) by hand-holding and giving
elaborate feedback, actually undermine the critical thought
development. I do believe that the feedback could be honed to something
far more efficient towards generating masses of technically acceptable
writers. However, I believe doing so would also forfeit the critical
thinking objective.

You could argue that writing courses shouldn't teach critical thinking.
But humanities (and breadth courses for non-humanities disciplines) all
hint that developing critical thinkers is a goal, yet none of their
courses actually teach it formally. At some point, you either have to
teach it directly (which would be an inherently high failure course if
it had even a whiff of integrity), or allow some leeway for the courses
which teach it as a side-effect.