VR, Peanuts, and Willpower

I have a friend who's a recovering video game addict. She* knows this, and has it under control, but she cannot play video games alone because she knows she will come to three days later realizing she's forgotten to go to class. I am the reverse; I enjoy video games, but I will go months before realizing that I haven't played in a while, and maybe I'd enjoy it. In this way, addiction to virtual worlds is different from addiction to drugs. It doesn't affect everyone, only a certain fraction of people who for some reason are psychologically predisposed to it. It's a bit like food allergies. Peanuts, e.g., are not generally considered poisonous, but they are to me, just as video games are not inherently addictive, but they are to my friend. Almost any activity can be addictive to someone; the result is what is usually termed a 'nerd'. The prevalence of video gaming, however, ensures that video game addiction occupies a special place in the public view. While this awareness fuels public worry over the problem of gaming addiction, the very same awareness leads to the extinguishing of that worry. Video game addiction has already started to fade from the public view as it becomes an old problem that we know to expect and know how to deal with. The negative impacts on the lives of gaming addicts are not a result of any inherent feature of games, though the features of a game may make it more or less potentially addicting; they are the results of susceptible people not knowing how to deal with something new, or to recognize when they personally have a problem. And the solution is correspondingly nothing to with video games themselves. It's teaching people to exercise willpower and effectively manage their own lives.

*Yes, female.

What Plagiarism Isn't

For the record, the idea of replacing a symbol with the thing it symbolizes to enforce rational thinking comes to me from Eliezer Yudkowski (http://yudkowsky.net/).

Your Boss Is IT Equipment

The fundamental enabler of large-scale organization is not management; it's communication. Starting on a small scale, any 2, 3,4, or n people can only organize and coordinate their actions if they can communicate with each other. The limit on the scale of organizations is the limit on how effectively people can pass information around. Hierarchical management structures are a solution to the problem of overcoming the natural spatial, temporal, and cognitive limitations on how effectively any individual can connect with a group of others. They represent a social and cognitive technology for facilitating communication, which uses extra people as components to make connections. Because people are very expensive pieces of equipment, hierarchical management is limited in how many connections it can support. This limit can only be overcome when you realize that the real problem is not how to manage more effectively; it's how to enable more effective communication.

This is why information technology is so important. This is why the internet is so socially disruptive. It is an alternate approach to amplifying the ability of an individual to communicate with large groups of others without the need to use other humans as components in the system. At both the smallest scales and the largest, it makes management obsolete. To reduce costs and build large-scale organizations, just replace your managers with switches and routers.

This Post Inspired by Here Comes Everybody.

Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

Computer Science has an embarrassing problem: it attracts a much smaller percentage of females than other science & engineering disciplines. This was not always the case; the world's first computer programmer was a woman, and in the late 70s and 80s women were not uncommon in CS departments. So why did they leave? The answer must explain what makes Computer Science as it is now so different from Mathematics or Electrical Engineering. It's not the subject matter; no, the most significant distinguishing characteristic of Computer Science is that almost no one becomes an Electrical Engineer or a theoretical Mathematician in 6th grade - almost everyone in those fields starts out on an equal footing - but children can program. The barrier to entry for experience with the tools of Computer Science is low, and a 6-year-old can get it. And thus, when I ask women I know why they didn't consider Computer Science in college, I get answers like "I would've been competing with people like you who've been doing it since you were kids," and "I might've if I'd known how fun it could be." Computer Science, more than other fields, suffers from gender discrimination in childhood. Fixing the imbalance will require not just better college recruitment, but changing how we raise our children.

A Technical Religion

Religion and technology are not usually mentioned together. "Religion" as a word has an air of archaism. It is based in the eternal declarations of God to our ancient ancestors, not the newfangled creations of secular men. Yet all knowledge ultimately is inspired by God, including the inspiration for new technology. God works most often through the agency of human servants, and surely He would want His servants to be as capable as possible. The message of true religion does not change, but the media for transmitting it do as God inspires humanity to produce more and better tools to improve the lives of His children. As a side effect, He lets us have Angry Birds.

Mickey Must Die

Let's get one thing straight: it is entirely possible to simultaneously believe that the current state of copyright law is borked beyond repair and that intellectual property is a valid concept which ought to be useful for making money. The law says there's this thing called "Fair Use", an escape from copyright restrictions that lets our culture build upon and expand creative works while still respecting intellectual ownership. But it is so ill-defined and so disrespected by the courts that no one can be confident of actually using it and being safe from attack. Even if your right to Fair Use is upheld in a court, the simple threat of fees from a tactical lawsuit is enough to freeze any attempts to apply it. In this environment of fear, copyright law's primary function is no longer to encourage innovation by ensuring compensation; it is to provide a legal avenue for stifling speech and stomping out creativity. So when I say that I do not respect copyright law, that it should not be followed and needs to be eliminated, that Mickey Must Die, it is not because I think that all information must be inherently free and artists have no claim on their work. It is because my sense of social responsibility is stronger than my greed.

You Can't Buy Everything At The Bazaar- Yet

The first rule of good software is that it scratches the programmer's personal itch. Unfortunately, not everyone with an itch is a programmer. Programming exists as a profession precisely because not everyone with a problem is capable of effectively solving it themselves, and thus someone has to get paid for scratching other people's itches. This will always be the case, because no matter how widely computer literacy is spread throughout society, some people will always be better at it than others; the fact that almost everyone can read and write does not make novelists obsolete, and the same is true for good programmers. This seems to imply that there will always be bad software maintained by people who care only as far as they are paid. However, there is one way out: as the population of programmers expands, the probability that one of them shares whatever problem you may have grows. When the bazaar is big enough, one just has to solve the problem of finding the person who wants to make what you need.

In Which Cliff Stoll Destroys Ignorance

Rarely do those who experience great stories know at the beginning how the stories are going to end, precisely because it is the banishment of high orders of ignorance[1] that makes for a great story. If you already know the end of your story, you're already there, and there is no more story. All character development and all personal growth is a matter of coming to realize the answers to questions that one previously didn't even know existed to be asked. The higher the levels of ignorance overcome, the greater the story is.

At one level, Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg[2] is the story of how an astronomer became an expert in computer security, but Cliff could have expected this; he didn't know about security from the start, but he knew he would have to learn. He knew that there were questions to be asked on that topic. On another level, The Cuckoo's Egg is about how a self-styled irresponsible kid discovered responsibility and ethics. This is the greater story, because Cliff not only had to learn the answers, and not only had to learn the questions to ask to get the answers, but had to first learn that there was a topic about which ethical questions could be asked. That realization is the fundamental weltanschauung-altering event, which Cliff Stoll struggled with throughout his pursuit of the German hacker. He knew that his views were changing; he worried about how he would be received by his "radical friends" in the "People's Republic of Berkeley"; and he worried because he knew that not only would they disagree with his new politics, but that they were basically incapable of understanding his new politics, because they did not know how to ask the questions that were the prerequisite for understanding. It is that realization, not the simple acquisition of technical knowledge, that made him a real expert in his new field.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=352194

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787/

Facebook Knows My Family Tree

Genealogical research is not about generating new information; it is about trying to find information that already exists somewhere, in some inconvenient format, and re-entering it. It is using human brains to look for pointers in written records and joining those records by hand. As more and more records are digitized, or collected originally in digital form, it is utterly insane that human researchers should still be required to engage in this menial work. No one should have to slave away manually searching through old records looking for the pointers that connect one human to another in the family graph. The greatest potential revolution in genealogy lies not in new software to streamline the process of doing research, but in software that eliminates the human bottleneck entirely. The pinnacle of genealogical technology will have arrived when family trees assemble themselves, requiring only that someone ask.

Circumventing Filters for the Good Guys

Discussions of the ethical implications of technology tend towards the negative; if 'ethics' and 'technology' are mentioned in the same paragraph, it's usually to warn that the technology in question is somehow dangerous. Some more frequent targets of this sort of derision are file-sharing software (like BitTorrent) and anonymizers (like Tor). BYU's own internet filters even block websites about Tor, as it can be used to circumvent them. So it's nice to see an example of both of these technologies being used on a large scale for what most Americans at least would find a very ethically appropriate goal: circumventing Iran's attempts to simplify totalitarian surveillance by eliminating its citizens' use of encryption[1]. Technology itself, after all, is not good or bad- it's all in how the technology in question is being used.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/tors-latest-project-helps-iran-get-back-online-amidst-internet-censorship-regime.ars

Eastern Europe: A Bastion of Freedom and Democracy?

In case you haven't heard yet, while the US public has worrying about SOPA and PIPA, Europe started dealing with their own version, called ACTA. While some were allegedly taken by surprise by the massive protests against SOPA and PIPA, everyone's pretty much used to American's protesting things. But would you be surprised to hear about anti-ACTA demonstrations in Prague? Or Czech members of parliament refusing to support it "as a matter of principle", and claiming that the media "played a part in the hush-up"[1]? A Slovenian ambassador even made a public apology for having signed the agreement, claiming that she acted carelessly and in ignorance and failed in her civic duty[2]. That is a level of candor that we never expect to hear from a US politician. Admitting ignorance as the Slovenian ambassador did is the first step towards gaining wisdom. But unfortunately, admitting ignorance is socially unnacceptable around here. Everybody knows, tacitly, that no one person can possibly be an expert on everything that they would need to know to decide every issue that faces the government. We'll start to make progress a lot faster when we can get around to no longer being embarrassed by that fact.

[1] http://m.ceskapozice.cz/en/news/politics-policy/czech-euro-mps-oppose-%E2%80%98completely-wide-mark%E2%80%99-acta

[2] http://boingboing.net/2012/02/03/slovenias-ambassador-apologi.html

Electronic Democracy

In 1979, Norman Spinrad wrote about an electronic democracy[1] that allowed every citizen of a world to be directly involved in their own government. At the time, this was a fantastic futuristic vision, a conceit to make a story work. One of the founding ideas of representative government is the impracticality of actually having everybody directly involved; so, we must allow a class of professionals to take care of governance full-time on our behalf. This works so long as the representatives can be trusted to act in the interests of those they represent. That is incredibly difficult to ensure, but as long as the inconvenience of direct democracy outweighs the combined inconveniences of either keeping politicians honest or dealing with the fact that they're not, we just do the best we can. Since 1776, the US has gotten worse at it (non-monotonically, but with a net downward trend), but there was never much we could ever do about it. That is no longer the case; Spinrad's electronic democracy could really exist in our world. The internet makes it easy for the public to remain informed on what's going on in their nation and its government. And while they can't all keep track of all of it, some millions of people can spend some small amount of their time on any particular aspect of the government's working; there is, collectively a lot more effort available to be used than all of the full-time government employees put together can provide themselves. We have the tools to address the problem of accountability. If we care, we can ensure our representatives do their jobs right.

Inspired by http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/14472117492/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought.shtml

[1] http://www.amazon.com/World-Between-Norman-Spinrad/dp/0553258931/

Information Overload

It has been said that, when you have enough data, you don't have to be too clever. Or, in other words, more data usually beats better algorithms. This is empirically true when it comes to programming machines. If you just know some good ways of finding information already stored somewhere, you can often save a lot of trouble on actually calculating it; if you have a sufficiently massive dataset, you don't have to worry about how to do good statistics with a representative sample, because you can just look at the entire population. But many people, myself included, implicitly apply this logic to the operation of their own brains, and, sadly, our brains just don't work like computers. Every day, I am immersed in internet news. While I'm reading it, I always feel like this is a very important thing to do, and how wonderful is it that I can be so well informed in this day and age. But in the long run, very little of it really matters. I never want to get to work on anything until I know everything that the internet knows about that particular topic; but in reality, there is a point, very near the beginning, past which more reading will not improve my performance in any meaningful way. A human needs to be clever, to know how to use the information he has more than to gain all the information there is. One of the greatest challenges for education now may be not getting access to accurate information or figuring out how to study well, but rather filtering out what we actually need to know and successfully ignoring everything else.