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"How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?"

#consciousness #hardproblems

#lol #grandmotherwillow #pocahontas #math #hardproblems 😰😰 (at Cawang Uki, Jakarta Timur)

#pocahontas #hardproblems #grandmotherwillow #math #lol

Rockets

#hardproblems

Facebook and diminishing returns...

From here:

The problem that I'm seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity. So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind. I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed. I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I've played with. At some point, someone is going to get it "right", and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don't know they're apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

#autisticsocialsoftware #diminishingreturns #facebook #flow #hardproblems #privacy #relevantm #reputation #socialnetworks #socialsoftware #sociallyinept #socialprivacy #justmigrate

The social cloud

via Ina Social network is a terrrible metaphor If you've ever talked to me, I have probably taken you by the pin of your collar and blasted something like this in your direction: 'Social networks!? Don't talk to me about social networks! I despise the term. Not only is a terrrible metaphor for reality. Its dangerrous and damaging as well" We must start using the social cloud If you didn't manage to escape at this point, I'd have continued "We need a new metaphor, such as a social cloud, that recognizes the esssential fluidity and dynanism of social relationships. Only then can we hope to build platforms that don't direct people into autistic-style interactions that plague these so-called social networks" At which point, I'd generally point up to the sky and get a far away look in my eye. Which was also your cue to slip away unnoticed. Its not just me... Well, I think its only fair to warn you that there's more of the same coming. You'll no longer be able to escape by simply avoiding me. Other people are starting to say the same thing. Normal people. Respectable people. Using almost exactly the same words. But unaccompanied by the wild-eyed look. Skip the first 14 minutes and watch to the end.

#autisticsocialsoftware #danahboyd #designsocialtool #flow #hardproblems #opensocial #socialnetworks #socialsoftware #trust #justmigrate

Solving the hard problems of identity and trust

J.P. Rangaswami explores the notion of applying ideas from the banking system to the problems of identity and trust in the information economy over at his confusedofcalcutta blog. Using those thoughts as a starting point, the following is a riff that just got way too long for the comments section: If the question was: "How do we most efficiently handle the information economy?" The answer may well be found by looking at the banking institutions that evolved to serve the cash economy. And its an excellent idea to look for efficient services for the information economy by taking inspiration from those services that increase liquidity and reduce friction in the cash economy.

This search begins with the fundamental question: So how do banks work? Well, you don't have to have had an account in Northern Rock or in a US subprime lender to know that banks are all/nothing depending on the presence/absence of trust.

But its also worth stepping outside the normal stomping grounds visited when discussing trust and noting that trust emerges naturally in two distinct ways in human society. 1) Through contract ritual 2) Through friendship/gifting rituals. Every tribe and culture that ever existed engages in both. And both are necessary to satisfy our economic needs. Its worth repeating that and empasising the keywords. Both are needed to satisfy our economic needs. The role of frienship/gifting rituals in meeting our economic needs is often overlooked not because of its lack of importance but because we are hard-wired to have a blind eye to its importance.

Bear with me while I explain what I mean by this point. We don't intuitively understand the mechanics of friendship/gifting rituals because evolution/Mother Nature/God has hard-wired us to have a blind eye to the mechanics of these rituals. Because Mother Nature doesn't want us to be too calculating in all our actions. Because she knows that a lot of the beneficial things we could do, we wouldn't do, if we were to stand back an analyse them coldly. Having kids, for example. Or risking ourselves in even a small way to rescue someone else in trouble. Both these examples parallel friendship/gifting rituals...ie where you are giving of yourself with no explicit contractual expectation of getting a return.

Think of finding yourself in a position of being able to rescue another person. Now, move on and think of yourself in the position of being able to rescue a bank on the verge of collapse. The banking system is a great example of the contractual ritual formalised and scaled-up so that it operates with great efficiency for the benefit of the market and all its participants. As solid as a banking system might look as a central part of society it is of course highly vulnerable and it could collapse overnight. But the threat of collapse is mitigated by a form of the friendship/gifting ritual rather than the contractual ritual that kicks into the action when the system come under threat. For example, when a major bank collapses it causes a scare and a run on other banks. The governments intervenes on behalf of its citizens and will sink all the financial and political power it can muster to rescue the banking system for wholesale implosion.

As such the entire banking system is underwritten in trust not by a contractual guarantees but confident expectation that a rescue is likely to be there when it is needed, whether or not the banking system is truly deserving or not. Which is just another way of describing a friendship contract.

Thus, although we are generally blind to it, the fact remains that friendship/gifting contract is the foundation for the contractual contracts upon which the banking business is operated. Banking systems could not exist without it. Banking systems would repeatedly collapse without it.

If you wish to explore the hidden mechanics and processes of gifting/frienship economies that underlie our contract-based economies and how they are used to create bonds of trust it is worth taking a look at these analyses in wikipedia as a starting point.

Koha Moka

#hardproblems #identity #trust #justmigrate