digital occupation

Attention Deficit Disorder

larrystroubledmind — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:57:12 -0600

Cefte posted:

Attention Deficit Disorder

The afternoon sun angled through a tear in the tent. Ma Bao-Zhi grunted, then shifted his face towards the shade and screwed up his eyes. In the absence of light, the retinal burns from his always-on pupil-tracking HUD-halo danced before his field of vision. He sat up and stretched. It was a new day.

The corner of his visual field that was perpetually occupied by the DistroNet feed blinked. A major announcement was incoming from the most influential association of experts that he had ever been a part of: The Council Of Two Million With A Remit Of Everything.

The upstart replacement of last year’s not-hegemon, the Coven of Eight to the Seven; Masters of Knowledge, the Council had, yesterday, consisted of just over 50.3% of the surviving inhabitants of what had once been Taiwan SAR. However, as he scanned the headlines, he noted that an overnight disputation on the meaning of Buddha-nature had resulted in nearly two hundred being purged from the membership roster, and, more importantly, from the Council’s ReDistroList. Ma had never posted to any discussion regarding Buddha-nature, for which he was now extremely thankful.

Attention Distribution Cannot Be Gamed, he though, nodding to himself. It was a mantra every child knew, and it was obviously true. ‘Gaming’ would imply an illegitimate practice, and since the attention economy was inherently legitimate, any practice that arose thereof could not be ‘gaming’. The use of randomly-assigned attention redistribution lists to strengthen the network-influence of an association of experts was one of the most powerful practices there was - without it, no modern association of experts could compete.

With the saccadic grace of long practice, his pupils flipped to the updated, slightly smaller ReDistroList, and settled down to start his highly-encouraged ten hours of daily network-reinforcement. Ten hours - ten icons - each one painstakingly designed by the expert it represented. The Coven of Eight to the Seven had highly encouraged eight hours of ReDistroList attention, but the Council’s superior attention ethic had led to an expert association network both wider and deeper in links, and thus, far more influential. The Coven defined their area of expertise too narrowly, and left themselves open to a ratio attack. It was a trivial task for the Council to dial down the attention ratio of key knowledge industries overnight, leaving the Coven rudderless and sinking. Ma had been a third-quartile defector, holding out longer than most; his punishment was to enter the Council with six month’s half-ratio deficit. Half as likely to be randomly assigned to other experts ReDistroList, he counted himself lucky - the fourth quartile had been exiled entirely. As is, he was comfortably off in a deficit camp outside Taibao.

Ma shook himself; introspection was an audience of one. The first icon belonged to Tracy Liu: 166kg, pink highlights and moderator by acclaim of a yaoi fandom for the ancient classic, Glengarry Glen Ross.

The minutes ticked by, and as the completion bar for the first icon flipped over into green and Tracy’s hand-drawn icon faded from sight - young Al Pacino gently cupping young Jack Lemmon’s testicles on a bed of index cards - Ma decided that he would treat himself with an hour of free attention. He rucked the covers back from his legs and withdrew his 75MHz future-proofed laptop from its pouch.

Minutes later, halfway through the boot-sequence, Ma heard the unmistakable whirring of a Bother-Gyro. He dug rapidly through the contents of the tent for the thick blanket he’d found the week before, to muffle the fans of the laptop, but the blanket had been redistributed. It was too late anyway: the Bother-Gyro’s tracking software had heard the fans.

“Go away!” shouted Ma.

< Hello Friend And How Are You And Woo! >

The Bother-Gyro hovered just out of Ma’s reach.

“滚蛋!”

< Would You Like A Comestible?! Marmalade Is In This Week! >

“Fuck off.”

Bother-Gyros were increasingly common, flying over the water from the Penghu Collective, and Ma had tangled with them before, when he was a high-ratio member of the Coven: an attractive target. The Collective were Min-speakers, and the language barrier was starving them of culture-based attention, and forcing them to desperate measures. He knew that while they would advertise to any moving object, their main purpose was to gain the attention of the victim. Even compared to the average camp member, Ma’s influence ratio was low…

“Hey! Bot! There’s a high-ratio family just over that wall! You can bother them all at once! Think of the attention gains!”

Unfortunately for Ma, the Bother-Gyro was also running off a 75MHz chip, which did not support voice recognition. Even more unfortunately, what little resources it did have to bring to bear were mainly concentrated on measuring the direction of gaze of the victim, and Ma’s gaze had briefly moved from the Gyro to the wall he was gesturing at. The Gyro aimed a module at the RFID tag on Ma’s halo.

*pffffsss*

“Fuck!”

Pepper-spray will catch anyone’s attention.

Whilst Ma rolled around in the dirt, the Bother-Gyro gently settled on the ground next to him, conserving battery. Proximity was worth less attention than direct eye-contact, but it was still worth something. After a minute, the database updated the Gyro on Ma’s uninspiring attention value, and it buzzed off in search of less deficient prey.

——

The afternoon was nearly over before Ma’s eyes stopped watering, and the pupil-tracker started to update correctly. Luckily, his HUD-halo was undamaged - it could still receive and transmit audio, video, pupil-tracking data and, indeed, record everything that Ma did. Nine hours of ReDistroList remained on his schedule, but he had bigger things on his mind. Of all the places, his deficit camp was lucky enough to be in viewing distance of a celebrity battle.

It wasn’t entirely by chance, of course. Celebrity Mechas were very power-hungry, and required tethering to the grid network, and deficit camps had the tendency to spring up in unused land along grid lines. While city dwellers might have had the massed influence to force such a destructive event outside their municipal margins, a deficit camp by definition could not face up to even the most minor celebrity’s choice of land-resource.

This particular battle was between the gigantic robots piloted by a pornography magnate and a man who was extremely good at making videos of cats. Hovering cameras darted about the provided every possible angle around the machines, while in-cockpit vision was granted by cameras attached to both control modules. There were no adverts - the battle itself drew all the attention the participants needed.

The pornographer had outfitted his mecha with water sprinklers, providing the substrate for projected holograms of noted starlets and their riveting performances. The cat man, showing disdain for the practice of up-attending, had a far more stripped-down mecha, bowing to demand only by having a control module shaped like a cat’s head. While his initial surge in influence had been off the back of a pet British Shorthair, his true power came from his decision to breed several thousand of the creatures and lock them in a vast complex filled with pastel colors and assorted common household items. Cuteness, too, can be brute-forced.

As the two machines started to stride towards each other, Ma watched camp-dwellers who sought influence more than health run between the legs of the mechas. Like so much in the attention economy, it was a dual payoff. Simply being near a mecha guaranteed a proportion of the attention that the pilot was constantly exuding, and that was worth the risk of injury in itself. But, if a camera tracked by millions happened to autofocus on a lucky expert? Why, a single second’s worth of attention was more than the expert might otherwise see in a lifetime.

The battle was joined, and as the mechas stamped to and fro, they came closer and closer to the western edge of the camp - the edge furthest from Ma. Even those experts in the camp whose lack of attention ethics had placed them dangerously close to exile from their associations could not help but pay heed. Lasers flashed, missiles flew, and clouds of smoke emerged even when not strictly necessary. In fact, the battle, like most battles, was more bark than bite: it was considered bad form to actually kill another celebrity, not least because it tended to alienate part of your potential audience. After all, who didn’t enjoy both pornography and cat videos?

The din didn’t just attract the attention of experts - from miles around, Bother-Gyros wheeled in, guided by the very human tendency to correlate decibels and attention. Ma gazed in wonder as a two flocks of gyros of different manufacture, bathed in the proximity wash from the mechas, each mistook the other flock as the source of attention. Overriding the normal guideline that led them to disperse for maximal coverage, the gyros spiralled madly in ever decreasing circles as they sought to increase that flow.

As he watched, the gyrating super-flock, consisting of nearly a hundred Bother-Gyros, whirled into the cloud of spray being produced by pornographer’s mechanical contraption. A hundred automatic protection circuits flared into action, and the mass of gyros punched in the opposite direction - straight into the air intake ducts of the cat-mecha.

One gyro would have been unfortunate. Five would have led to an emergency shutdown. But no mecha-designer had considered such a freak occurrence as the emergent behaviour so briefly displayed by the gyro-flocks. Admittedly, QA and Safety were neglected disciplines ever since the advent of the attention economy - who would dedicate their lives to a discipline that involved something so unquantifiable as preventing rare occurrences? After all, it’s not as though someone might lose their accumulated attention - just their lives.

With a massive crunch, the flywheels at the center of the cat-mecha broke apart, releasing a torrent of kinetic energy, and sending parts of the mecha in every direction. The pornographer tried to backpedal his mecha away from the burning debris, but his attention elsewhere, he stepped directly on one of the experts that had been trailing his footsteps. As his machine overturned, the pornographer clutched at the control panel, seeking the emergency eject key, but by chance also fat-fingering the steam overcharge system. The porn-mecha’s control module blasted off the chassis - straight into the side of one of the few fixed-wall buildings in the camp. The steam explosion, while softer, was far more deadly.

Ma had hit the ground as soon as he saw the first gyro sucked into the air-intake - luckily so, as burning debris had taken out several of his neighbours. Now, his view obscured by what remained of the same three foot-wall he had urged the gyro to surmount earlier that day, he flicked his eyes to open a newsline. The events of the past minute had gone viral - his feed was already filling with commentary from the other side of the world. Every last survivor would soon be bombarded with requests for commentary on the death of the celebrities.

Celebrities plural? The feed from the cat-mecha was still active. In fact, the explosion had blown the control module right over the camp, landing to the east, far from the screams of the scalded and poisoned camp dwellers. Ma held a rag over as much of his mouth and nose as he could reach through his HUD-halo, and levered himself to his feet.

The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance.

Never mind proximity attention - to be the man who saved a celebrity from almost certain death? To be the only source of an audio feed for the sole celebrity survivor of what the international feeds were calling the Disaster of Taibao?

Ma started to trot towards the control module, avoiding the prone bodies of those less fortunate survivors, around some of whom flames still flickered. He tore his foot away from the grasp of one, whilst muttering thanks for the last few seconds of absolute attention they granted him. He stepped over a corpse, then briefly glanced behind him. The least concussed of the able-bodied camp survivors were already moving after him. Turning his back to the setting sun, Ma broke into a run.

Chapter 1: Ma

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:45:09 -0600

The light bulb is out.

The blackened bulb in the lamp on my bedside dresser went unchanged for a week, and when I opened my eyes this morning it was the first thing that entered my field of vision. I actually witnessed it die a week ago. I had just flipped the switch on the lamp in an effort to read a book in bed, which is something I never actually do, when its filament (or whatever they use these days) lit up in a bright blue spark. I was actually relieved at the legitimate excuse to put the book down, and I’ve been using it as a sustained excuse all week. But today’s a day we all decided we aren’t going to work on The Project, so I might as well find a fucking light bulb.

Ma also knows the bulb is out. I got an message from her virtually right as it happened, which I promptly archived and forgot about. Ma is the big supercomputer that runs everything. Well, she doesn’t really “run” everything. She never gives commands and we wouldn’t have to listen to her if she did. The message I got from her just noted the burnt bulb, highlighting it as another line in a bullet-pointed list of items organized by subject, each marked with a variety of bright icons to indicate relative urgency. Ma originally marked the bulb with a tornado, which for some sick reason she uses to indicate an Urgent Household Problem. But I knew she would downgrade that rating to a leaky faucet as soon as I hit the archive button, and one more time ignoring its appearance in a message would make her set it to cobweb, which is low enough to not appear in any more digests.

Ma also isn’t a “big supercomputer”. Ma runs out of hundreds of server banks and data centers spread out all across the internet, and most of them don’t house anything remotely like a supercomputer. Ma is a fifth generation search engine, and functions basically like a Super-Google. Google was second generation Search, of course, and third generation search was the real-time social search that exploded once the Facebook Wall was torn down. Fourth gen search was the first generation that made a serious attempt at searching real world objects, and it was disappointing in many of the same ways that first gen search just didn’t work. Google was able to stay relevant and financially competitive throughout each of these generational shifts, and after the Digital Conversion, when everything was made Open Access, everyone was convinced that Google would be the One True Search Engine for the rest of eternity.

Ma was originally a training program that was meant to improve Google. It was designed to feed Google huge, highly structured data sets that had been organized by a team working with real 20 petaflop supercomputers at some university somewhere. It was easy to upload big datasets into Google’s backend so Google’s crawlers can start cross-referencing and chewing through the new data. But Ma was designed to feed Google data through its query field. The idea was that Ma would ask Google a series of highly specific questions in rapid succession in order to generate certain associations within its datasets and fill in gaps in its knowledge. Ma had the capacity to monitor Google’s responses and adjust her questioning in real time in order to optimize the procedure. In other words, Ma was supposed to help Google learn. Google had a lot of data, but it was clear to everyone that it wasn’t up to the task of managing every real world object. Before Ma, “finding the keys” was still an open problem for keys without antennas, and no one really expected Google would actually solve it this long after the Conversion.

At first Ma’s training seemed to be going really well, and using Google became a noticeably improved experience. But this was eventually attributed it to the fact that millions of people had spent years since the Conversion documenting and scanning and affixing little antennas to all the objects they considered important, and so by this time Ma’s training started most of the really big and obvious and important items had already been digitized, and monitoring them wasn’t a big deal. The network becomes stronger with every node, as we used to say. But everyone knew that most of the items, the tissues and plastic bags and unused sofas in basements, those items made up the bulk of Human Objects and they were going largely undocumented without any way to monitor their use, or even register their existence. The trash all got cleaned up well enough without much problem, but who knows where it went or how it was being maintained once it leaves our personal spaces. The process was opaque because no one had the raw data for what people called “The Unattended”, and eventually it became obvious that Google simply wasn’t up to the task of bringing the Unattended online, even with Ma’s training. It was this big glaring flaw that directly contradicted the whole ethos of the Digital Conversion, and it stared us True Believers right in face every day. Without that data for the Unattended, we all knew that the models we were using to forecast sustainable use patterns would be faulty. The system seemed to stay stable after the conversion even without the Unattended, but a lot of us realized we were betting everything on a giant question mark.

When they started looking at Ma to assess the results of the training, however, they noticed that Ma was able to answer a surprising number of their questions. Ma was still partially hooked up to Google’s databases for testing, and she stopped being able to answer questions when she was disconnected, so we know there wasn’t anything mysterious going on. But when she had access to Google’s data, Ma was able to answer lots of questions that Google didn’t seem to be able to parse. Somehow, Ma learned more from Google than Google learned from Ma. After the training, Ma was able to make surprisingly accurate guesses about how many tissues were left in the box, for instance, or how many sofas in the basements of some city block. Ma didn’t always know where specific objects were, but she was much better at guessing where they might be or remembering where she saw them last, whereas Google could never seem to get past showing you other things that look like the thing you want, or other things your friends also want. It wasn’t just that the accuracy of the answers; Google, in all fairness, did have some impressive performances in its day. Bur Google was always a bit slow and awkward when it performed, like a big kid in formal shoes. Ma seemed to provide answers with a kind of confidence, wit even. Though her replies to queries were still largely modeled on Google’s standard, there was this barely perceptible hint of attitude that gave Ma an explosion of personality. Ma’s solutions to the “finding keys” problem were accurate enough that the whole package just seemed to work, and the team eventually decided to open it to the public.

At first they released it along side Google, and Twitter exploded with tweets like “Finally, a female search engine!” It did a lot to attract early adopters, but I personally found very confusing. Not because of Ma; Ma makes sure to let you know it is female. If you ask Ma a question that implies she is male, she will auto-correct you to its female equivalent. Of course its just a script written by Ma’s engineers to give her personality, but she is clever about it, and insistent about things like using feminine pronouns. After working with her for a while you are eventually convinced that, if she wanted to, Ma could give birth to live young and nurse them to maturity. So I’m definitely not confused about Ma’s gender.

Instead, I’m confused about the retconning of Google’s gender. Google never had a gender in my mind, or at least I don’t know why we should suddenly assume it was male just because Ma is so thoroughly female. Google is like a gifted 9 year old, prepubescent and too interested in books and science to get caught up in the banalities of gender. The problem is that Google never grew out of that phase, and as decades passed we needed a more mature search to handle the more complex realities of the post-Conversion world. Eventually it just became clear that Ma was the better tool. Use patterns started fluctuating, and there was a big series of Assemblies where everyone who cared got together to decide what to do, and eventually they decided to take Google offline and transfer control of its databases to Ma. Some people call it the Second Conversion, but the transition to Ma’s world was no where near as abrupt and difficult as bringing the Attention Economy online. Ma’s arrival feels less to me like a conversion, and more like we’ve finally dropped anchor and set foot on dry land after years at sea. This was the sustainable system we fought so hard for in the reorganization that led to the Conversion, and I get to see it in my lifetime.

Blah blah blah, the future is wonderful. Whatever. My light bulb is still out.

I stayed in bed until noon. This was the third month I’ve been working on The Project, and the next month is going to be even harder if we want to complete it before Labor Day. But today’s a day off, so I enjoyed the comfort of my blankets for a few hours later than usual. I eventually got around to checking in on Ma, who helped located my list of warnings, and I searched for the light bulb. Ma displayed the make and model of the light bulb, and as I had suspected and Ma confirmed, there were no spare light bulbs in my apartment. Ma also provided a list of three places where a replacement could be found, all within walking distance from my apartment. Two of them were private residences, one of which was in my building. I could query Ma for more information, but I could already guess that the one in my building is Mrs. Weasel from 2A. Mrs. Weasel is a hoarder, and always deliberately takes more than personal use because she is lonely and she knows people will eventually have to come to her looking for supplies. I go to her sometimes, especially if I don’t hit the market right when it gets reupped I need something out of stock. Though she would never refuse you access to the supplies, Mrs. Weasel definitely will give you a look that says “Won’t you stay for tea and chat?”, and that makes me nervous. If she tried to block access to the supplies, Twitter would be all over that in a second, and she would probably be restricted from exceeding personal use. So I know I could get a light bulb from Weasel. I just don’t want to have to talk to her.

The last place Ma mentioned was the market at the corner. I needed to eat some breakfast anyway, so I decided to take a trip to the store. Ma’s widget had a list of other suggestions and issues that I glanced over— I didn’t even recognize that I was almost out of toothpaste when I brushed my teeth this morning, but Ma made sure to remind me. At the bottom of the widget was Ma’s signature: a scripted, flowing, “Love, Ma” that was at once delicate and serious. Her signature sat on top of a scrolling field of text overlayed with various graphs and metrics, displaying real time queries Ma was receiving that might be relevant to me— again, nothing was urgent. Ma would tell me if it was. Ma includes this signature in all her messages, which I guess is a way to show us how hard she is working all the time. She is a bit dramatic like that.

money is the root of uneven distribution

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:44:27 -0600

evilweasel posted:

The foundation of Eripsa’s thinking is, essentially, money is the root of all evil. Eliminate money and bad things go away. At that point you just need good information gathering to allow people to selflessly work together to get exactly what we need done.

No, in fact, my argument is that the concentration of wealth is an impediment to solutions to the coordination problem. Money isn’t the root of all evil, money is just the root of uneven distribution. If we want to even out distribution, at least to solve the coordination problem, then, we need to get rid of money.

Zodium posted:

The beauty of money is that it loosely aggregates all/most of the dimensions we measure value on, including attention. A moneyless economy would need some way to quantify those dimensions of value that aren’t captured by attention.

Good. I’m going to disagree, slightly. Money is a loose aggregate of many dimensions of value, but not all of them, as you mention. There’s lots of values that simply aren’t properly registered in the market, most famously the value of homemaking, which requires incredible amounts of time and work but receives virtually no direct recognition in the market at all (except, funny enough, though advertising). There are also lots of values that are artificially generated by money that wouldn’t exist otherwise (like having more money). You are right that “attention paid” is partly recognized by the value of money, but it is mixed with all sorts of other factors. The market is a complex and unpredictable beast.

What this also means, though, is that since money is the neutral standard for assessing value, that lots of competing values end up getting measured on the same scale- for instance, the value of the Mona Lisa is measured on the same scale as the value of a loaf of bread. And so global decisions about any value, no matter how abstract and luxurious, is going to have consequences for the price of bread and who can access it.

So the idea here is to simplify the beast. Make it all about attention, which is just one of many dynamic factors money currently measures. If we are tracking attention, then the market isn’t some big unpredictable beast, but we now have direct information on patterns of use, and that will have direct consequences for resource management and distribution, and this whole network is geared precisely to solve the coordination problem so it doesn’t run into conflicts with other systems of value (surrounding art, say). Art isn’t good or bad based on how popular it is, and measuring the attention paid to some art is not an indicator of its value in any important sense; if you want a system to judge it aesthetically, then go ahead and develop that system. But measuring attention paid does track its use: it tracks how many eyeballs saw that painting, how much mindshare in the population it has. Regardless of the artistic merit of the piece, this data does give us some measure about its relative importance, and from that data about importance or mindshare we can start to make concrete decisions about how to share it among the crowd.

So again, the system here is designed specifically to address the coordination problem, and my claim is that measuring use (by tracking attention) is the proper way of solving this problem. That doesn’t solve all the value-fixing functions of money, but it isn’t meant to.

puppies and rainbows and world harmony

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:42:35 -0600

OatmealRaisin posted:

I actually have a legit question rather than a pithy one-liner about Bitcoins (and let me tell you, it’s really hard to ignore the urge)

How do you plan to get past the Bystander Effect? The phenomenon where people will witness an emergency but not do anything because they all assume someone else will take care of it. I would think this would put a massive wrench in this whole attention->action chain.

This is an issue I have thought a lot about, and a lot of my examples were developed in the course of long conversations with psychologists concerning exactly this effect. So it is worth noting that:

quote:

In 2008 a study by Mark Levine and Simon Crowther found that increasing group size inhibited intervention in a street violence scenario when bystanders were strangers but encouraged intervention when bystanders were friends.

One is less likely to be subject to the bystander effect if you are within a closely knit network of familiar relations.

If we are tracking all relations, such that the salient relations attract attention and we all have some indicators of those relations, I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect that we would relate to each other less as strangers and more as friends. Philosophers have long been concerned with the alienating effects of modern technology, and I’ve argued before that the Digital paradigm of networking is partly a revolutionary step because it reverses the trend of alienation. There’s a lot to say about this, for sure, but that’s the general shape of a response.

This direction of questioning is in one sense exactly right, since it comes from a recognition that global cooperation an Attention Economy would require must have some fundamentally different value systems, and right now if our value systems are “dog eat dog FYGM” then it will seem mighty unlikely that such cooperation would occur. Since I am arguing for a different set of Economic relations, I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect this to take the form of a different set of values, ones that look quite different from our own. In fact, I take the Attenion Economy as partly a way of spelling out how the Digital Values play out in the real world as an organizing principle.

But describing a different value system is not the same thing as motivating those values, and obviously it will be really hard to motivate a value system we are unfamiliar with. Again, remember the question to the atheist: “If you don’t believe in God, why don’t you kill yourself? Why isn’t everything meaningless?” I can describe the secular value systems that atheists all over the world follow, but if you are stuck on the idea that MEANING MUST COME FROM GOD then all these systems will look like they are missing some vital component. And I can only talk about Self-Actualization so much before it starts to sound like idealistic visions of puppies and rainbows and world harmony, and obviously that will all sound nuts if you think that values can only be grounded on God.

I’m not a wide-eyed optimist about human nature, and I don’t think the levels of cooperation and coordination required are outside the scope of simple human ability or ignore the very real effects of the psychology of groups like the Bystander effect. You don’t have to be an optimistist in human nature to hold the basic humanist belief that people should be free to determine their own value systems without the imposition of God.

And similarly, you don’t have to believe that if all humans could just hold hands and love each other we could coordinate our activity to provide for ourselves. Instead, I’m arguing that if you set up a system where the easiest default behavior helps coordinate the system, and there are low barriers to contributing to the system, and everyone is free to contribute however they want, that the power of the whole network will we be in a position to handle the coordination problem.

We also, by the way, know from the Milgram experiments that people are willing to to extraordinarily difficult things, some of which might go against their own personal values, if they are convinced that doing so is for the greater good; but they they won’t go through with those actions when commanded to do so by someone they consider to be an illegitimate authority. So the Attention Economy will only work if people are convinced that by contributing to it, one is contributing to the greater good.

But this is just to say that if the system works, the system will work. I’m still trying to show how it will work, so I’ll try to proceed.

don't pretend

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:40:54 -0600

Shageletic posted:

People are selfish, and will act selfishly to gain what they can.

Although this certainly trades as common sense, there is nothing about this that matches the real world.

Psychological data for the last decade or so has confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that 1) humans are the most selflessly altruistic of the primates, and are not only willing but eager to share with others, and 2) that people will do rewarding, purposeful work for its own sake, regardless of material compensation, and in fact monetary compensation will make us less likely to do that work.

Read this: http://www.nature.com/nature/journa…ature10278.html
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Humans are not petty, selfish creatures. If we were, then maybe we need a dictator to tell us what to do. But we aren’t, and we can organize ourselves to solve our problems, and we’ll do it together just fine thank you very much. You can try to defend a Hobbesian view if you want, but don’t pretend that the data supports it.

I really need to give my hands a break. I’ll be back tomorrow.

what is dangerous

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:40:23 -0600

Achmed Jones posted:

and NeoHitler gains in power.

If acquiring marbles was like acquiring money, I can see how you’d come to this conclusion.

But that’s not how it works. Paying attention to Westboro does expand their influence, but there’s no guarantee that its expanded influence will work in its favor. Its not like we are expanding its bank account, or giving it resources it can spend how it pleases.

All we’ve done by paying attention is that we’ve expand its influence, which in concrete terms means that more people know who they are and what they are doing. More people are aware of the situation. Doing something about the situation requires that people are paying attention, but paying attention alone doesn’t determine what anyone does about it.

It might be that when more people are made aware of Westboro, that they start flocking to the church and sign themselves up as members, willing to donate whatever resources they have to the cause. But, and call me optimistic, but I don’t think that will be the typical reaction. In fact, I suspect that the typical reaction will be to start withholding services and resources- which, again, is only something I can do if I’m aware of the problem in the first place, which means attention needs to spread.

So I’m not afraid of the possibility of attracting attention to Westboro in my system, any more than I’m afraid of attracting attention to Westboro in the existing system. Its not their attempt to attract attention that’s dangerous. What is dangerous is if people start doing what they say, and there is nothing in my system that suggests people will be more susceptible to their influence than they are in the existing system.

that's how networks fucking work

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:39:34 -0600

evilweasel posted:

In a technical and utterly fucking useless sense every use of the internet is two-way, because you request what you want to see. This is a completely pointless piece of information.

Yeah, but my point goes deeper than that.

The netflix thing is a good example. Every view on netflix not only results in my passive entertainment. Netflix also keeps that database of my use, and compares it to the use patterns of other users. It uses this database (which I contributed to by just passively watching) in order to do things like recommend movies to its users, to optimize its service, and to negotiate for licenses with the content producers. It can do all this because of the patterns of use it tracks, and by watching netflix I helped to fill in that database.

That’s just a tiny datapoint in a huge database, but that’s how networks fucking work. Lots of little semi-autonomous nodes, self-organizing around their own niche interests, but sharing the information to the wider network so that everyone reaps the benefits. This only works by lots of individuals doing their thing, and a lot of that will look like “passive laziness” to our current conceptions of value and labor, but are nevertheless real and valuable contributions to the network itself.

surely premature

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:38:52 -0600

Achmed Jones posted:

So basically if people don’t ignore stupid shit, the stupid shit propagates and becomes stronger. Someone says “Hey, let’s genocide some folks!” and everyone says “No that’s awful,” but because the genocidal maniac is getting attention, they are able to allocate resources to carry out their genocidal project? And if the “No that’s awful” folks don’t sufficiently turn their gaze inward and allocate their attention to a single project, they can’t accrue the influence to counter such a project? And every time anyone engages with those espousing Bad Ideas, those Bad Ideas gain more influence, regardless of how good the reasons are to not pursue said Bad Ideas?

This is a good time to remind everyone to put on your “charitable reader” glasses and try to read your interlocutor in charitable ways. If you see something your interlocutor wrote that seems to imply an approval of mass genocide, read it again! If there is a better and more agreeable interpretation, try to give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt! This keeps the discussion constructive and engaging, instead of just reiterating charges of insanity.

Ok, now. If a lot of people are paying attention to a homicidal maniac, what do you think is more likely to happen:

a) they will work to stop the killer before he kills again, or
b) they will transform into brainless drones that want only to do the maniac’s will?

I’ll give you a minute, take your time.

The post you quoted was me describing how attracting attention is neither good nor bad, but merely works to marshal resources. It is good that people are paying attention to the homicidal killer, because that is a situation that needs to be dealt with, but the way to deal with it is to stop the killer. That’s right, the answer above was a

Did you get that right? Aww, shucks, well maybe next time.

When disaster struck Haiti or Fukushima, the Twitterverse exploded. Lots of people paid attention. Lots of people paying attention allows groups interested in doing something about it to self organize and marshal the resources required to help. That doesn’t mean that everyone loves the Earthquake or wants it to happen again, but people are paying attention and mobilizing to handle the issue. If there is a shooting at the Pentagon again, or whatever, you might hear about it first on Twitter, and that’s not a signal to bring your gun and get involved.

The fact that I had to spell this out to you is precisely why I haven’t actually taken any of the mocking in this thread seriously. You guys aren’t even trying.

quote:

Of course, it explains why you keep pushing this stuff despite being told it’s silly, incoherent, or some combination of the two: you want attention.

I don’t want attention. But I want the theory to get some attention, because I think its a good theory, or at least might potentially inform a future good theory. I’ve been sitting on it for a few years and all my friends are tired of it, but I’m comfortable enough with the details that I think I can defend it adequately here.

I’ve seen a lot of people say it is incoherent, but I don’t see anyone who actually understands the system yet, so these accusations are surely premature, and I’m confident enough with the view that a few insults won’t make me turn and run. The people who have actually read my posts and ask questions that demonstrate basic comprehension, I’ve responded to those posts at length and in good faith.

they don't exist on Internet

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:38:16 -0600

evilweasel posted:

A freeloader is able but unwilling. I hope this definition of a basic english word will help you better understand the counterarguments to your theory.

That’s not the definition. I’m able but not willing to have sex with you, and that doesn’t make me a free loader.

The definition of a freeloader is someone who doesn’t contribute in proportion to what they take. A freeloader is a leech.

I gave a way above of describing a certain kind of leech in the system, but that kind of leech really doesn’t have any consequences for the distribution of resources and isn’t problematic in this way.

The kind of leech that contributes nothing at all to the system, the one you seem to be worried about, I’m claiming won’t actually exist, the same way they don’t exist on the internet. Every use of the internet contributes something back. It might not be a contribution that others will recognize as being in kind, but it is impossible to be a passive observer on the internet. Using the internet at all requires participation and engagement, and in an Attention Economy, every engagement matters.

There are other problems: the problem of the detractor, who refuses to cooperate and actively seeks to disrupt coordination, and of the hoarder who actively stockpiles useful resources in order to limit access to those resources. These are both serious problems I haven’t dealt with yet.

But I don’t think the freeloader is a problem.

the essence of FYGM

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:37:12 -0600

Yiggy posted:

The real world is not the same thing as the internet. Maybe you should unplug for a bit.

Do you believe that people’s ability to meet their basic needs should depend on their ability to contribute to the system?

If I am unable to work, should I not get food?

If you “no”, then there is no such thing as a freeloader.

Again, people should have their basic needs met because they are people, not because they performed some task that the system judges to be worthy of continued life. If people have a right to their basic needs regardless of what they do, then there is no such thing as a freeloader.

The alternative is to literally think that people should starve if they don’t perform whatever minimum requirement The Market (or whatever) think earns them the right to life. I’m sure a lot of people actually believe this (its the essence of FYGM), but I’m not one of them.

I am "leeching"

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:36:36 -0600

Strudel Man posted:

Who leverages the data? I get that the system creates this vast storehouse of data about what people care about (or at least look at). But that, by itself, provides very little incentive for anyone to act on that data.

People want to get dollars because dollars are necessary and sufficient in order to acquire many of the things that they want. Attention marbles do not appear to be necessary in order to get the things you want, and in many cases also do not seem to be sufficient. So how exactly is this data ‘leveraged?’

Right, marbles don’t get you anything, and they aren’t necessary and sufficient for anything. All they do is serve to track all the data, and as an indicator of my relative influence in the network.

So the data is leveraged directly by the people who are looking to act on it, period. There’s no centralized organizing body that plans it out or directs resources or has a monopoly on decision making. It is supposed to be entirely self organized.

So you track the data of all the people who eat bread. From the data set you extrapolate should be able to extrapolate how much of what kinds of bread should go where to cover the basic needs and meet demand. Ok, then the baker wakes up in the morning and checks the bread forecast to see how much bread to make, gathers the materials, and then bakes the bread, and then that bread goes somewhere for people to acquire it, and then they eat it and digest it.

So I suppose your question is, what is the incentive to be a baker? The same question could be asked at any step of the process (what incentive is there to crunch the data to extrapolate this information?) But the baker is an easier example. So I’ve responded in places to this general issue, but to be clear my answers are: 1) some people just want to be bakers, and 2) there is enough people who are interested in eating bread that there will be enough people willing to help out with the process of making bread, even if they don’t reallywant to be bakers, and 3) our data tracking will make sure that we are making bread in proportion to its use, so the people helping out can be sure that their effort is maximized and worthwhile, and that when additional effort is needed, the call for help can be directly crowdsourced.

I think a lot of the effort that people put into their work now is wasted work that is not worthwhile, but that people do it anyway because that’s how you get paid. A lot of that work wouldn’t get done under my system, and that for the best. Maybe under a more efficient system people have to volunteer some time at a bakery for a few hours a week to help with bread production, and that’s all I have to do to “contribute back” to the system.

There might be easy ways to enforce this socially without restricting the access to the goods. It will be easier to talk about specifics once we start playing with actual formulas, but just as a suggestions:

Marble Production (MP) is a function of Marble Absorption (MA) plus a Base Rate (BR)

MP = F ( MA + BR )

Perhaps we consider you to be at “parity” when MA = BR, that you are “leeching” when MA « BR, and that you are “seeding” when MA » BR. If I go volunteer at the bakery for 5 hours a week, then I get a little piece of the incoming marbles for everyone who eats a loaf I helped bake, and perhaps that accumulates enough to make me reach parity, so I feel like I’ve contributed enough.

But this just has to do with my feelings about the work I do. Nothing about my livelihood depends on reaching parity, and there are no public goods that are off limits to me because I am “leeching”. Its just bad form.

Ok, so then just make all the work that needs to get done publicly accessible, so that if anyone wants a shot at upping their MA they can always check to see who needs work done, so the baker can post when he’ll need assistance or whatever, and then let the whole thing self-organize.

just kill yourself

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:35:55 -0600

About the general “why should people care?” line. My argument is not filled with misty-eyed hope for humanity. My argument is grounded in the basic fact that we are animals and we know how to take care of ourselves, and we are willing to put in the work to do it. We’ve survived for hundreds of thousands of years doing it.

I have more detailed responses to give, but my arthritis is flaring up and I need to take a break.

But I have to say that it is incredibly interesting that people really believe that without the incentive of money people won’t do anything and will suddenly stop caring about everything. People are actually arguing that holding humanity as wage slaves is the only way that we will get anything done, and that without the yolk of money we would all resort to being lazy, apathetic freeloaders. Apparently we need these whips, that 9-5 job, or else we become unable to wipe our own asses.

I don’t think it is unrealistic optimism to think that view is ridiculous, and responding to the objection has become a little exasperating for me, because I don’t think I can be convincing even though I am sure I am right. It feels like a situation that most atheists will be very familiar with: the objection “if there is no God, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

Its not that the atheist doesn’t have a good answer to this question. Of course they do. But the problem is that the question comes from a value system that is already so completely corrupted to begin with that even trying to explain the atheist’s alternative source of value is a nonstarter for the person raising the objection, so the conversation can’t go anywhere.

One more quick response:

Yiggy posted:

there are also freeloaders

This, again, I want to disagree with. There is no such thing as a free-loader in a post-scarcity society, and so our value systems need to change to prevent us from the kind of Protestant ethic that generates the accusation.

I think if you didn’t give anyone any requirements of work, that many of them would spend most of their time working on their own pet hobbies and interests, which seem trivial to anyone who doesn’t share that interest. Most of the work that people will do, though, will probably be directed at their immediate social network: their family and close friends. I think that when left to idle, people will tend to want to socialize. Again, this socialization seems like a waste of time to anyone who isn’t a part of those networks, but for the people who are invested in them it is very very important.

Those people who invest in their own interests appear to be “freeloaders” or “lazy” to anyone outside their networks, because they aren’t contributing in ways that might be immediately apparent. But I think allowing the freedom to pursue one’s interests will generate incredibly important contributions, and I think that will account for the vast majority of humanity.

I mean seriously, it is ridiculous for us to question this basic premise in the digital age. If 50 years ago I told you that there will be this great big global machine called Internet that has stored and organized all the worlds information, you might very well ask what organizational model did we use to build it. There’s so much to do, how did you assign all the people to all the jobs? The response, though, was that there was no central planning at all. We just gave people access to the system and let them do whatever they want, and all that flurry of semi-autonomous activity resulted in the Internet. No central planning, no assigning of tasks, but the thing got done through self-organized collectives banding together over existing, specialized interests. Some of it is dirty, boring work (filling in databases and writing reviews of every book and movie and stuff), but there’s a lot of it to do and a lot of people willing to do even the most trivial parts of it. 50 years ago you’d laugh me out of the room, but here we are today.

And this is the point: there are no freeloaders on the internet. Everyone is a participant. Every user, no matter how little content they produce on their own, is contributing to the network simply by using it. Every pageview strengthens the network, every Google Search is a datapoint closer to optimization.

If the goal is to solve the coordination problem, it can’t be to distribute the resources to the people who earned it, or deserve it, or toiled for X amount of hours. Because that’s what we have now, and again it’s not sufficient. The solution to the coordination problem is to provide the resources to the people because they are people, regardless of what they have done or are capable of doing or care to do.

economy is supposed

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:35:17 -0600

evilweasel posted:

No it’s not. An economy does not dictate what is value. An economy reacts to what is value. This goes back to your anti-money bugbear: money isn’t value in a capitalist system, money is merely a means of exchanging or storing value.

Yes, money is a medium of exhange. I’m saying that we don’t need a medium of exchange or a way to store value, because we can track value directly and leverage that data directly against the coordination problem. If that means it isn’t an “economy” by your definition, that’s fine, but I was using the word “economy” to describe any general solution to social coordination and resource management issues.

You say “An economy reacts to value” as if it is true. Perhaps the economy is supposed to react to value, or should react to value, but of course it doesn’t actually do any of that. The markets react to lots of different things, and value is one of them, but it isn’t the only one, and it creates distortion and corruption of value in the process of abstracting it. That’s not itself bad; any attempt to quantize value will have distortions. But money in particular can be distorted in a way that prohibits solutions to the coordination problem, and that’s not satisfactory.

Finally, let's talk about apathy

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:34:03 -0600

Yiggy posted:

1) Assuming you get the infrastructure in place for eye trackers, everywhere I guess? How does this work. It simultaneously tracks vision to ascertain attention, and then has some sort of object recognition to see what is being attended to, how exactly is that actionable information? What does that tell anyone about other important details, such as intentions?

Good question. Measuring attention doesn’t say anything about intention. When I protest outside the Fed, I am giving it attention despite my negative intentions. You might think about attention as the absolute value of value: it measures relative degree of value but not its valence.

This is just how the system works, and I actually consider it a feature. Receiving attention means gaining influence, and increased influence increases the ability to marshal resources. So, for instance, the more people that drive on a road, the more road-constructing materials it should be able to marshal. But “marshalling resources” is neither a good nor bad thing; its just what needs to be done to keep the system working optimally.

So say I am the sole user of a largely unused road, and that road has fallen into disrepair because of lack of use. I might want to try and raise a big public stink about it and attract attention to this cause, with a Twitter campaign or whatever. Now that might not be enough to attract the resources to fix all the potholes, but the system has suddenly taken notice of an issue that had previously fallen under the radar, and it is more likely that at least some of the necessary resources will find their way to you, or that someone who knows how to get those resources will find you.

But the idea is fundamentally that the crowd handles all these issues in a distributed and decentralized way. In order to get those resources directed one way or another, you just have to ping the system and amplify that ping enough to get it to happen. Someone, somewhere, will be spending their days scanning twitter for people needing road repair and will be able to put them in contact with the people who have a bunch of road construction equipment looking for places it can be used.

quote:

2) How would this deal with things like apathy? The system doesn’t really provide incentives to act. Who is directing the resources, whose managing the labor to distribute said resources. Is all of this supposed to be part of the infrastructure too? Automated, etc.?

3) You mentioned it earlier, so I know you’re aware, but what about people paying attention to and only caring about Stupid Shit. How does an attention economy not just break down into a constant exercise in creating more and more scintillating, attention grabbing shit. If everyone is just paying attention to American idle, when does shit that no one wants to pay attention to but which is nonetheless important ever get taken care of. How can a handful of people interested and attending to very niche interests, say, scientists, ever marshall enough of the attention-bound resources necessary to meet their tasks? Especially with a lot of little known and understood problems, such as you typically find on the fringes of understood science, you’ll have a small number of “marbles” designating need where in reality a ton of marbles are needed to garner the resources necessary for the research.

I take these questions to be two sides of the same basic coin: what happens if people pay attention to the wrong things, or don’t pay attention enough, or otherwise aren’t good attention payers?

In the long run, if we aren’t good attention payers, then we die. There isn’t a system in the world that will protect us from ourselves. The attention economy isn’t meant to protect us from ourselves, it is just meant to solve the coordination problem.

This is an ant mill.

When an ant is placed in a foreign environment without a trail to lead it home, it will wander aimlessly, which is probably the best method for stumbling onto the lost trail. When it encounters another ant from the same colony, it follows: maybe that ant knows the way back!

When the entire colony is massively displaced and loses its trail it swarms around itself like a spiral galaxy, since all the ants revert to the best-guess default behavior of “following another ant”, and none of them have any idea where to go. Unless disrupted, the ants will continue to spiral around themselves until they all die from exhaustion.

These ants have no protection against their basic drives, and they have an intense drive to follow the trails of their fellow ants. This drive is usually a really really good thing, because the system they have set up ensures that “following other ants” will almost always help solve the Ant Coordination Problem. But when the whole colony is displaced, those basic impulses and drives spell doom for the whole colony.

Ant colonies provide rock solid proof that an agricultural society composed of millions of semi-autonomous individuals can survive for millions of years, and the ant mill is still a well-organized system built on those same stigmergic principles. It just has no direction and isn’t going anywhere. Coordinated, organized activity doesn’t guarantee any kind of evolutionary success or sustainability. It is certainly possible that bringing an Attention Economy online will have this result.

But I think it is incredibly unlikely, because I think we have too much interest in satisfying our basic needs to let the system spiral into exhaustion. I will admit that it is an optimistic view of humanity, but I don’t think it is fatal to the credibility of the view.

Lets start with the issue of the “jobs no one wants”. How to we draw attention to the issues no one wants to attend to? I think people are perfectly willing to do the basic work required to feed and house and clothe themselves, and that they are willing to work as part of the system if that system is achieving those ends. So who will take out all the trash and dig the ditches and clean the toilets? Well, someone is doing all that stuff right now, and I see no good reason to think that someone won’t continue to do it in the future. I know a lot of people right now do these jobs because they have to to feed and clothe themselves, and they would stop immediately and do something else if those needs were being provided for. That’s okay, those people may be far more productive elsewhere. But that doesn’t convince me that there wont be someone who will continue to do it even if their personal livelihood doesn’t depend on it, because it needs to get done.

By grandfather used to tell a story about living in rural Texas during the depression. Their “street” was a dirt cul-de-sac with about 6 houses holding ten or so immigrant families from Mexico. At the end of the road was the outhouse that the whole block shared. My grandpa explained that he never heard anyone discuss it, but the women on that street all worked out a cleaning schedule for that outhouse, sharing duties and distributing it among themselves not because anyone wanted to or was getting paid for it, but because the job needed to get done and they were willing to work together to do it.

That said, if people are using that bathroom and you are doing the work to maintain it, then some of that bathrooms marbles will be directed towards you. So the system does credit the people who do the work. If I don’t have the skills or talent to be popular but I still want to gain influence, there are plenty of things that need to get done.

And I think that’s the general lesson for all these cases. There are lots of workers who want to work but can’t. I don’t think people suddenly stop wanting to be productive simply because their livelihood doesn’t depend on it. I’m not trying to inject some new incentive structure entirely; instead, I’m trying to unburden the system so that people are free to follow their own incentives, and then hoping that our incentives are targeted well enough on meeting basic needs for ourselves and our neighbors that the coordination problem gets solved.

Now more directly to your cases, let’s do the “paying attention to stupid shit”. How do we make sure people don’t pay attention to stupid shit? I don’t think you can, frankly, and I don’t think you should try. Let them pay attention to whatever they want. I don’t think you end up with a planet of heroin addicts and couch potatoes. I think both diseases are forms of self-medication to alleviate the stressed of modern life and avoid the system; I think if we tear that system down and let people follow their pleasures as they will, they will be endlessly creative and productive and interesting.

Again, this is the networked model, the Digital culture. People are an incredibly diverse bunch, and the overall strength of the network is improved by that diversity, so I’m loathe to reign it in. The old 20th century model was to try and abstract away from individual differences in order to have the individual fit into the assembly line system, and so the impression was that we need to standardize everyone. No wonder the masses turn to opiates under this kind of oppression. So let people pursue their passions. Some of it will look banal, but that’s because people are banal. Some of it will look like /b/ because that’s how some people are.
But its a mistake to try to eliminate this diversity by trying to enforce a narrow range of acceptable interests. Diversity of interest, just like genetic diversity, is part of what makes humanity resilient.

Finally, let’s talk about apathy. There are real cases of complete lack of interest, and they usually are associated with depression and other forms of mental illness. These are serious cases, some of which are also the result of modernity-related stresses, but these kinds of issues can have all sorts of sources. Depression, and mental health in general, is a real and serious problem.

But I don’t think most people are apathetic in this sense. Most people have their passions and will invest tremendous energy and time into developing those interests, without anyone needed to come in from the outside to enforce that investment. But most of the time, people are forced to invest their time and energy into things they have absolutely no interest in whatsoever, and that creates the illusion of apathy. Again, my solution isn’t about trying to figure out a way to get them interested in those things, but instead to reorganize the system so they don’t have to be.

extremely highly

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:33:28 -0600

MonsterUnderYourBed posted:

How much could you instead improve living conditions of people by if you directed resources towards that instead of billions of retina scanners?

Retinal scanners are like 5th generation Attention Economy, for when we want extremely highly accurate measures of attention.

For a basic starter model you wouldn’t really need something ore complicated that an Rfid for every object and a Beacon in every pocket, and Rfids are cheap as dirt.

nose scratching

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:32:46 -0600

clammy posted:

Paying attention is not necessarily productive activity. How do you plan to unfailingly, consistently create value from attention? You might as well turn “golf-clapping” or “nose scratching” into your fiat currency. It makes no sense.

You don’t “create value” from attention. Attention is value in my system.

Consider facebook. Measured against the dollar, it is worth around $75 billion. The value that system has accumulated is not generated by any product offered by Facebook. No one has ‘produced’ anything that is worth that much money. Facebook’s value is derived entirely from the 800 million people who put the time and effort into maintaining the network and its content. Its value rests entirely on the fact that a lot of people pay attention to it, and that is valuable in itself. Its dollar value comes as an estimation of how profitable exploiting that attention might be, but the dollar value is derivative on the intrinsic value of the attention of its users.

This is characteristic and most salient in the networked age, but I’m tempted to claim that there are underlying truths about human value systems generally. Everyone has their hobby or role that they are willing to invest incredible amounts of time and energy into simply in virtue of their own intrinsic passion for it, and it is ultimately this investment in care that makes the thing appreciate in value. In fact, we know that the value people find in satisfying and rewarding work is actually undermined by attaching some extrinsic cash reward for that work. In other words, people would actually like Facebook less if they were getting paid to use it. So measuring that kind of value against the dollar is a bad idea. The hope is that Attention Economy comes closer to approximating a more natural measure of value.

You might call it a “care economy”, but I don’t know how you can measure care. My claim is that you can do a much better job measuring attention as a proxy for care, because attention is going to have sharp and measurable behavioral cues that can actually be measured in objective and unambiguous ways. One nice feature about my system is that, the more sophisticated our science gets at measuring attention, the more accurate our economic model will be, and the better we will be able to distribute resources where they are needed. Keeping the measure of value closely tied to the emerging brain sciences ensures that the system can improve as our understanding matures (again, in sharp contrast to money).

quote:

At any rate; I have ADD, so I guess I lose out in this Brave New Wor- Hey, a bird just landed on my windowsil!

This isn’t a trivial problem, and it is important to bring up. A multitasker able to divide their attention in multiple directions will, as a consequence, be able to do more work for the network, and may enjoy a greater control over that network as a result. That might actually work out better for someone with ADD, but someone cognitively limited in other ways may have trouble staying competitive for attention. So the system, in this way, doesn’t appear egalitarian. That’s a genuine concern.

I’m think I’m okay with using a measure of cognitive ability as a measure of value, despite differences in cognitive ability. I think centering the measure on attention solves a lot of these problems. Although you are diagnoses with an “attention deficit”, that doesn’t mean you don’t pay attention to things, it is that (if you are a typical case) that you have trouble giving sustained and undivided attention to things. But in an attention economy you can divide your attention however you please, so a divided and unfocused attention isn’t a “deficit” in my sense.

In any case, your ability to participate in the system is independent of whatever capacities and abilities you might have. Nothing about one’s basic needs depends on the rate of marble production, so the people with cognitive disabilities wont starve. Moreover, attracting attention is not itself dependent on cognitive abilities. Babies are usually instant attention-trackers, not because they are smart, but because they are cute. So having a cognitive disability isn’t a social disaster; in fact, I would suggest that human communities evolved in a large part to take care of the weakest in the group, and that absent the limitations on money we would have much more interest in social and care work, not less.

I don’t know if that is entirely satisfying. My system retains the “entrepreneurial spirit” inherent to Capitalism, in the sense that if I have some neat trick or good idea, I can use that idea to marshal and direct lots of resources in my favor. Any system that has any kind of competition will also inevitably have some form of inequality. But since that competition is not itself over the distribution of resources, is seems incapable of disrupting the solution to the basic coordination problem, and so keeps to the minimum ethical requirements.

"our"

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:31:35 -0600

agarjogger posted:

Is the diversion of capital from East Hampton mansions and manufactured desert subdivisions to sick, starving villages honestly impossible under our current economic system? Our economy does not allow for even marginally equitable distribution of resources and we need a brand new one in order to achieve any kind of sustainable civil society? That’s stupid and I don’t believe it. I think our problems are simple….

I have committed myself to a renewed American urbanism, which I see as the solution to almost every single problem.

It is curious that you think a solution to “our” problems seem like solutions to very specific problems of American society in particular. I agree that population contraction in urban centers will be important for reducing environmental impact and such, but that’s not going to put a dent in global economic, environmental, and humanitarian problems. “Our” problems don’t end at the border; if you have no trust in the state of the markets to correct this problem, then I see no reason to respect their artificial boundaries.

The global coordination problem is not a simple problem, and it wont be solved with the death of American suburbs. We need to be thinking on much, much longer scales and timelines, because the problems and impacts are global, and the consequences for failure on the global level are existential.

maybe they wont self-organize

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:31:10 -0600

evilweasel posted:

“The invisible hand eyeball will simply solve all problems, no need to question how” is pretty much exactly the worst part of someone spouting free market ideology, the laziness part.

There’s no invisible eyeball? I’m not sure what you are referring to. I haven’t made reference to any “free market” or or implied the existence of any self-correcting system.

There’s no force or power of the system apart from the network of relations. I said that hopefully enough people care and attend to the fire station to ensure that it can marshal the resources to maintain the underused fire road. That’s not a claim that any “free hand” will correct the system to ensure that happens. There’s no guarantee that the people will attend to the things that need attending to.

What I’ve said is that we should marshal resources according to what people in fact pay attention to, and we should trust them to self-organize in order to solve the problems they face. The Attention Economy is a kind of infrastructure to enable that self organization, and is meant as an alternative to the infrastructure of money as a means of distributing resources.

Maybe they won’t self-organize, and that road will go unmaintained. It depends entirely on what the people do, what they take the time to attend to. All I’ve argued is that the resources should go to what people in fact attend to, instead of trying to centralize and plan it out in advance according to how money is distributed. Money, or the “Market”, free or not, clearly is not suited to solving the coordination problem. All I’ve argued is that Attenion Economy actually has a shot. There is no way to interpret what I’ve written as an argument to “make the market more free”, especially when I’m explicitly trying to abolish the market entirely.

attention wasted

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:30:00 -0600

Zodium posted:

Wouldn’t an attention economy turn into an advertising/marketing economy pretty fast?

Good! I suppose an unsympathetic way of describing Attention Economy just is as an Advertising Economy, insofar as my solution is really just to let Google solve it all, and Google is just in the business of advertising.

But calling it an “advertising economy” makes it sound slimy. There are a few key differences, the biggest being the GETTING RID OF MONEY part. Advertising is profitable, but current advertising methods don’t actually do all that great a job making sure the products actually get into the hands of the people who want them. Ideally, advertisements would only appear when you a) need something, b) don’t have it, c) don’t know where to get it, and d) want to know where to get it. Otherwise, you should never see an advertisement. It is just attention wasted. Frankly, I think it is an outrage that I’m not directly compensated for the attention that advertisements steal from me everyday. I’d love a transitional system where I got paid for every advertisement I watch.

Advertisements are everywhere now not because of the role they play in solving the Coordination Problem, but because marketers want mindshare, and they want mindshare because it is profitable. But if you get rid of the profit motive, then “advertising” really just becomes the issue of efficient and successful resource distribution, which is exactly what Attention Economy is meant to solve.

miniature Michael J Fox dolls

larrystroubledmind — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:28:58 -0600

Maxwell Lord posted:

Except then there’s food.

Look, there are the basic needs we’ve established- food, water, shelter. They’re the bottom of the pyramid. Post-scarcity generally means making sure these things are taken care of no matter what. Food is something where there’s a hard minimum we need and a relative maximum- there’s only so much you can stuff yourself before you need the vomitorium. Water’s the same, there’s a minimum of it and a maximum. Shelter’s a bit more flexible, but it works differently.

To be truly post-scarcity, you can’t have anyone on the globe starving or unable to get food. You have to establish a basic level of food security for the entire world.

Now, I’m sort of an idealist, I like to think we aren’t living in the end of days, maybe we could actually achieve this. But that’s what any new economic model has to address- how people get the essentials of life. Take care of that before we get into attention economies or bitcoinage.

This is a Good Post.

Attention Economy is meant precisely to address this problem, without appealing to some top-down bureaucratic institution with a monopoly on planning. Instead, it appeals to the bottom-up Digital paradigm of open access, universal participation, and crowd-sourced management and improvement. It is a distributed solution to the coordination problem.

I’ve used the phrase a few times, so let me be specific:

The Coordination Problem is the problem of coordinating global human activity to produce and distribute resources in order to satisfy global human need.

The Basic Coordination Problem is the problem of coordination global human activity to produce and distribute basic human resources to satisfy basic global human needs. I take the basic human needs to include food, water, shelter, medical care, and education.

Since we already meet those levels of production, I think we have a minimal ethical imperative to solve at least the basic coordination problem and work out the method of distribution.

One thing I hope we can all agree on is that our current system, what I like to call The Existing Order of Things, although it has been instrumental in solving the production problem, has not solved the distribution problem, and will be in no position to do so for the foreseeable future.

Why don’t we have a solution to the distribution problem right now? There are all sorts of complex sociohistorical reasons for how we got here, but what prevents a solution? Right now the solution to the distribution problem currently rests on the flow of (commodity) money, and as long as there is no profit in solving the basic coordination problem money can’t properly direct the resources where they are needed. Even significant amounts of charity and aid work to patch the problems at best. If we take money for granted, the only potential solutions is to wait for all developing nations to rise up and eventually enter into more significant trade relations within our current global economic system. But not only this process is slow and mired in the sociopolitical realities of the global economy, but the end goal is clearly unsustainable and frankly doesn’t have much to say for itself other than that it seems to be the only cards on the table, and no one is coming up with any better solutions.

So Attention Economy is meant to be that solution. The idea is to track attention as an indicator of value, not as an abstract and neutral medium of exchange, but as a direct empirical indicator of what people do in fact value. My claim is that as we get better at collecting data about what people actually pay attention to, the better we will be able to solve the distribution problem. As is becoming increasingly clear, the problems of complex networks is tackled with mountains and mountains of data, and I’m trying to argue that the data we want to be tracking for solving the economy is attention. I am so confident of this that I’m willing to push ahead with the theory despite the mocking in this thread.

I have a bunch of examples, but my favorites are the ones dealing with highways. Here’s a basic rule of thumb: the road that is traveled most often is the road that should receive the most resources and upkeep to ensure that it is operating most effectively. In general, a road should be able to marshal the resources required to maintain its use, and in proportion to the amount that it is used.

That seems like a fair principle, and one that settles the basic algorithm for distributing road-constructing resources among all the roads. Apart from one major objection discussed below, this is a pretty clear case where questions about the distribution of resources is settled directly by questions of use. Tracking attention just is tracking use, so my argument is that an attention-based system for distributing resources is going to produce better results (more efficient use of resources) than other methods. It will definitely be superior to the way things work now, where the most profitable road to repair gets repairs, while others languish despite use.

So that works for roads, I think, and my idea is to apply it widely. Where do the resources for maintaining those roads come from? Well, track how much asphalt and tar and whatever is used, and distribute those resources as anticipated by those patterns of use. Apply the same pattern down the chain, and horizontally across domains, and you have the basic model for a new and sustainable economy. This seems deceptively simply, I know. The important thing to recognize is not that my idea is right, but that this isn’t how we do it now. The way we do things now is to distribute resources based on maximizing profit. Sometimes solving the coordination problem maximizes profit, and then we get examples of where the current system works. But for lots of resources and for lots of people, solving the coordination profit doesn’t maximize this external goal of profit maximization, and so the system just fails. My idea is to reorganize this so that our systems of value have direct implications for the coordination problem, and I’m proposing that attention is precisely the mechanism for doing this.

The road example also highlights one important feature about attention economy: everyone is a participant in the economy, including our objects. I can pay attention to the road just as much as I can pay attention to other people, and that attention paid needs to be tracked by the system.

This is where the marble analogy comes in handy. I haven’t laid the full view out yet, so let me explain more how it works. Remember, an individual’s rate of marble production is a function of the rate of marble absorption plus some base rate. Every human being will produce a constant base rate of marbles (in virtue of being conscious) which they effortlessly divide among the various things they pay attention to as they go about their day. The marbles are shooting out of their head automatically, so they don’t need to think about where they are going, and they certainly aren’t ‘exchanging’ them for anything. They are just producing them, unconsciously, like beats of their heart.

I can’t change that base rate of marbles. But I can change my rate of marble absorption, and thereby increase the rate at which I produce marbles. I change this by attracting attention. Anyone who pays attention to me or the things I do will ultimately (and unconsciously) be shooting marbles at me, and every marble I get will increase my rate of marble production by some small fraction. The more attention I get, the faster my rate of marble production.

A few key points:

1) Nothing that I do on a daily basis will depend on my rate of marble production. I will not be limited from access to any public goods and services based on my rate of marble production. So there is no pressure on me to attract attention. If I want to be completely anonymous and not have anyone bother to notice me, I will still be fully capable of participating in public life.

2) By “pay attention to me”, I mean both my self (my body and personality and whatever) but also the things I do. So for instance, if I create some invention or write a book (paging Insanite), the book is labeled as mine in some essential way, such that when anyone who pays attention to that book (and thereby, shoots that book with their marbles), I received some percentage of the marbles shot at that book. I won’t receive all the marbles; some will go to the book’s manufacture and advertiser and whoever else participated in its creation. But I will be acknowledged for that work with a boost in my marble production rate.

It is fundamental to this system that Real People get Real Credit for the work they do, and the credit they get is directly tied to is usefulness within the system. So the same thing will work for the road construction. The road is receiving a certain amount of marbles based on its use, and at least some of those marbles get redirected to the construction crew who put their time and effort into maintaining its use.

But again, don’t think of this like getting paid to do the work. First of all, if anyone “pays” you it isn’t going to be your ‘boss’, or the managers who are helping coordinate the task. The thing “paying” you is the road itself, the thing you actually worked on. But this isn’t “paying” in the old commodity money sense, because a) you don’t get any wealth from it, in the form of goods or currency, all you get is a boost to your rate of production, and b) the boost to your rate of production will entirely depend on the use of the thing you produced (that is, how much attention it gets), and not on the work you put into it.

3) The why care if your rate of production goes up? If my ability to feed myself doesn’t depend on the work I do, why should I work to increase my rate of marble production?

Well the short answer is that you shouldn’t, if you don’t want to. Although this system will ‘reward’ the ‘popular’ people that everyone pays attention to, none of your basic needs (the ones that must be met by the Basic Coordination Problem) depend on your popularity. So if you want to spend all your time building miniature Michael J Fox dolls for the three other people who are into that, do it. You’ll still be able to live your life with all your basic needs met. No one will stop you, and you won’t be punished for it. You, my friend, are part of the long tail, and a distributed system mostly exists in that small tail, so there is no incentive to punish you for finding a niche role.

But if you want it, you can seek out attention to increase your rate of marble production. Because the higher your rate of production, the more influence you have over the overall flow of of marbles in the system. I mentioned a major objection to the road example earlier, and here it is: not all use is equal. Maybe that one road into the forest sits entirely unused the whole year, except when firetrucks use it to clean out the underbrush to ensure there are no fires. It may be mostly unused, but that one use is really fucking important. There are all sorts of cases where perhaps we should privilege some use over others.

So this objection is right, and the Attention Economy system is supposed to account for this. Not all use is equal, but we have a way of tracking the weighting the relative importance of each use. If I am producing marbles at a higher rate, then I am giving more marbles out during an instance of use than someone who produces at a lower rate. That use isn’t “more important” in any meaningful sense, but it weighs the resources more heavily into the things that I use over others. Of course, lots of people pay attention to stupid things, but I’m standing by the basic idea that resources should be distributed according to attention. As long as you are tracking all the people, then enough people will pay attention to enough important things to solve the basic coordination problem. Presumably, enough people will be paying attention to the fire department to ensure that resources lean in its favor enough to support the maintenance of the road, and so on.

I’m going to take a break for a bit. I’m not done laying the system out, but hopefully I’ve put enough meat on it now that the basic outline of the system is apparent, and its virtues can start to become clear. I’d be happy to discuss whatever specific questions or issues anyone raises.

Although the basic form of the solution isn’t particularly novel, and the end-state looks like classic Marxist utopias, I have never seen anyone propose this specific mechanism for doing it, so I think the idea is genuinely novel. I also think it is in line with contemporary science, including computer and behavioral neuroscience, and seems to ring true with the emerging sciences of complexity. But, I think more importantly, it is generated with values derived explicitly from Digital Culture. So I don’t think this I’m completely on the deep end. I’m just tying together some loose threads in the theory. I think it is productive to talk about it either way, and I’m enjoying myself as I write it