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| Saturday, February 02, 2008 |
| Hive Mind vs. Groupthink |
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.
Yeah, I know.
The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.
Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.
I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.
I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.
This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?" Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.Labels: blog, cartoons, computers, government, idiots, information, Internet, life, people, politics, power, random, reason, technology, war |
posted by Steve @ 5:46 AM  |
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| Friday, January 04, 2008 |
| Roadrunner as high metaphor |
A lot of pretty intense philosophical shuffling can be extracted from the Roadrunner and Coyote, in a similar vein as the classic the Tao of Pooh, which my Mom (a devout Catholic) had me read. In particular, comparisons to Sisyphus seem accurate.
Despite all that, my favorite part of the dialog is where Chaos Theory and multiverses are brought in to explain cartoon physics:
It is possible that technology does not work in Mr. Coyote's universe in the same way it works in ours. First of all, what is known of Mr. Coyote is only third person speculation on a multiverse. It his particular multiverse there is a mysterious fifth force of weak horizontal gravity. This mysterious mechanism exerts a force on falling bodies horizontal to the plane of a strong gravitational force, such as the Earth. In this multiverse, were Galaleo to throw a cannonball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the cannonball would first move horizontal to the Earth, hover for a few seconds contemplating its peril, then fall rapidly to the ground due to the strong gravitational force.
It is entirely possible that this weak horizontal gravitational force has a seemingly random interaction with technology that we are not quite able to understand. So let's stretch the metaphor to the breaking point through philosophy, into political theory and possibly out my derrière: I hope that, if/when the Democrats get a president elected (hopefully Obama), they don't have a Coyote moment: They always wanted it, but now what?
Also, OMG Coyote caught Roadrunner!Labels: cartoons, Obama, philosophy, politics |
| posted by Steve @ 12:26 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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