Scale, by Geoffrey West, is a thought provoking book about coarse grained quantitative network theories which concern the entire human species and its interaction with the environment. Although verbose — as I think the intended audience is upper high school and entry-level college — it is clear in its depictions and explanations. This book is an important summary of really profound work and research performed at the Santa Fe Institute. And it is a great introduction to understanding power laws and scaling in biology and network topologies.
Category: social behavior (Page 1 of 4)
Hidden Forces, hosted by Demetri Kofinas is an nice set of interviews with various people on topics including: finance, complexity, mathematics, and cryptocurrencies. I struggled listening to some of the interviewees because I did not agree with their ideas or conclusions; but I guess it is good to have conflicting opinions in order to encourage debate in the comments and to help review one’s own opinions and understandings. Regardless, Kofinas provides a highly accessible medium through which advanced ideas can be grasped.
I first ran across Hidden Forces while listening to the interview with Ray Monk about philosophical mathematics. Monk’s narration on the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Gödel is excellent – by far one of the clearest and easiest to grasp. It was learning about these paradigms and paradoxes of mathematics via Hofstadter’s famous book which led me to start this website.
Oh!? you believe in conspiracy?… What are you, a conspiracy theorist of some kind? Well, I am certainly not a conspiracy ‘theorist’ … When people take that position I have to laugh… because I feel sorry for them, they obviously never read a history book. Because anyone who knows anything about history knows that it’s built on conspiracies — from one end to the other. Conspiracy is the engine of history! Every major event in history, when you examine it, has come to pass largely as a result of at least one, and in many cases many conspiracies. And it goes on today.
Order can exist without a hierarchy, yet I constantly confront the word anarchy in contexts which assume its manipulated definition of disorder. This association degrades the ideas of political anarchists. To remedy this issue, I propose a new word:
Autocosmocracy – a form of society in which the political relations between its members, without the aide of any hierarchical institution, continually gives rise to a self-organized society. A continuously existing society without a higher power structure; a system where authority lies in the absolute freedom of the individual. All members are autonomous agents.
The world of the biologist is filled with organisms which are self-organized. In the natural sciences there are numerous phenomena in which order arises out of agents acting autonomously. Is not man himself a biological creature in the physical world?
Imagine a hypothetical situation where the form of civilization is an autocosmocracy — all individuals completely autonomous, bound by no institution. I would postulate that inevitably, after a certain number of generations, the civilization would form groups due to scarcity; and that these distinct groups will form their own government. These new groups will throw away the autocosmocratic forms and create novel political frameworks in order to achieve various goals. For instance, there is great dominating strength in having a mass of brutish men who will obey all commands unquestioningly. In other words, in an initial state of complete freedom and liberty, humans will group and band together. It can be shown mathematically that this will be the equilibrium state. Those individuals who fail to join a group will be out competed or destroyed by those who do join a group.
A similar situation occurs in the distributed cryptocurrency mining networks. This system, which is initially distributed with all individual miners acting autonomously, inevitably transforms into a network of groups due to competition and scarcity. So the natural question arises: how to prevent the formation of such groups in the presence of scarcity? Or is it a better question to ask how to eliminate scarcity?
In terms of Plato’s cave of shadows, it would be a society in which all members are able to discover the source of the shadows. All members would exist as philosopher kings.
Wikileaks recently claimed that Facebook censored their post on Hillary Clinton’s email dump. This suggests that users of Facebook are in no way guaranteed the right to post whatever they want. At the end of the day, it is Facebook Corporation (Quote: FB) which has the final say on what should be publicly allowed on Facebook. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this is the expected outcome of a free service existing as a centrally managed set of servers owned by special interests and shareholders.
The solution, not without its own disadvantages, would be to create and migrate all users to a decentralized social media network. I think this would be possible with Namecoin in combination with WordPress (think BuddyPress) where all users would have their own local servers or rent machines with services like Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, Amazon EC2, etc.. The process should be simple:
- User rents machine on Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, etc…
- Install WordPress on this machine
- Add WordPress social network plugin
- Create Namecoin domain
- Create user profile
- Publish posts, socialize and message friends
Here are some current examples/ideas of people creating and implementing P2P social networks:
Diaspora – Working version of a private decentralized social network
Synereo; visit their blog to keep up with their progress.
The Pandora. P2P Social Network
Masques: an invisible social network
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