Group items tagged

Initially “anyone can program reality” via written text,

invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication

In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.

In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media

How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?

Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.

bias followed by commandment

1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”

2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”

8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.

3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”

4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”

5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”

Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.

6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”

By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.

7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.

you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.

9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”

We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.

10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”

The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.

We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.

If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?

In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]

We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.

expected that shame might be more effective than honour

n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.

confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group

Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.

Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.

Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.

language, replaced direct observation

the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.

The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.

Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.

difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].

awareness (such as meditation)

help people learn how to identify and de-identify with various groups, by allowing them to experience the variety of social contexts.

Roland's

not only be critical thinking but systems thinking

help people become more self-dependent.

experiences are organized for children from the early age

raise the level of critical thinking

Education is liberating.

The notion of indirect reciprocity could be important here: doing things for those groups without expecting to get a return, but setting an example

reject the notion of tribes or of people being permanently and essentially bad and extremist, and to be welcoming and kind

Bodil's

I can work with other communities which are open, tolerant and welcoming.

Better distribution of resources.

reputation and trust

know how to build trust and create cooperation, we should know something about breaking bad patterns

knowledge about social dilemmas

“growth mindset”

David's

separating fiction from fact,

interaction in order to reveal the "true" characteristics of inform

physical security, enough to eat, a place to sleep, freedom from threat.

John's

little can be done at the level of the individual, other than being aware that our appreciation of ideas, and our tendency to engage in counterproductive behavior may be due to forces other than the ideas themselves.

becoming aware of our own weaknesses with regard to absorbing new information

it is possible to gather individuals into a super organism that is less vulnerable to being victimized by false or misleading information,

we need access to information and skill in critical thinking

Hermano's

My political answer is internationalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics).

High level of material, political, physical, psychological etc personal independance

My cultural answer is to displace the ubiquitous narrative of competition by this narrative of cooperative

traces of trustworthiness online,

tactical tool is the internet.

empowers the common man to act at multiple levels, assuming responsibility for all the nested groups to which he would belong.

Inger's

 Fighting discrimination

stereotypes

negative stereotypes

experience the feeling of discrimination in order to fight it.

Discrimination starts with stereotypes that turn into prejudice, and the individual becomes a member of a group that is dehmanised and stripped of human qualities.

Elena's

Meditation skills

life satisfaction

transferring an ultimate level of governance and common legislation to structures above nation states

Practices of integration of spirit-mind-body

value of own life and personal voe not to destroy self

Calisa's

only possible escape route is to get a glimpse of life on the outside, to see that there are different ways to live one's life, to understand that there are choices.

only through the glimpse can the child even begin to contemplate the notion of breaking the "pre-wiring"

glimpse does not guarantee escape

 shine your light brightly:

If there are children in your life, invest in them

Sahil's

Stay informed about the big, complex world-shaping issues

Use technology to express yourself beyond your home and workplace

same forces producing the 'dark' forms of social cooperation mentioned above - compliance, conformance, solidarity - are perhaps the same forces behind 'good' cooperation.

continually trying to re-imagine our 'imagined communities'

the more connected we are, the more we'll be forced to recognize others' interests as our own.

might include: cultural traits and norms based on morality (i.e. religion), integration of market economies, promoting greater free-flow of people/ideas, promoting denser urban centers, open access to information, monogamy??, anti-nepotism norms, cooperative higher institutions (with ability to manage laws/reputations/punishment).

Luis'

 We are “pre-wired” to cooperate within our tribe

impact of group identity

“manifold and profound”

make group identity salient

redefining the boundaries of the group to include more people is the best opportunity for change

Once you include everyone in the group, you find ways to encourage interactions among both sub-groups,

narcos manage to stay loyal and cooperate within their cartel when competing against other cartels with equally loyal members.

discourage cooperation inside the cartel groups

Assurance game, because one narco will only fight if the other fights, and will defect if the other defects

The key issue in the Assurance Game is whether we can trust each other.

Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us.  At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at.  It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation.  But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored

our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.

"Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves..." Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.

Indeed, symbiogenesis has been observed in the lab.  An amoeba population, accidentally infected with bacteria was observed over long periods of time, and soon enough, the infecting bacteria could not be removed from the infected amoeba without killing the organism. 

Gaia is the work of the relational loops of push and pull between bacteria, other organisms, and the environment

But Lovelock came up with an understandable and accesible metaphor in the form of a computer program called Daisyworld.  Daisyworld is not the "proof" of Gaia: Lovelock and his colleague Andrew Watson devised the program to see if living and environmental factors could theoretically interact without intention. 

After she found James Lovelock, they worked on making those processes known.  Their collaboration resulted in Gaia Theory, which was a disciplinary symbiosis -- the theoretical expression of Margulis's interdisciplinary life.

Gaia processes are real and observable (and sometimes referred to as "biogeochemistry", a term more acceptable to mainstream science).  Furthermore, the five kingdoms (bacteria, protoctists, fungi, plants, animals) of life are all touched by symbiosis

"Gaia," Margulis's former student Greg Hinkle said, "is just symbiosis as seen from space."

All animals have symbiotic partners in their guts.  Remove these symbionts and the animals die.

Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like "Gaia" and "cooperation" (which Margulis did not like to use).  They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation.  But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research. 

Along with the many detailed examples of bacterial mergers at varying levels of cellular complexity, the world revealed by Acquiring Genomes is also a world of mating between distinct phyla

What is definite is that the merging of beings is key, and symbiogenesis offers a clearly observable alternative to the consistent but woefully incomplete neo-Darwinian paradigm.

David Bohm, who said

"Science is the search for truth...whether we like it or not."

Microcosmos show us a bacterial view of the world.  Bacteria exchange their genes laterally.  This means they don't pass their genomic information only when they reproduce (though this can happen), but also  through their simple existence.

it's much more complex than that -- there is something "in it" for every symbiont,

"Gaia is not merely an organism."  The Earth is beyond stale conception.  It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine.  Gaia is object and process.

this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.

If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.

To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like "cause-effect" more like "being-manifestation."  That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both. 

Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory.  He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.

Perhaps as we -- in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization -- witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.

Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion.  To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied.  Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists.  This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking.

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.