Jun 04, 2021

Information I Consumed on June 4, 2021 - game 04.04

by: Kristen Pavle

Game04 post 04/10

Context

In the spirit of an earlier game 04 post , here's another edition of "Information I've Consumed Today". I'm not sure what I'm hoping to accomplish with these posts BUT it is forcing me to write down how I'm understanding what I'm reading.

I'm less reactionary about game 04 posting than I was yesterday, but still feeling like IDK what I'm doing or why.

What I do know is that I enjoyed this VERY WEIRD combo of information consumption today.

Info consumed

1. PartyDAO by John Palmer on Mirror.xyz

TLDR;

• this may be a good test case for what we're trying to build because it's based on collective building and shipping of product.
• also of potential interest: their crowdfund -> tokenize $PARTY process (details here This DAO is here to $PARTY by Denis Nazarov on Mirror.xyz

Notes

• #collective bidding on #NFTs

• fully #decentralized org, that ships products

• combo of folks in engineering, design, smart contracts, writing, with a goal to ship product that is of the same quality as a top tier startup.

  • From the other link below, here's the supposed future of #start-ups, sounds about right....: "Spontaneously organized, cooperatively-owned, and funded by community tokens and crowdfunding."

• NOT A COMPANY! lol, they make this very clear

  • this is an interesting aspect of all of the #DAO stuff - particularly for people who are considering with the current instantion of the [[legal system]] - makes me wonder how we'll orient to "law" in the future

• lol, they have a twitter, @prtyDAO, and it already has 1,000+ followers; on their twitter stream found this:

  • PartyDAO is what startups will look like in the future by Jamie Wilkinson on Mirror.xyz

    • This helps explain a bit more about what [[Party DAO]] is all about, including some insight into their process: livestream Figma design session and public Figma file

    • I love this #transparency - it's really refreshing, and I love taking a peek under the hood. (tbph, I'm also a bit #jealous - imagine having a "small" focused idea to hammer out, vs. a big amorphous new-fangled [[relational OS]]👹)

    • Yep - theres a note about their being #open-source and this is good #marketing and #recruitment strategy

    • Haha - this one's for you @Jon, per our discussion with @Dave the other night:

      ---

      "Building stuff is fun, building stuff with friends is even better. Getting paid to build stuff with friends, all open-source, no bosses, and you've got a legitimate ownership stake in what you're building? That's another level."

      ---

• AHHH, its all happening this is exciting

2. "Reciprocity of social influence" by Ali Mahmoodi, Bahador Bahrami, and Carsten Mehring in Nature Communications (peer review journal)

TLDR;

• "Reciprocity is a pervasive social norm" - if someone is open and receptive to you, when they give you advice or a suggestions, social norms dictate that you should abide by their advice - regardless of whether or not their advice is high quality.
  • this is in direct opposition to Bayesian social theories - which posit that information that is more credible and trustworthy should have a higher weight
  • people are influenced by an equality bias heuristic, which gives everyone's opinion equal weight - this is overly simplisitc and doesn't appropriately give more weight to the reliability, credibility and trustworthiness of someone (and that someone's information)
• People do not (currently) have social norms around reciprocity with computers, only other people
• optimal human information integration is muddled by the social norm of reciprocity; humans appear to place a higher price on social integration than that of information integration.

Notes

• humans use other people via social interaction to improve #decision-making
  • social influence affects:
    • [[perceptual judgement]] - using our senses to make judgements (aka [[sense making]]) about the world; in other words we're getting data from socializing that influences how we make sense of the world through our sensorial experiences/inputs
      • There's something interesting here on a more philosophical or even spiritual level - we are influenced by how other people experience the world, so much so that it in turn changes our experience - this is a fundament of what we've been talking about with [[relational OS]] - the ability to "take other's perspectives" - a simple solution here appears to be to introduce socializing into the equation somehow - because humans innately will take other's perspective this way (via games, like we've been doing?)
    • and long-term #memory
      • I see this as a direct result of the above, if our sense making is impacted by other people, this will be encoded into memory
  • social info improves:
    • accuracy of decisions
    • what the outcome of decisions become
    • evaluative judgement - the skill of being able to evaluate the quality of something
      • This seems to be directly related to what I refer to as "triangulation" - I'm better able to understand something if I'm looking at two things at once vs just one; with only looking at one thing, I have a 1:1 relationship with the thing. If I pull a second item into play, I can now triangulate, I can relate to each of the two things, AND relate the two things to each other.
      • In the social setting - having more information through social interaction gives us the ability to triangulate
  • on the flip side, social info can result in some negative impacts:
    • information cascades - ignoring of your own information in lieu of going with the collective group info
    • this in turn leads to lack of #diversity, aka [[group think]] (note - we may have found a simple solution for this with the #blackbox technique)
• humans #reciprocate in social interaction
  • think of this as like calls to like: you act with love, you'll receive love back; you act with hostility, you get hostility back
  • susceptible = reciprocates; insusceptible = does not reciprociate.
    • susceptible = someone provides advice and you take it; and vice versa you offer advice and the person takes it. Dynamic process.
    • Insusceptible = you offer advice, other persons does not take it; they offer advice, so you don't take it.
• concept of #reciprocity is shown to be a #dynamic process, and is lacking when a person interacts with a computer
  • the question in this research paper is: can we influence social behavior through reciprocity? (in this regard, reciprocity is a a kind of social #manipulation, though not in a negative way)
• the quality of social information is related to the source of the information (aka the person) - so people who provide info that is reliable, trustworthy, credible, etc tend to benefit others more than poor quality of social info
  • however, people often fall into a trap of thinking all social info is equal in quality, a heuristic that simplifies collective decision making - known as [[equality bias]]
  • THIS IS IMPORTANT AND I THINK RELATES TO OUR POOR GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES CURRENTLY.
    • look at Congress, look at our democratic voting, look at company boards, even look at many #crypto and #DAO project voting structures... we're using the overly simple equality bias heuristic when i don't think this makes sense - aren't some people more credible and trustworthy than others in certain situations and on certain topics?
  • There's also an [[egocentric bias]], where people rely more on their own information and past experiences than they ought to
• So what you get is: social normativity (equality bias) coupled with maintenance of a self-image (egocentric bias) that directly influence decision making - which is inconsistent with the Bayesian theory of social information aggregation, which postulates that influence should not depend on norms and conventions.
• Bayesian theories recomend weighting different people's opinions based on the reliability of their opinions in making decisions - but due to the innateness of reciprocity, people are swayed by others behavior too much. HOWEVER, when working with a computer, people are less swayed by reciprocity and are more open to the computer's opinion
• Part of the reciprocity thing has to do with the concept of #status and being part of an #in-group - people don't want to be left out. This does not hold with computers, there's no sense of being left out in regard to a relationship with a computer
  • there's also a [[cognitive balance theory]] - humans change preference to be similar to those they like; dissimilar to those they don't like. And it seems that people "like" those who reciprocate - further codifying the social norm of reciprocity
  • people tend to have a poorer self-image when their advice is NOT accepted from someone else (aka being ignored); repeated instances of being ignored can leave a negative emotional valence around the person ignoring

3. "Thermodynamic Computing" by Alex Nugent on known.org

TLDR;

• There's a bunch of computing based on mimicking biological systems, including neurobiology. The article was written by an inventor and frontiersman in the space, Alex Nugent
• The article looks at self-organization from both a physics and biology perspective
• Definitions of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and thermodynamics are provided - with accompanying examples - and it's all relatively easy to understand. The quantum + thermodynamic is then coupled with biological evolution, and a kind of dialectic is introduced resulting in the concept of thermodynamic evolution, and ultimately thermodynamic computing (which is a bit too heavy in math and physics for me but I can follow up until we get into formulas)
• Essentially, what we're talking about is the potential pathways of energy dissipation flows that allow us to break from looking at the 2nd law of thermodynamics in isolation - that is that all things lead toward entropy, a homogenous, stable state that lacks structure.
  • This homogenous state that lacks structure is the soup of aporia from which we can derive structure, if we follow energy dissipation pathways and couple this with relationships between particles and living entities.
• I can't really explain how this stuff makes sense... but what is happening here is a way to program computers for self-organization. And clearly, there are major implications for how we look at [[machine learning]] with thermodynamic evolution as the backdrop.

Notes

• Ok, first off - the site where this article comes from is an organization called Knowm which is in the business of moving the computer industry toward "neuromemristive processors" - at first I was like, what?! but I found the "neuromorphic engineering" wikipedia page and got a bit of grounding.
  • In a nutshell - a specific kind of computing hardware that contains circuitry that mimics #neurobiological architecture. #neuromemristive is a specific kind of #neuomporphic computing that focuses on #neuroplasticity through #abstraction
  • Their lead inventor, thinker, mastermind, is [[Alex Nugent]] - he's into #adaptive computing. Worked a bunch with #DARPA included a full scale program with them in this arena for 10+ years
  • Interestingly, their work was first funded by an entrepreneur and business woman! [[Hillary Riggs]]
  • Suffice to say, I think that this shit is INSANELY RAD.
• #self-organization is a fundament of life, and we can look at this from both a #physics and #biology perspective - or both if we're smart 🙃 - this is what the article aims to explain
• [[quantum mechanics]] - looking at the physics of very small things VS #gravity - physics of very large things (interesting distinction here)
• [[quantum computing]] or QC- "a particle (or more generally a physical state), if left to total isolation,does not act like a particle but rather spreads its tendrils out through space in all possible paths with some probability given by its wave-function"
  • in QC, the particle is called a #qubit, and if a qubit interacts with another qubit (and nothing else), the two become entangled, and their tendrils become jointly configured
  • This is a natural action, it just... happens. In QC, according to [[Richard Feynman]] "it is theoretically possible to exploit this property of Nature by forcing those ‘tendrils’ to explore and interact over all possible paths and massively speed up some types of computation."
  • emphasis on theoretical - the major challenge here is that nature doesn't like qubits, it likes [[quantum decoherence]] which is the collapsing of qubits into something tangible (say a plant, a human, etc.)
    • in fact the very universe is coming into existence through the process of quantum decoherence. A kind of configuration of matter, which extends to that which humans creating, including technology
  • In QC, we're fighting this quantum decoherence, wanting to keep all the potential pathways of the qubits open and mappable - so you can imagine this is quite a feat of insanity
• Enter onto the scene: #thermodynamics, and a concept of thermodynamic #evolution or TE
  • if we look at #physics as a mathematical accounting of #energy of time, we know that objects move to reduce their [[potential energy]] - e.g. rock rolling down a hill, chemical reactions to move from high to low potential energy states, etc.
  • Now apply this to biological evolution, and you get thermodynamic evolution-- "an accounting of [Life] energy within the area of dissipative structures."
  • TE looks at creating structures from a homogenous state (high entropy, stable state, energy uniformly spread throughout a system).. this is known as [[symmetry breaking]], because of the symmetry of energy. And there's always an underlying assumption that the structures we see in the world exist BECAUSE they allow for the dissipation of energy
  • In #Darwin's evolutionary terms: " 'Survival of the fittest' may be reformulated to a more exact physical statement: Structure that is responsible for more free-energy dissipation is stable because it uses the energy to repair itself."
  • In thermodynamics, the 2nd law states that everything will tend toward entropy, aka away from the stability of a given structure... the example given is of a primitive building made of mud. There's a dissipation of energy to assemble and build the structure, but the mud structure also degrades over time, and requires constant repair - lest the mud return to its homogenous state from which is emerged
    • If the structure can afford protection and safety to an inhabitant to the point where the inhabitant can spend less energy on maintaining its own state/structure (food, sleep, wellbeing), the inhabitant then, in exchange, can maintain and repair the structure - avoiding the inevitability of the 2nd law of thermodynamics for the time being.
    • There's an energy dissipation pathways that is maintained in this arrangement - I'm curious about this relationship between structures, in this case the mud home and the human inhabitant. They're working together - and in some ways I suppose you could call a home a primitive human technology SO, think about all of the ways that human x tech relationships could resultant in inventive energy dissipation arrangements! (This is the basis of the Knowm organization, I suppose)
• Alright, NOW we can get into the meat of the matter - which tbph, I don't understand because it's too physics and mathematics heavy. BUT here's my approximation of understanding
  • #self-organization, the process by which life is able to form (plants, animals all grow through self-organizing systems), can be explained by looking at two energy-dissipating pathways competing for resources, and this competition results in the maximization of dissipation through plastic methods (plastic in the sense of easily shaped, molded).
  • In other words: "there is a particle that flows through competitive energy dissipating assemblies. The particle is either directly a carrier of free energy dissipation or else it appears to gate access, like a key to a lock, to free energy dissipation of the units in the collective.", and we see this in a lot of self-organizing structures in #nature: arteries, veins, neurons, leaves, branches, lightning, mycelium, rivers, etc. etc. etc.
  • From here, things get real heavy and I get lost. But the general underpinnings of this make sense to me and I find utterly fascinating.