Category: Stuff

The Crusade against intelligence

Wired continues the story about The Crusade Against Evolution rightly noting that

This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long ago.

Is the evolution of human beings (or other organisms) by natural selection a proven fact? No.
Is it a theory backed by a crushing yet increasing weight of evidence likely to convince anyone but the most hardened anti-materialist? Oh yes.

I’m so glad to live in Denmark where that debate could never occur.

The architectures of thought

Believe it or not, when I wrote my master’s thesis “The Architectures of Trust” concerned with ways in which behaviour could be regulated by code (essentially) I had never read a word by Lawrence Lessig. Indeed, I remember first paying attention to his name in march 2003.

Odd then, that when I recently read Lessig’s Code cover-to-cover (5 years too late) his main argument and particularly his terminology seemed curiously like my own (even if his main interest is different from mine). There is little question that he says things more clearly than I – and even less doubt that he used the phrase “architectures of trust” long before me – but still, I’m curious as to 1) Why didn’t I know of this book? (why didn’t anyone tell me?) and 2) How did I come so close to his theory/terminology without hearing it spelled out?
Conspiracy?, self-deception?
I’m guessing: The memes did it.

Thoughtful

nowuseit.com :: it’s about excitability
Co-candidate Martin on his fashionable – if constantly morphing – nowuseit.com mentions the “potential dangers of usability culture”. This is a topic which I used to be rather obsessed with as an undergraduate, going as far as to write a largely misunderstood student paper entitled “The Disenfranchised User”. In this underestimated masterpiece I argued that usability is wonderful in the short term but the requirement that users must not (for the love of God!) think may have dire consequences (insert, in the background, the shrill sound of high-pitch violins) in the long term. But it all depends on your conceptualization of IT – if IT is like electricity we have little reason to be concerned with the relative ignorance of users (or if we do, it takes someone more STS than me to realize it) but if IT is like a communicative infrastructure the design of which has large-scale consequences for both private and public life then we may not want to resign ourselves to ignorance, no matter how blissful in the short term.

Abandon all hope

Luhmann writes that trust…

“always bears upon a critical alternative, in which the harm resulting from a breach of trust may be greater than the benefit to be gained from the trust proving warranted. Hence one who trusts takes congnizance of the possibility of excessive harm arising from the selectivity of others’ actions and adopts a position towards that possibility. One who hopes simply has confidence despite uncertainty. Trust reflects contingency. Hope ignores contingency”.

As an example, Luhmann says that leaving your child with a babysitter is not a case of trust but of hope.
I’m experiencing absolute uncertainty as to my selection between multiple interpretations.
What, I beg you, does he mean?

The World will have to do

The game center gets a writeup at BBCs The World. My attention was caught a statement by one Jonas Schmidt:

“It was weird to think that there would be some sort of payoff for all of the hours spent,” Smith says. “You know, telling our parents this, but they didn’t believe us. They should see this.”

The depth of wisdom within this one sentence, not to mention its daring position on the issue of internal coherence, boggles the mind.
In one of the pictures my office mate can be seen hard at work doing basic research.

But seriously, it’s a nice piece. There’s supposed to be a companion webcast but I can’t seem to find a working URL.

Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma

Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma
Southampton people have bested Tit-for-Tat in a repeated PD with a somewhat ingenious setup. Although they won fair and square, in a sense they didn’t respect the spirit of the game in which strategies are meant to compete (not their mastermind makers).
TfT’s original success was of course highly dependent on the actual setup of the tournament so beating it in some sort of repeated PD is not so sensational.

From the depths


Having other mysterious business in the basement my wife hinted that it might be time for my illustrious Amiga 500 to again see the light of day (as long as it happened somewhere else). So now it’s all packed and ready to make the (entirely manageble) trip to the ITU – complete with semi-functional RGB cable and all. I guess it would attract some streed cred to start of with “This dissertation was written on a pearly white Commodore Amiga“. Then again, maybe not. And it really isn’t all that pearly after all these years in the basement.
But at least we’ll finally get to see who’s the real Speedball II champion. Ice cream, ice cream!