Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
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i will click record thank you everyone for joining and for the introduction this is gonna be a conversation about stigmatic wisdom which is a thread
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that's weaving together [Music] a handful of directions taken by many in this room in fact everyone for being here
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but everything from long term directions in the way that people are studying behavior and algorithms like the concept of stigma g which will
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be unpacking it means collective behavioral algorithms where there is feedback amongst the agents and their niche in some way like pheromone modifications
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or architecture in insects as well as digital modifications of the niche long-term threads in describing collective behavior as well as long-term threads in
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developing [Music] wise groups and how that all comes together in kernel and beyond
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so in the chat there is a document that that brad has shared and all we share it so anyone who would like to share their perspective during this conversation
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please raise your hand if you'd like to speak live and linearly or and please feel free to make any structural edits or any
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additions to this notes document it will show not tell that we can have many um [Music] voices contributing concurrently and also all of the opportunities and
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challenges that that presents for example related to our attention and how we then have a onus to like curate and allocate our attentions
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and how we integrate different asynchronous all of these different kinds of questions are what we get to explore and i know that many people will be bringing like opportunities to stay
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involved in this kind of niche different projects in the area that ronan and brad will be talking about so that is all for the introduction to
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stigma g for now um ronan and brad will both be sharing and then we can have um some open discussions and modifications so maybe whoever would
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like to go first brad first go for it well i know ronan's next but daniel could you do 30 seconds on just the mechanics of like markers medium actors in different
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systems and of course in different languages people refer to different parts of the system differently broadly though stigma g is
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based around this separation of like entities or actors or agents from their niche or their context or their surroundings so it's like separation of mobile entities
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from some semi-static ground and the modifications can be of very different types like in the physical world pheromones are a type of modification
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and those dissipate through time whereas like a uh architectural modification like moving a pebble is of a different kind and ronin can actually unpack a little more like how that difference between
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the more transient um like metadata type pheromone markings in contrast with the more content like architectural modifications so there's a lot of like resonances
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across systems and hence not exactly one ontology or way to talk about the different components however the uh possibility to apply our intuition and
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the physical systems that we see engaging in stigma g to digital systems is very exciting and again we can keep on like drawing out many of these threads as we continue
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today so roland sure thanks and yeah it's great to be in this uh zoom room i i get this feeling like since you know we've started doing these virtual meetings so much during covet at all like there's some zoom rooms have like a quality like it's
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entering a space where you like feel something different uh this room feels kind of that way um yeah i don't know exactly how to uh articulate it but anyway so happy to be here and thanks for inviting me um how long did you like plan for this
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sort of technical kind of i mean you wrote technical sort of overview but how long would you sort of like how when were you thinking like a few minutes or uh yeah ideally ideally around five uh and
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if you extend that's perfect but uh that's a container yeah um great so yeah there was the video that you shared uh that we made for the
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that blue sky ideas paper uh with daniel and some some other collaborators so that kind of was i think it was this meeting i guess uh through daniel i was sort of exposed to this concept of stigma energy and
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it just kind of resonated with me because i've been thinking about how um we browsed the internet and what's kind of felt like it was really missing so i was coming from this work by uh zach stein if you're
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some of you maybe are familiar with he talks a lot about shared attention is this kind of prerequisite for any kind of effective learning between a teacher and students you have shared attention where you're following the teacher's gaze or you're following their hand
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pointing or you're just following what they're looking at or what they're interested in so different levels of like uh following someone's attention and then sort of this kind of question about where is where is your
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attention on the web like if i'm on a web page why am i not seeing other people's attention like people that are sort of relevant why am i not seeing like where have they been once they were on this webpage like the trails that they left um
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and then yeah meeting daniel and learning about stigma g and collective intelligence and ants and and just kind of trying to weave this together um yeah it brought us into this interesting space of like what what is going on in online environments uh where do we see
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stigma energy and and how it can maybe help us inform and inform at least like redesign of some of these environments because once you start thinking about it in terms of stake energy you start seeing like people will say oh twitter is like this you know great collective
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intelligence uh platform it actually does really amazing things once you start thinking about sort of in terms of signature like it could be so much more and it's like so there's so many things wrong with it and so many things we could improve so yeah that was kind of the sort of
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backstory for for how how we we got around to this um so i'm happy to kind of talk a little bit about uh stigma g in the context of these online environments and how we're thinking about it um
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and feel free to maybe yeah okay you can jump in if you have questions or drop it in the chat one of the um questions i have about why um our stigmatic use of the annotation environment is not as
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good as it could be is because facebook and twitter kind of own the algorithms or what happens with these markers um and that that seemed like a motivation for your open source
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attention thing so maybe talk about that right yeah so i think yeah the the sort of main thing that brad brought up and this is kind of the main theme of this this paper was was that
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so this stigmatic markers are if you look at like ants you know you imagine ants that are laying the pheromone trails but imagine then that the ground instead of sort of acting the way it's expected to act which is like letting these pheromone trails decay over some predicted amount
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of time it's actually swallowing fair boats or it's amplifying pheromones and other places like interacting in a completely like unpredictable like we don't know why what it's doing and why it's doing it and we have no control over that so the ground is sort of yeah
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it's we don't own it and we don't really understand it so these platforms are providing this kind of ground that is not conducive necessarily just to sense making um and that is part of the reason like why
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why they're yeah what brad was saying like why why there's issues with these platforms i think but we kind of so yeah so so so to talk about the open source attention there's this idea you know people will
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talk about like we need to free our attention online we need like autonomy or freedom uh of attention but then trying to operationalize that like what is attention uh and one way to operationalize that is
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uh using this concept of stigma because these stigmargic markers uh are sort of traces of human attention like they're not the full human attention but there's some trace some like part of human attention that we can sort of capture in
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a digital environment um and then you can ask yourself okay where are these what's happening with these traces today and and really it's uh yeah it's siloed across all the platforms like twitter owns your like
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and like facebook owns your likes and facebook and slack ones are like some slack and and they're just this so the the sort of these markers are so important for sort of sharing our attention that we can't actually share them because they're
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silent so how do we make these markers interoperate and that was one of the main sort of themes is can we free the like button or can we you know i want to be able to like anything on the web and own that like
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i want to be able to link between any two pages on the web and own that link and then i want also people to be able to see those things and sort of amplify them if they if they like that link but they should upload it and then other people can see it so
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um yeah someone who's writing it like about dan gravy and hypothesis i think this is something that hypothesis is such a like they they're there's a sort of step in this direction because they let you annotate anything you're not committed
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to you know only being able to sort of annotate on a certain platform but on the other hand there's no there's no there's lack of stigma gen hypothesis where you can't really like for example i can't like someone else's annotation so i can't there's no way to separate noise there's no way to drive content
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discovery if i can't uh if we can't sort of interact with each other's annotations um one last question you know just uh before you left brad is the from philippi says i understand stigma g
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in the context of sensing so these markers or marks signs and symbols are left by other agents the future agents make sense and there's like indirect coordination and all of the stuff that you don't need like synchronous presence there in order to like move and navigate through the
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environment uh but like you've been using sense making so do you do you sense that there is a difference between sensing and sense making and if so what is this yeah that's yeah that's a great uh
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yeah that's a great distinction i think i'm just like to me sigmar g i mean he's making sense is something you almost literally make like if you're not if there's no artifact of your sort of sense making it's almost like i mean so
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many kinds of sense that we i mean we sense and then you know for example if i'm trying to understand some long uh article then i'll summarize it to myself so i'm i'm making sense of it by actually and my actions
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modification to the environment for myself also to sort of better understand something so making sense is actually making these almost stigmatic markers that's part of the sort of sense making process like literally you're making a new artifact
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in the environment so yeah my annotations their their pieces that i'm living in the environment and they're also part of my own process of sort of understanding what is salient to me in this in this blog post or in this
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paper so yeah i see sense making is very active um and it is there's there's this whole maybe at the end can also talk about you know this uh theories of extended cognition right that like our
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combination extends beyond our mind into the artifacts we're using so there's a lot of i think you know sort of uh scientific research to support this that that yeah this is the part of our cognition is extended into the artifacts
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and the context like the physical environments that were situated and so part of this process of sense making is really modifying the physical environment which is helping myself and others cognize better or whatever you want to
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say so just to clarify for mate thanks andy for asking the question the uh the symbols and the signs the stigmatic traces contribute to our sense making
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but other information and contexts and environmental parameters are involved in that sense making in fact the stigma magic information content may only be a minority of the sense making process
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yeah yeah for sure yeah go ahead thank you thank you one can imagine uh in ant necessity foraging the sun's direction and the polarization of light and other
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chemical cues might and and the active cognition of the nest mate might all play a role and so it is just cues this isn't like um the full how-to per se
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with cues any more than an emoji is um and exactly why those would be interesting to have interoperability in the same way that content can be moved easily and then one other note it's um
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this discussion on sense and there's a one usage of sense with like our our n senses and sense data and then there's sense making which is
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often highlighting like a more active whether active cognitive engagement with material or even inactive like with extended cognition and taking notes and so on and then there's some interesting
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ways that comes together with like generative models of perception for example even our visual sense is generated which is why we don't have like the blind spot and below visual
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acuity in the periphery in all these different aspects so there is a embeddedness of action in a lot of these discussions even without the stigma modification
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and also we're potentially dealing with stigmatic modifications that aren't themselves cognitive like you modify a script but then the script runs in a way where
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physical pheromone might just decay um maybe you could even think of the decay rate of chemicals as cognitive process so there's just it's like a grammar or a pattern language for approaching these
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systems and where one won't approach these questions is the flock of birds the school of fish the mob escaping the stadium because those are important scenarios for collective
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behavior but because they're not engaged in feedback with the environment and modifying the likelihood that themselves or future entities do something different it um
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describes the behavior it describes but the sense that it is describing collective behavior is like more transient and ephemeral charles oh thank you i um i just wanted to flag something i i'm
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probably jumping the cue in terms of andy how you have things lined up but the other word to frame this you know and the invitation of the space here is is wisdom and we haven't even mentioned this and i
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just was wondering now we're approaching halfway um we have a few kind of we have a number of wonderful people here and i'm seeing george poor here and i'm seeing harley grim as just a couple of of
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i know have a lot of to say about wisdom and i don't you know i'll leave it back to you andy as to when and how to leave it but um we you know i think we could easily talk about all this stuff that we've been
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without talking about wisdom at all today but i think we're also here to look at wisdom thanks yes because wisdom often has a lot to do with patients and we have brad brad up
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next followed by george okay i'll try to throw to you charles on that on that subject because that's definitely one of the things that we wanted to be part of this conversation is hey you know stigmergy does these
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things but how does that end up being wise um so quick uh overview of why i'm involved with sensemakers wrote renin and and daniel is um
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uh i was made aware of that i loved his video about open source attention and i've been doing a lot of work in harvesting uh the best of twitter over for ten years where we have we have a really uh
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efficient way of crawling twitter and harvesting just the urls that are coming through a list like let's say a list on cryptocurrency or permaculture or whatever and we can kind of harvest uh the a little bit of um
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the zeitgeist of that community about what are the what are the urls they're sharing what are they what hashtags are they using who's who's referencing those and so i offered that to to run in about to as a way of kind of bootstrapping
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a um an open source annotation corpus so that's one of the things that's part of the git coin grant is that um we're going to be working together to plug our
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twitter crawler into something that they can then spew out um markers uh to an into an open source corpus so that's gonna be pretty exciting and fun and um hopefully you know yield some
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some critical mass you could also do that with you know harvesting the urls that are going through this twitter through this chat right now or slackbots that can can push um
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references to urls to that same to that same corpus so um that's that's pretty interesting um my my real interest you know is around people and i i was i've been sort of
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exploring this idea of what i call stig people stigmatic people where the the medium the ground that we're marking is just other people right so we're not marking a food landscape or
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a content landscape but we're actually marking other people and we kind of do that i i'll i put a link in there to a little um sort of interactive graph that i made
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from two kinds of markers um from twitter one is uh twitter lists when you put someone in a twitter list you're marking them and when you and retweets so when you
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retweet them you're you're marking them and what you see it's pretty interesting are you getting an error did i get the wrong yeah i wasn't able to open it i got a 404 or not
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oh really maybe i just copied it i can share it actually if i can maybe get it um well i'll try and i'll uh i'll make sure
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i can get that but um but the base so what it was was uh it's a it's everyone who are in a set of lists that contain both kernel and d web um so so i i searched for a list that
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contained kernel and dweb and said okay who's what's the the you these the uh overlap of those of of those users and then who who's retweeted whom within that and it gets pretty interesting i'll make sure you
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can you can see it um but to me that's super interesting with um you know in terms of being able to kind of have uh to grow uh almost if you think of humans as
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neurons in a in a brain and the links between them as synapses then then that's to me what's interesting trust networks come out of that delegation collective decision making etc so that's that's something
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i'm really interested in exploring thank you so much so that that leads us really really nicely we think about these markers in the environment the current social media that we have how that can both amplify but also
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negates aspects of collective intelligence moving into well we are each other's environment we're marking each other constantly and that is what leads us into trust networks collective decision making and hopefully
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some wisdom which sets the stage wonderfully for our friend george if you would like to introduce us to some of your thinking around collective wisdom around what that means in our day and age
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where it's come from and how it might be applied in this context of environmental modifications indirect coordination and trust networks well i would start
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where did my orientation to collective wisdom come from in my personal life you know
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i'm a refugee from the collective intelligence camp where i spent 40 years studying sometimes contributing to the to the field
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and of course i always had an intention to not to use collective intelligence for negative purposes but
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we know many science many stories collective intelligence was also enabling the nuclear bomb and all sorts of
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shitty things that's why i need that's why we need um to add another layer uh which has to do with the
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intention what what do we want to use collective intelligence for with what intention and
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that's where i am building on largely the work of daniel schmuckenberger
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who is talking about sovereignty now it's interesting because uh in the web3 community there is a lot of talk about uh self-sovereign data
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and of course that's very important and what is even probably more important is self-sovereign individuals
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and um i'm going to get to the collective wisdom but i need to start with this issue the sovereignty that schmachtenberger
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described with three vectors of uh sense making meaning making and
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choice making actually these are my terms because to add a little bit to the terminological confusion about sensing and sense making so i have a
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very peculiar use of this i use sensing in terms of activating our senses or sensory organs and what
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i heard in this whole as sense making i use for that the term of meaning making what meaning what is the meaning of the in signals that we are
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receiving and finally what is the only beneficial uh choice making that we can use
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the meaning that we extracted from the patterns of signals so
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what i would say that if i combine if i have a chance to experience um sense making
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of what is happening or sensing of what is happening sense and what is combined with consequential meaning making and choice making for the greater
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good then uh i'm a wise person if we can do this together then we are a wise community so
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why what what are the qualities that um we need to develop for this kind of um accurate uh sensing
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consequential meaning making and choice making for the greater good what capabilities we need to develop individually and uh together
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this is not something that i would uh want to just think about this is something that um i would love to
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participate in a collaborative actual research thinking together and having a
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practice of collective wisdom in the process of a participatory generative action research where we explore
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through inquiry and action what are the qualities that we need to develop for collective wisdom so these are i'm you know many people
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think of me i'm a kind of visionary guy but the truth is that i'm more an actionary i or let's put it straightly that the praxis the
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where the theoretical methodological development led by driven by the practice of the community this is what i am passionate about so i guess i
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stopped here and i just put in the uh chat the you are where you would find a draft
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of uh enhancing wisdom in web 3 organizations i would love to
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get your feedback and whoever is interested to participate or eventually co-design this participatory generative action research
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into collective wisdom i would love to play with you guys wonderful thank you so much it's such a beautiful notes to finish there on in this
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actionary and play uh and just one more plug george also has an offer in the colonel office channel if you're looking for a playful environment to explore some of
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these ideas as it relates to wisdom i suggest you take your map on it this is one of the aspects of stigma g that i find to be most persuasive is the notion of indirect
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coordination so because we all happen to be interested in the same topic and to be working on it along different dimensions doesn't mean that we have to agree on anything or collapse our projects into one or impose one upon the
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other it does mean however that we have the invitation and opportunity to learn from and reflect to other folks things which might help them make wiser choices in the moments in which they are
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called to make them for instance uh you know one of the really interesting aspects of the script that we've called together to me is that
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you know ron and daniel's work has this very like targeted and particular question around which you can imagine really interesting immediate and actionable things happen how do we make a like button for the internet right i
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love that because like this is a like a wonderful thing we can begin thinking about what that really looks like and if that's your propensity and proclivity in life then that's an amazing thing to
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look at and then brad's work collecting 10 years of twitter data and thinking about how that applies to trust networks these wider issues of uh collective navigation of large amounts
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of data in ways that are curated but credibly neutral really interesting stuff uh not not quite a like button for the internet in terms of like but there's just
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incredible things that you can do there which inform both aspects and then hopefully gets us into the developing field of collectivism for the
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decentralized web with george and many many other folks in between so i know there's been incredible uh contributions in the chat mostly uh wonderful
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wonderful questions from blue uh so perhaps if you would be willing the to ask some questions next that are top of mind and heart for you or make some some points about what resonated that would
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be a good place to move the conversation and then we can come back to some of the questions and other comments from the chat sure so i just um asked in the chat
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for maybe people who are listening and not reading chat i just asked what is collective intelligence um and it's kind of one of those things that like you know it when you see it but
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like it's still not easy to define um and like i've thought extensively about this and come to some conclusions about what i think collective intelligence
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like might be or might be modeled as like this whole idea of you know it when you see it um doesn't align with like my values as a scientist like i want to be able to quantify it and measure it and
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um and say is more here than it is here and like what contributes to collective intelligence and what maybe uh contributes to collective stupidity like what are the what are the things that go on here um
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and one of the uh definitions that was brought up in the chat um via a paper is um collective behavior oh just lost you blue okay you lost your
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mic yeah continue can you hear me now yeah yeah continue we lost to your behavior perfect okay you got me still okay um so uh the ability to execute a task
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successfully is um intelligence right so if you can execute a task that is intelligence and then that would like lead to collective intelligence as um executing a task collectively but even
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just measuring intelligence itself is difficult um i think like it's very encultured like if you give someone an iq test that's not familiar with a lot of the western standards it's it's hard
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so there are the progressive matrices i think those are like the most biased like non-cultured non-uncultured um intelligence metric test but um more than just collective behavior so as
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intelligence then behavior that that i i mean i can see it but but also um the idea of emergence is has been brought up like um borrowing integrated information
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theory of consciousness like the degree to which a whole is more than the sum of its parts that's how they like define consciousness and there's a great deal of math um in that behind that so um
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just using that like maybe we can use this concept of emergence as an intelligence definition and these are just some thoughts that i have kicked around but i i that's neither of those things are really wisdom and so if you
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have intelligence then it's like it's wisdom to me is maybe um using your intelligence with ethics right or some some degree of that so it would be cool to see how people maybe
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define wisdom also because that might not might not be the same for everyone so yeah thanks for giving me the floor and letting me ask some good questions wonderful thank you so much as always the best headphones in the
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entire business are matched by some wonderful questions i think that george's work in particular does make this point that uh simply being able to measure the convective intelligence is not enough
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because it can result in negative outcomes particularly when we're really good at doing bad things hence the shift to wisdom which he defines well in the paper that he has shared in in the
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chat here and in slack i think that like one one aspect that i want to just like direct some of the questions to here also is that like brad has been talking quite a lot about like intentionality and super organisms
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so intentionality as it applies to trust networks and then can be applied further into uh into these super organisms and i wonder you know brad how does how does intentionality fit
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into like better decisions more wise decisions how does it apply to super organisms and and can you take that back to stigma g because i see that ronan also had a hand
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at some stage all intentionality intentionally applies to super organism that would that was a question that i asked you know and it's it's
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it um it actually it comes out of the question of how do we survive the meta crisis and you know my quick answer is that you know there is there could be a large global super
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organism that rises above our our current dysfunction at doing uh global scale coordination towards a better world and if that you know that that to me
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is you know an emergent super organism out of you know millions of great people and be able to coordinate and and do collective action and decision making at scale
00:35:54
um and could that you know is that an intentional super could it does an intentional super organism is it possible well i think that uh the super organism uh
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when it comes into being it will not resolve the metacrisis it will be coming into being as the resolution
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of the metacrisis so it's the human species basically and i'm laughing when um people who have a recipe for uh the next
00:36:35
days civilization and making injunctions and uh pleading that we should do this we should do that i'm always asking who is the v
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and then uh they say well we as human as humanity the point is that humanity doesn't have a agency if we if we had
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if if it had an agency then we already resolved all our issues so that's my brief answer let's do the raised hands
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and also the document is developing greatly including areas that people can get involved in so we'll do rave tandon here from hopefully many more in this last section
00:37:27
so maybe photos and charles then this first i think ronnie was before me yeah go ahead i talked already alright okay
00:37:44
um so um the of wisdom i would like to offer is that in figuring and because um these are
00:37:56
very difficult concepts to uh deal with because of their the variety of their application so there's an intrinsic vagueness there and what i think is very useful is to go back to
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the etymology and the language uh to figure out um something deeper in these concepts and like in intelligence because it comes
00:38:21
from the latin verb intellithere uh basically which basically means um to choose between there's this aspect of um being in a situation where you have to
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make a choice or a decision um between things uh and you do this in the best way possible so this is a very important aspect between intelligence which makes it also something very
00:38:47
situational and something that is not easily universalizable anyway uh i mean we can there's this good metrics that we have now this g this is
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all this uh matrix of um intelligence but there's this context-specific aspect which is very interesting uh and also uh but
00:39:12
what i want to bring up here is uh that in talking about intelligence usually either in academic circles or in pop culture
00:39:26
there's this assumption that we're talking about the individual and only the individual it's like intelligence is something uh that we do as individuals that's
00:39:38
something that takes place in some mental processes that have uh a neural substrate and so like we have we're almost like imprisoned to our own
00:39:49
brains but what is interesting here uh to what we're talking about is this collective aspect because uh it seems to just shatter um the received view
00:40:02
that we have of intelligence and how the mind works which is neurocentric and it moves the locus of the minds and all cognitive processes
00:40:14
um more to the interactions that happen between cognitive agents uh without themselves between themselves and their environments so like i want to also like
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uh ask everybody here uh about this assumption that exists culturally uh about the individualist nature of intelligence and if you have faced it
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and um basically this boils down to how do we uh spread these concepts out because it seems
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to be quite a challenge you know if the culture seems to be uh so individualistic so yeah i talked a lot if everybody can uh eliminate
00:41:06
that nice i would ever say that charles and roden i i can't i can't illuminate that um
00:41:20
at the moment focus but uh i did want to just uh flag a little more of a great tom atlee and i believe george you cited him in your piece at least when i saw earlier and um
00:41:34
i tried to copy it in but um there's there's this one piece of tom's definition of wisdom that that i've been for years inspired by and driven by which it has to do with wholeness i did
00:41:47
put some other links earlier from some great pages with lots of uh resources around wisdom and wholeness from tom but the from the wise democracy pattern language page he talks about
00:42:00
wisdom is taking into account what needs to be taken into account for broad long-term benefit and and that's just really profound for me and the long-term benefit really is um
00:42:13
uh seven generations or more kind of deep time perspective so i just want to uh offer that um the wholeness framing is is uh as i've come to um understand it
00:42:27
it's uh it's aspirational it's about growing an awareness and iterating or sort of adjusting calibrating along the way what's whole what's really for the whole and what is the whole the context and um
00:42:39
and thank you that's what i had to share yeah um i really i really like that it kind of connects to what i was thinking of this whole conversation has made me think about this concept of relevance realization i showed that in the chat
00:42:54
and then like its connection to wisdom um and and the what you said charles this kind of yeah we were talking about intelligence and then i think blue said that that one definition is like the
00:43:08
this position to perform tasks successfully but i think there's this question of like what has to perform in the first place and that's like that's relevance realization like what should we what is relevant for like survival of myself for the collective
00:43:20
survival and uh so yeah wisdom and relevance relations seem very related and i think like to me sigmar g seems like it's just one part of this chain of relevance realization where it's kind of
00:43:32
what are we paying attention to collectively like so when i when i imagine us you know highlighting stuff and annotating papers and we're kind of sharing our attention and then kind of becomes this like global salience landscape what's what are people looking at where they're following if we're
00:43:45
looking at brad's uh sort of notion of following humans um so yeah that's kind of where is our attention and what i would expect like if someone came and like did this study today i don't see like humanity's attention is not focused in the right place it's like we're not collectively
00:43:57
wise right now we're not looking at the right things that are going to kill us maybe in like 50 years if we don't wake up um so yeah just thinking about how we can we it feels like we need to solve the whole stack like some of our attention and our decision making and action like
00:44:09
the whole collective organism like all the all the pieces of it um so yeah big challenging test wonderful i know that's uh that daniel had the most incredible conversation
00:44:21
with john f vicki uh just last week and that relevance realization was a big part of this the link for that is in the convo thing on uh on canva.com community and daniel i'm gonna ask you about this in a moment so
00:44:35
there's just like one thing that i want to add to the discussion which has been a really like rich and enlivening one uh but as follows points out like like you know and necessarily so for this first discussion like quite abstract
00:44:48
and one of the reasons for this is that there's this inherent vagueness and high level concepts that are difficult to like get past particularly when each person has their own understanding of intelligence wisdom of uh what these things mean in their own
00:45:02
lived experience and so i just thought i'd share like a very brief story about like like one one little piece uh for me on this front which you know one of the reasons that i was
00:45:14
so attracted to stigma g is this notion of indirect communication leaving traces in the environment these environmental modifications that allow for like coordination across time and space you don't have to be in the same place as other agents the markers just need to
00:45:28
be relevant in some way to them and their cues they're not saying exactly what to do it's just like these these kind of cues and i come out of the the world of like literature and language and linguistics and i was a great fan of
00:45:40
uh if you'll forgive me the french structuralist in particular deirdre right talked at length about this notion of trace and deference and he meant it in a very different way but like the trace thing really like struck with me when
00:45:54
when daniel started talking about signature and what i wanted to relate to is that you know i've written a number of kind of digital books and one of the things that i did here because there a day in this essay called
00:46:05
signature event context has a throw a throwaway remark which is that the trace of poetry must be music and he's kind of being like a like it's a moment of lyricism in very dense
00:46:19
french philosophy which is kind of why it's always stood out to me and when i was writing the first digital book that i made i then decided to trace out the
00:46:30
uh influences for each of the poems things that i was thinking about at that time links to things that were happening when i wrote the poem or that had lyrics that related to the poem and it turned out that
00:46:43
most of the traces were musical and it genuinely was not intentional at first and as i realized that and there are now about 154 like youtube links in all of
00:46:55
the traces for these poems i realized hey you know i can make a playbook for a playlist for this book which is a kind of crazy thing you know i can't go and look at the playlist of paradise lost but you can look at the playlist of this book and what it does is like along with like
00:47:08
a bibliography on goodreads and a playlist on youtube and a more curated playlist in spotify is it provides different views over the same data right you can look at the poetic view you can look at the musical view
00:47:21
you can look at the bibliographical view and it's all like over the same data but it's providing these different views and the sense that doug engelbart was talking about when he was building nls and thinking about how do you have multiple different views of like graphs
00:47:34
or tables or whatever it is of the same data so that people can collaborate at scales never before possible so that we might augment collective intelligence and like the views of the blue book are not
00:47:46
formal logical views in the sense that engelbart meant but they are these associative kind of loosely linked things that provide you if you're more into music than poetry just listen to the youtube playlist like don't
00:47:58
bother yourself with the bones hopefully the experience is somewhat similar right like it's not going to be exactly the same but it's someone similar the reason that i tell this story is because it was by mistake right that i did this it was not intentional
00:48:10
and it's just like an interesting concept point to the discussion that we've had so far because like yes intelligence is the ability to make choices and yes it has something to do with behavior and yes it is in between agents as photos so
00:48:24
beautifully said definitely and i have experienced that same cultural thing where we ascribe it to the individual and that seems to me to be mistaken but like similarly speaking like intelligence like another way of
00:48:35
thinking about it is like it's the ability to make mistakes in an interesting direction right and this the last thing that i'll say is that it links me back to a video of the charleston colonel about uh the with the matt's last theorem and
00:48:48
andrew wiles and when you if you watch that video and we can link it uh i'm sure charles has it somewhere like they're talking about the like the one conjecture named after two japanese
00:49:01
mathematicians whose names i don't want to butcher and like there the man who is still alive talks about his partner hamari i think and says he was sloppy as a mathematician but man he made
00:49:13
interesting mistakes and and i've i've loved i've always loved that uh so i just thought that uh these mistakes you know that your nest mates make them as well and that maybe brings us back to daniel so as we think
00:49:26
about relevance and the way in which like there is a generosity required in our communal context that allows for people to make mistakes in interesting directions that might legitimately move us towards
00:49:40
like wiser environments and i wonder like is there a way of like quantifying that in the sense that blue is talking about so do you have any thoughts to kind of finish this off here at the top of the hour first
00:49:54
perhaps to rey and brennan who haven't spoken just for any brief thoughts and then we'll close in just the final minutes so i'd like to build on what uh andy said and i wonder if it's wise
00:50:10
that you use the word stigma g for what we're talking about because i think for most people they won't know this term uh if you look it up the first definition that someone's always going to see
00:50:22
is the basic mechanism of hormonally mediated behavior that would occur in termites and ants and so forth that's the canonical use of the term and that sort of behavior
00:50:36
is deeply embedded in the dna of the organism like there's very few things that they could do with a hormonal signal whereas human beings can react to
00:50:49
signals and interpret them in all sorts of ways and the interpretation might not even be consistent we know that someone will change how they react to a signaling environment based on the time of day
00:51:01
how bright it is how hungry they are how long it's been since the last time they slept the last thing they did who is with them and it seems like we're
00:51:13
overly simplifying social behavior by calling it stigmargy when actually what we do is a lot more
00:51:30
thank you ray brennan yeah uh this has been awesome i just want to say that really quickly um this is a new topic for me um so kind of seconding that point i feel like stigma
00:51:44
g is itself a poor stigmargic marker um for newcomers um so i put a question in there if there's room for a complexity guild and kernel or kind of like an introductory series of
00:51:58
articles for people in colonel who are completely new to even just complexity sciences as a whole um kind of exploring these issues because i think it's like one of the most important topics that we could discuss in web 3 and you know systems design in
00:52:12
general um but because it's so technical and well so complex um it tends to be kind of self-referential and it's very difficult to get people in the door
00:52:23
um but by the very nature you know to build a better complex system we want to get more actors in the space and get them more connected so we get more perspectives involved so i'm just curious kind of um
00:52:35
what people's take is on how we as kind of an educational fellowship can help uh increase the resilience and complex complex beauty of our discussions by making them more
00:52:49
accessible kind of from a similar lens it's a great point and intention to kind of lead us out on the top of the notes pages are
00:53:03
affordances to act and participate and hopefully it's like through action that we can continue to develop all these questions and brennan's point about the
00:53:16
accessibility and participation and inclusion on the topics is also really important and stigma g is just an english word it's just the mark it's not even the thing
00:53:28
itself so for sure it can only be a translation of one facet of any system that we actually care about and so that is always gonna for those
00:53:42
who see it have one one out of six feet in the ineffable because the modeling process is always transcending the model itself and the community is always
00:53:54
doing so with the individual and um yeah it could become a common term it would be awesome if when people just think about collective behavior rather than it being something arcane and ephemeral
00:54:07
like flocks of birds and that's the only place you're going to see collective behavior or traffic jams if it were something that were tangible and participatory that would be cause and consequence of a
00:54:18
better situation for some and it would lead us to these exact threads that we wanted to build and just introduce today which is like stigma g is just a description it's just
00:54:31
describing the category of algorithms where there's feedback amongst entities and their environments and so it is not wisdom it's not even good decisions littering is stigmargy
00:54:42
and picking up litter is stigmargy it's a descriptive framework it's like numbers but for agents and environments and how that is going to be actually utilized in
00:54:54
cyber physical systems many people here have done amazing thought and work around and in affordances to act and participate on the top of the document
00:55:06
hopefully there's a few ways that we can keep it going charles i'll be brief because i know we're over time but the you mentioned littering and actually you just reminded me that i i
00:55:18
was speaking with brad earlier and about the notion of crap detection so it's it is what it sounds like and i learned about this from howard reingold it's a term i think that mark twain actually coined
00:55:30
um and but so when we have to go into these environments online and i think especially my kids or any young people you know that's even another level of crap detection required um just just to kind of deal with um
00:55:44
what what's you know the onslaught and then and and then uh if we're talking about twitter or you know like who we're following then we've maybe cultivated over time you know how to filter out or filter in what we want and
00:55:57
so forth um so i just wanted to kind of flash on that to pick up on you know for next time and i look forward to the next time and the other thing is andy um uh prompted me with uh
00:56:08
mentioning doug engelbart and um i have i'll see if i can be really compact here but and it relates to community gardening or in the garden so if we think about the whole and wisdom in the whole it's the whole garden
00:56:21
okay and and the way i've i've come to look at engelbart's framework with the dynamic knowledge repository network improvement community again a bunch of jargony stuff that glenn here is is trying to talk me down from um also
00:56:34
interoperability okay anyway i'm rambling but i'm excited to pick this up um and maybe we can think about the garden as the whole and whatever that is even on the simplest smaller scale
00:56:46
um deal with the deal with these things thanks great hope to see many in the colonel slack and for others uh the affordances to act and participate should make it clear other ways to
00:57:02
participate and there's the last comment would be active block prince is an open source package open source attention is a another project with ronan and brad and others and charles so check out some of these
00:57:15
resources because there's active opportunities to be really involved basically right now so anytime somebody wants to learn more contact someone here thanks for the
00:57:26
subtle play out andy you're supposed to start dancing this this is a song that comes from holly graham uh it's uh it's got an old man uh in the thinker pose with the big
00:57:42
words study on the front of the video so i thought it was a wonderful way to end our session today some binaural beats from the one and only holy grail thank you so much for joining us
00:57:56
we will no doubt have many more of these and act and participate in the documents we will be in the channel and continue from there thank you so much
00:58:08
for joining us
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