2005-03-16 rolling notes


book: Darwin Among the Machines, by Dyson

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market of one vs the homeland china. two big trends.

another trend: geek introspection is hitting the mainstream. people like to know
the narrative behind the world that surrounds them. and we're illuminating more
of the human world as we go along.

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jimmy wales:

http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikicities

"conceived as the social computing successor to 'free homepages'"

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folk tags talk:

joshua saying there's a natural level for tags. not "computers" because
everything is that; not something really specific, because that's only one
thing. so something inbetween. and interestingly, that's like the brain and
landmarks. there are certain things that we all understand are potential
landmarks.

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wisdom of crowds talk:

ants drop formic acid so that they have a mechanism for getting smarter
together. humans are not ants because we have no such mechanism. [which is
totally disagree with. automaticity is precisely this--we tend to follow the
paths of those around us, very complex intellectual paths too.]

[and, from an ants perspective, are they really doing the smartest thing? are
there things ants could do that would be smarter if they had the planning
module?]

humans are imitation machines. it's a quick and dirty heuristic that works quite
well. [ah, okay, i forgive him :) although the imitation that's interesting is
not that we assume "lots of people doing something makes it worthwhile"
(standing on street corners and looking up), it's that imitation goes all the
way down the chain, minute by minute stuff.]

economists call [something] an information cascade.