Augmented Democracy - Intentional Capitalism | A continuum analysis of collective decision making — I've been thinking about how groups make decisions. There are a lot of ways decision-making happens in detail, but I noticed a broad pattern that I wanted to discuss in this post: that the most fundamental component of a decision-making system boils down to how the atomic "decision making unit" (DMU) is distributed across the population. I'll explain what I mean by this using the simplest example first. Democracy: predetermined distribution of DMUs To start off, lets focus on a pure direct democracy where every decision is voted on by ...

analyzing a.ttent.io/n — Why do written works of fiction ever have to be finished? What if the story's growth was part of the story itself? My first real work of fiction is finished. But I wonder if my first real story is just beginning? What is a.ttent.io/n? While I've previously alluded to the story I've been writing, which has been in the works for more than 3 years, I've never directly covered what it's about on this site. It's a story, to be sure, but it's also meant to be an experiment. Writing ...

Imagining a new economy on the Co-op Trail — I'm honestly grossed out by how our economy works. I never really had the privilege to understand it until now, but now that I'm seeing what it's like for a well-off person, I can't help but recognize the preposterous unfairness of it all. A few months ago I learned about the co-op movement and an idea called the solidarity economy (mostly from following Zebras Unite ❤️). I am learning so much and compiling articles and videos, but as I've learned more and more, I'm really starting to understand just how ...

Renaissance of the Renaissance Person: We should restructure society so anyone can try lots of things. — Inspired by the Break 'Em Up! discussion from People's Action today, I've been trying to imagine what I think fairness and justice would look like in the world. It's a lofty thought, but one that I don't think enough people take the time to envision in their day-to-day life. We all talk about how we want a fair society in an abstract way, but there is a grey area in the definition of fairness between the obviously unfair distribution of resources today, and another extreme of perfectly regimented identical distribution ...

The Ongoing Process of a.ttent.io/n — I feel like my short story a.ttent.io/n will never be finished. But rather than fight that, I'm thinking perhaps I should embrace it as part of the core novelty of the medium I'm building. If I recall correctly, I came up with the core conceit of the novel sometime before I started grad school in 2010. I sketched out the different story arcs, but I languished with the problem that the whole story was just too big. Then in the fall of 2017, I was chatting with a friend at ...

The Lisens: a license to simulate the sense of self — For the past year, my viewfoil project has led me to expand my use of identity publication (aka social media) and consolidate my public technological identity footprint into one portal online. My long-term goal with the project is to form an artificial intelligence simulation of my personal online behavior. In other words, I aim to someday build an algorithm that can replicate and potentially replace the portion of my mind that generates behavioral artifacts on the internet. But this forces me to ask a question: If I can pursue self-simulation ...

Prof Bonkerfield Joins the Ampled Co-op — This summer I started getting very interested in co-ops and the solidarity economy. A big place where I started to learn was during the Zebras United Season of the Dazzle, which led to learning about start.coop. And while watching start.coop's 2020 grad class give their presentations, I learned about a very cool artist-ownership payment platform called Ampled. Ampled is a pretty straightforward replication of Patreon (or onlyfans), but the interesting part to me is that the business is built and run with the intention to keep the fan's funding in ...

How about worker-owned automation? — Epistemic status: I've been ruminating on Fully Automated Luxury Communism and how to make it happen. Can't tell if it'll succeed, but it's something worth working toward. Recent events have reawoken an idea that I've wanted to tackle since I was a teenager. Over the past few months as I've been learning, I've also been reorganizing my life and finances to try to take a new direction. To put it bluntly, I feel like it's time to find a way to ethically get rid of all the crappy jobs in ...

Identifield: information in the material universe — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. As I moved from physics to biology and now into machine learning, my worldview has shifted from one focused on material reality to one that deals largely with abstractions of information. I've thought a great deal about these two viewpoints and wondered about their relationship. Importantly, as I've interacted with people ensconced in these two fields, I've ...

A Spacetime Visual Explanation — Spacetime Explained It can be tricky to think about where something is in not only space, but time too. Physicists picture the location of objects in space and time using a concept called spacetime. They generally think about this in regard to physical objects, and that's a good place to get an introduction to the concept. As an example, check out this bowling ball rolling in this gif I found. The ball is more or less traveling in a straight line down the alley so at any point in time ...

Redefining Identity: A continuum approach — Epistemic status: This is an attempt to define personal identity for myself. I believe that it is a more developed description than most, but I always welcome new insights. There are two hurdles that I've needed to overcome in defining my personal identity. First, I've had trouble holding onto what it is that makes up "me."" I've changed so much throughout the course of my life, that thinking about what "I" think seems almost impossible. Second, I'm troubled with the concept of identity as labels. I've found myself falling into ...

Philosophical Grind: why assume that your actions matter — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. What causes us to choose one action as opposed to another? There are, of course, instantaneous needs that must be met, but how do we decide the bigger questions in life? Over the past several months I have formulated a resolution to this question that I believe makes the fewest necessary assumptions about the structure of the ...

Intuition as Unobserved Probabilistic Function Exploration — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. In my previous writing, I've derived arguments to show that I should act as though the universe has a purpose, and that while the universe's purpose is not knowable with certainty, I should act as though correct action is discoverable. In this work, I wish to lay out my argument for intuition as a way of sensing ...

The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream — Epistemic status: Minimally researched musings from someone who has blogged (poorly) for a few years and has an idea for a thing he wants to make. In the digital circles where I find myself roaming these days, there is an interesting conversation about two different modalities of online content creation, summarized by a potent analogy called the Garden and the Stream. I think I was initially made aware of it from Chris Aldrich's reference to this post by Mike Caulfield. If you aren't familiar with the tale of the Garden ...

Quantum Multiverse Bifurcator at Burning Man... in Another Universe — Last night, I learned that Black Rock City isn't going to be built in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm grateful the Burning Man organization made that choice. It was the right thing to do in this time. I had been waiting to announce that my friends and I had gotten a Burning Man Arts Honorarium until I knew what was going to happen. But now that I know the event isn't taking place, I feel much more comfortable showing off our plans! Based on our previous quantum multiverse ...

Why building an AI chatbot that passed as human convinced me to put my whole life on the internet — In my free time, I like to build stuff and put it on the internet. Two months ago, I built an AI comment generating chatbot and deployed it on reddit. The chatbot was designed to leave pertinent, realistic replies to other redditors' comments. I figured it would say a bunch of weird stuff and then get flagged and blocked. To my surprise, the chatbot was practically perfect at writing coherent English sentences. And it was also pretty good at understanding the context of a reddit comment and generating replies that ...