The "Intelligent Design" Theory Of Wikipedia, Er, Maybe We Should Call That "Intentional Design" Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

There's a theme, so far ex tempore, that persists in tugging at my little gray cells in divers and sundry e-vironments. I will begin by replicating and mutating an unnatural selection of these sporting thoughts here.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

When we speak of a system being "dysfunctional" we need to remember that functionality is relative to a purpose. A system that is functional toward one objective may be dysfunctional toward another objective, and will be so if those two objectives are incompatible in their own rights.

The systems-analytic task known as System Identification (SI) includes the task of identifying system objectives, or specifying system purposes. These are judgment calls. So our judgment that a system is dysfunctional may devolve from the fact the we have failed to detect, identify, or specify its intended objective, or the purpose that the system actually has.

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Thu 24th April 2008, 3:34pm

[Jon Awbrey]

Dynamic Workspace — for doing some rewriting …

Es ist passiert, "it just sort of happened", people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself.

— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving
on its own, just data and people shuffling it
around. Then something happened, and it …
it knew itself.

— William Gibson, Count Zero

It makes a good science fiction story, but it doesn't make such a good science reality story. The reason why we evolved immune systems is because evolution is too damn slow. The reason why we evolved brains is because immune systems are too damn slow. Designing media on the model of evolution is two giant steps backward — a double devolution.

Jonny

Dear Count Zero,

That Self-Organizing Connectionist Brains O' Mush Bit (SOCBOMB) has flashed in the brain-pan of intellectual fadism every 20 years like schlockwerk since 1900 — so you're either 8 years too late or a dozen years too early to take the tide of times at the flood.

Syncerely Yores,

Jonny Mnemonic

Dear Jonny. Please get a brain-dump before that skullbusting load of cynicism destroys your acting ability or explodes your cerebrum. Oh, the acting problems came before, you say. Ahem.

Yes, the ideas in one way or another have been around far longer than 1900 — at least since Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin (who read Smith), Spencer and so on. But that doesn't make them any less interesting, or that new instances of evolutionary thinking don't need pointing out.

For example, Google, which uses a voting scheme to sieve the net, which also has a lot of parallels with neural nets. Think Google isn't thinking? Then how come the other web search engines are so dumb by comparison?

We're all just hydrogen atoms that have been given a lot of time to jossle, and a good entropy sink. Wikis should be faster.

But when the wine had stolen about the wits of the Cyclops, then I spoke to him with gentle words:

"Cyclops, thou askest me of my glorious name, and I will tell it thee; and do thou give me a stranger's gift, even as thou didst promise. Noman is my name, Noman do they call me — my mother and my father, and all my comrades as well."

Homer, The Odyssey, 9.362–367, A.T. Murray (trans.), Loeb Classical Library.

Wikipedia is an anarchy

It's an oligarchy.

No, Man, Nemocrasy.

Oh Look, yet another recitation of the Nobody's In Charge (WP:NIC) myth …

See Also

• TINC
• TINCC
• Nemocracy
• Unseen Hand
• Rex Absconditus
• Jimbo Krack Korn

Jon

Ya didn't read the second half where I compare Jimbo to Lenin Ah hell, the post is too long and on a Sunday morning I wouldn't read all of it myself …

It's not that I didn't read it all, it's just that the Nemo theme resonates with some recent reps of ritual rubrics by a motley crue of Wikipediot Altar Boys — Doc Glasgow, Newyorkbrad, and others. So that is what jumped out at me from the Mass, er, mass.

If I ask myself Why They Need To Be Able To Say That To Themselves, I guess the first answer that suggests itself is a tune from Tommy —

I'M FREEEEEEEE !!!!

But methinks they doth protest too much.

I selected the following couplet as representing one of the critical tropes or turning points in Doc's envoi.

Of course the initial decision making process has a Godking as a safety valve. Alas, Olympus is now distant and probably impotent anyway.

Many people — yea, verily, even who walk and quack among us — falter at this step and uncritically accept what further reflection unmasks as Yet Another Comforting Bit Of Mythology (WP:YACBOM).

My declamation of that fact rightfully raises a couple of further questions:

• Why Is It Mythology?
• Why Is It Comforting?

Exorcise For The Reader.

If there is anything like the Eternally Recurring Fallacy (ERF) about Wikipedia, it is the notion that its dynamics is driven exclusively by Tertium Non Datur Dyadic Cyclones taking place solely between two classes of Wikipediots — for example, the shift-changes that occur on the plane of experts and novices, among many others — all ungoverned by, er, Control.

The motive for languishing in this false and untenable assumption is the very engine that drives every con game — the mark simply prefers not to believe that he or she is living in such a world that has such perfidious creatures in it.

Control has screwed nothing up.

Control is right on the money.

Control is right on the mark.

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Thu 24th April 2008, 3:42pm

[Jon Awbrey]

Tongue In Cheek (TIC)?

In my youth I had a fairly robust Integrating Facility (IF), but I let it wax rusty in the iron cage of oeuvre-speciation, so it's something of a struggle for me to integrate the many-splintered themes that I enumerated above, not to mention the yarn-bag packed full of loose threads and tangled skeins from which I can hardly tease them.

And now another Infantile Fantasy (IF) hits the fan — it's the one that goes a bit like this:

We're all perfectly equal in our knowledge of everything, and all it takes is the stubborn insistence of random jostling in gang-banging ganglia of self-confessed I-Am-Not-An-Expert-Bots for the obseen hand of e-volution, re*acting witlessly to one damn e-mergency after another, for knowledge to arise in the Systern.

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Sun 27th April 2008, 4:50pm

[Milton Roe]

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free." That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Mon 28th April 2008, 12:40am

[Jon Awbrey]

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free". That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

The stuff you've been ladelling out here is a whole lot of pop culture mush. I can dish that out as good as anyone — and there is some fun to a good food fight.

Let me know if you ever wanna have a real discussion about AI, where it is and where it AIn't today.

Jon

[Milton Roe]

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free". That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

The stuff you've been ladelling out here is a whole lot of pop culture mush. I can dish that out as good as anyone — and there is some fun to a good food fight.

Let me know if you ever wanna have a real discussion about AI, where it is and where it AIn't today.

Jon

We'll never get anywhere until you admit that intelligence in animals (at the very least) is a free lunch. It runs on sunlight. No design.

We humans may have had some "bootstrap" existential hand in the design of our own intelligence, by means of our own intelligent selection of each other as mates, but even so, we started as animals too, so ultimately, that also is free lunch.

This is NOT pop culture (any longer-- it was pop culture in 1930 with Stapeldon, but that's long gone). This is Dawkins and (the late) Gould and where standard biology is. If AI theory is going to shrug off biological intelligence and its emergence as "pop culture stories," then it can go hang. But (fortunately) AI is not ignoring biology. And as for me, I don't really want to talk about artificial intelligence. I only care about intelligence. AI is not going to get here first. But "better than human intelligence" (BTHI) is already here. It sent men to the moon. I can't do that, and you can't either. Nobody can. Nobody ever could. It's so far outside the bounds of human ability that some people still don't believe it happened. But yet it did. I'm interested in understanding how.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Mon 28th April 2008, 2:13am

[Jon Awbrey]

It is of course but another turn on a very old gambit, so a word to the wise will be sufficient — how about this one:

∃←Ø (Something For Nothing)
That Old Con (TOC)!

Jon

No, the only actual con is "Money for nothing and the chicks are free". That never happens. However, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch (Guth) or Big Lurch, and all the "freebies" from there, have been driven by the increasing entropy from that beginning. To be specific, all the little free lunches result from the Big Lurch™. Including you and me.

The stuff you've been ladelling out here is a whole lot of pop culture mush. I can dish that out as good as anyone — and there is some fun to a good food fight.

Let me know if you ever wanna have a real discussion about AI, where it is and where it AIn't today.

Jon

We'll never get anywhere until you admit that intelligence in animals (at the very least) is a free lunch. It runs on sunlight. No design.

We humans may have had some "bootstrap" existential hand in the design of our own intelligence, by means of our own intelligent selection of each other as mates, but even so, we started as animals too, so ultimately, that also is free lunch.

This is NOT pop culture (any longer — it was pop culture in 1930 with Stapeldon, but that's long gone). This is Dawkins and (the late) Gould and where standard biology is. If AI theory is going to shrug off biological intelligence and its emergence as "pop culture stories," then it can go hang. But (fortunately) AI is not ignoring biology. And as for me, I don't really want to talk about artificial intelligence. I only care about intelligence. AI is not going to get here first. But "better than human intelligence" (BTHI) is already here. It sent men to the moon. I can't do that, and you can't either. Nobody can. Nobody ever could. It's so far outside the bounds of human ability that some people still don't believe it happened. But yet it did. I'm interested in understanding how.

Now don't get me wrong — one of the few Isms I cotton to is Naturalism, which I take to be the hypothesis that everything that happens is natural.

The current disconnect in our discussion is not about that — it's the matter of scale in space and time, and the analogies that break down when people try to stretch them across vast gulfs of scale.

Yeah, animate intelligence is a free lunch, but's a lunch that takes millions and billions of years to rustle up, depending whether you count the time it took to preheat the oven … or to forge the oven. So if you're watching the pot of evolution, waiting for the heat death of entropy to warm your soup, I ♥ily recommend you bite the • and buy a microwave instead.

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Mon 28th April 2008, 12:16pm

[Jon Awbrey]

When we speak of a system being "dysfunctional" we need to remember that functionality is relative to a purpose. A system that is functional toward one objective may be dysfunctional toward another objective, and will be so if those two objectives are incompatible in their own rights.

The systems-analytic task known as System Identification (SI) includes the task of identifying system objectives, or specifying system purposes. These are judgment calls. So our judgment that a system is dysfunctional may devolve from the fact the we have failed to detect, identify, or specify its intended objective, or the purpose that the system actually has.

Jon