m&mworld

replace each human with an m&m




color each m&m
according to its philosophy




when their philosophy changes dramatically
their color changes as well




some never change, from birth




some share their parents philosophy

some don't







healthy whole personalities are represented
by whole m&ms

broken and wounded personalities
by broken m&ms




the tragedy of being broken
is normally blamed on another broken m&m

 
 
 
 

.

Language molecules

whether they're dna or not
there have to be molecules in the brain
that embody specific words

so someday a visualisation
will be able to sort the whole thesaurus
into specific brain regions

down to the level of specific molecules

so life events
are continually
verbalised
at the molecular level

 
 
 
 
.

Calculating interface 'friction'

the juxtaposition of
john gruber's concept of interface friction
with david li's copula formula

has refocused an old intuition
about the science of human factors:

that someday we should have a formula
for rating the 'friction' in an interface

• how many clicks
  for each important action
  
  
• how much mental strain
  to refocus the brain
  (like shifting contexts)
  
  
• how much unintuitive complexity
  to master
  
  
• how much opportunity
  to be publicly humiliated
  
  

web 2.0 has made considerable progress
on the first two of these

but achieving sufficient mastery
to avoid self-embarrassment
is a gigantic, growing problem

 
 
 
 .

metacargocult

what i like about
this cargocult analysis
is its bottom-up originality

squeezed out of direct confrontation
with media stupidity

so i thought blogs that linked it
might be worth sifting

(what i don't like about it
is its bottom-up contingency
lacking top-down necessity)

[numbering mostly added]

I. Ignorance is innocence

cf eg "zen mind, beginner's mind"
open lack-of-prejudice can be angelic
the 1st time you try bowling you may get a strike

but "Forrest Gump" was sentimentally dishonest
(also "Being There")

we may deserve a world where
innocence effortlessly triumphs
but we've never had one

IA. Complicated explanations are suspect

g spencer brown would defend this one

if the intuition senses
a simpler way
it has the right and duty
to reject the too-complex one

IA1. The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

isn't this an explicit variant
on the anthropic principle?

IB. Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

IB1. Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.

IB2. Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the
prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real
knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled

Popular beliefs must be true.

No bad idea can survive.

People are generally smart.

Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the
same boat as everyone else.

II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person's explanation of the means of his
success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful
people

This is the key to the cargo cult.  To enjoy the
success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

Your idol gets the blame if things don't work out, not you.

You have a right to your share

You get to define your share.

Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.

Celebrate getting more than your share.

III. It's not your fault

If it's good for you, it's good

Society is everyone else.

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

There is no long term

Don't miss an opportunity.

Consequences are things that happen to others

Only you can hold yourself accountable.  Don't let
others make you do that.

If somebody starts the blame game, you can still win it.

There are evil people and institutions, and surely one of them is more
responsible than you are.

You are not the problem

An ugly image means a bad mirror.

IV. Death is unnatural

You're special

Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

Pain is wrong

Life should not hurt.

It's a Whiffle World.

Tragedy is a synonym for calamity

Bad things are never consequences of one's own action or
inaction.

There will be justice

Bad people get punished.

You, however, will be forgiven.

The Con molecule

everyone's experienced 'awakenings'
where the Con loses its grip
(as in Carpenter's "They Live")

but always falling back then
to sleep




after enough cycles
of wake-sleep-wake

a pressure-point
may come into focus

thru which the dark cloak
descends

but which can be resisted
standing up against the conformity
of millions of people
over thousands of years

and might this pressure-point
even be a single molecule
or at least a small cluster
in the brain
between the eyes

the ultimate battleground of good and evil

torn between
a state of comfort
and a state of virtue?

 
 
 
 
.

The ontology of the Con

reagan's victory in 1980
was a cold awakening for us hippies
the progressive dream drowned

and ever since we've been pedaling in sand
in tar
no traction

i see one hope

the solidity of science

social science without academic bs

an a.i. simulation of the Con

world history rewritten

in the broader context of psychological evolution

the etymogeny of meaning

the mysterious depths of sexuality

wakefulness intimidation ego and sleep

 
 
 
 
.

Urk

Jill Tarter [Wiki]: It's the slow-thinking speed of the humans relative to the mechanicals that makes me wonder whether in fact they might be so reduced in number that a small glitch, a fluctuation, can mean the end of them. Or whether they won't be purposely eliminated, or choose to eliminate themselves.

Will Wright: It's an interesting point, because if you basically take the brain out, what other part of human biology would you want to keep?

JT: Right.

WW: In which case, is that to say that we're likely to transition into purely designed creature or entities?

JT: That's what the singularity is all about — having the first opportunity ever to do that. Who will take it is the question. [my emphasis]

Am I reading this right, that they take seriously the possibility that humans will/should let the species die out, so superior robot brains can take over?

"...if you basically take the brain out, what other part of human biology would you want to keep?"

Priority-semantics

at any moment
in any person's
mental model

some objects are
more important
than others

ie
mental objects can be ranked
by importance

rankings changing in time

and different rankings
can be averaged
narrowly or broadly
by various algorithms

locally important details
demoted
as averages are broadened
(other times
other people
other places
other species)

today's average
year-to-date average
family average
community average
national average
species average

these ?universally? important objects
are named in english
with words like

sex death ego money
love family brains body
beauty art communication
celeb gossip sports politics



novelists projecting their private priorities
onto realistic characters
with individual priorities

 
 
 
 
 
.

Wisest of the wise

[this is the first
and hopefully the
least
articulate and
most
controversial
of a projected series]

any semantic web first needs
a mental model of all possible semantic webs
(and this mental model must include
a mental model of all possible
mental models)

say

mentally model each 'object'
(including mental objects)
as a named point
of known or unknown duration
(some objects
more important than others
from the perspective of any given mind)

with lines between points
modeling relationships between objects

relationships changing in time

relationships mentally modeled
by related mental objects

relations affecting
and affected by
(more or less strongly)
related relationships with other objects

(all mental models of relationships
necessarily related to the mental models
of all related objects
and of their relationships)


and mental models differ in depth
in wisdom
some shallow some deep

deep or shallow
in many different ways

different wisdoms
characteristic of the deep or shallow
people who hold them

but mental models of semantic webs
and mental models of mental models
must be deep by every definition

constructed atop a distillation
of all wisdoms
(art philosophy religion
politics economics history
fiction poetry humor
psychology philology anthropology sociobiology
criticism design logic math)
only by the wisest of the wise

.

Crayolacube combinatorics

starting
from the worldtree

and its
individual lifelines

isolate any
line segment
and flatten its spatial dimensions
down to just x
(with time as y)



paint this segment
using any convenient mapping
(eg the crayolacube
red-evil blue-sad
yellow-sick or -enslaved)



classify your segment by
start-color
and end-color



ignoring intermediate values
(here greyed)

notice the formal analogy
with the i ching's 64 hexgrams
permuting eight trigrams



each colorchange
within any segment
must have
causes

some expected
some unexpected



now
isolate any pair of segments
that start and end
at the same times

and classify this pair
by its two start colors
and its two end colors
(8^4 = 4096, too slow to render)



#1 of 64



sometimes the colorchange
in one segment
will help cause the colorchange
in the other segment

via
a strong or weak
linkage

strong

weak

 
 
 
 
 
.