Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

[Alexander Praetorius <alexander.praetorius AT serapath.de>]

one rule of thumb would be to build fast feedback loops, so that you spent less time debating and speculating, but getting more real feedback, so the smaller the "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product), which already brings at least some "value" to whatever kind of users (in our case, that would be the pirate party and their internal communication processes), the better.

Just try to boil it down to the minimum feature set, of which you are kind of very sure, that those will be needed anyways and push it out.
Then, when there will be actual usage and other kinds of feedback, the discussion is less exposed to waste time arguing about things that cannot be known for sure yet.


this "ontology" we are building sounds nice in theory, but makes it also more complex to develop real systems that make use of it.
OWL (Web Ontology Language) was broken down into a light, medium and heavy weight version and you could argue, that RDF is even a more "lightweight version", because its all about other programmers understanding what it is about and building programs, that make use of all those features.

So, even though, in a more "evolved future" all those "details" of the ontology make sense, but the initial version has to be radically simplified and should aim for just pushing out something that people can actually use to easily implement there own discussion systems that make use of it...

On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Scott Raney <scott AT metacard.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Martin Stolze <pirate.martin AT stolze.cc> wrote:
> On the upside I think that you are heading in the right direction with
> "objective scientific measures". It's just that you can't measure what you
> can't define.

Right, which is why I plan to leave the defining and measuring to others ;-)

> I think you are also ahead of the curve by getting over the left/right
> blather. It's "*biases*, especially towards prejudice and aggression, that
> present problems".
> I called them uninformed choices, we just differ on where they originate.

Unfortunately to do so is to throw out a few hundred years of
psychological research that shows that there *are* personality
differences among humans, that they are at least partially if not
mostly genetically determined, and that they don't significantly
change over an individual's life.  There are great longitudinal
studies that show even assessments of personality characteristics
(especially shy vs outgoing) done in *preschool* have a high
correlation with liberalism/conservatism when measured when the
subjects were adults.  Some people *are* just more likely to feel and
display prejudice and aggression.

> Let’s cut through the chase.
> - If I find a bridge with serious cracks and I have other options to get on,
> I don't need to concern myself with its "background". I won't cross it. To
> be precise, a bridge that isn't build according to the laws of nature and
> with great understanding and expertise in the application and integration of
> the construction materials to the environment it isn't worth a dime.

I'm not proposing to just discount what we *do* know about social and
personal psychology to build our bridge.  I'm just saying we don't
know nearly enough about social engineering to design our new
government system the way we would design a bridge or a new cell
phone.

> It is indeed correct that "we don't have to understand the inner workings to
> create a *system* that works in spite of them", if all you aspire is a tree
> across a creek.

No, what I'm proposing is to over-engineer our structures to account
for what we don't know.  In the bridge analogy it would be using more
girders because we don't actually *know* if maybe 25% of them won't
perform the way we expect them to.  And to make the guard rails taller
and thicker because we don't know how often people travelling over the
bridge will lose control and crash into them.

(snip)

> The point where your entire ideology falls apart to me is that I am
> convinced that the human brain is a highly plastic organ. This means that it
> can be molded in an almost infinite number of ways. Successful religions
> have this figured out already.
> Sunday mass? Christmas? Repetition is the key to make impression on this
> organ.
> Repeat the Holy Scriptures often enough and they will stick. I don't think
> that any religious person thinks about it this way, their system was rather
> designed by haphazard. You try the same with deliberation.

Again, this ignores a whole swath of psychological and neurobiological
research that shows that the level of plasticity is limited.  Your
proposal is that we can take a pair of identical twins and raise one
of them in a safe and secure environment and produce a liberal, and
raise another in an environment of scarcity and get an authoritarian.
The science shows that this is just not true!

(another snip, really just for brevity, it's all good stuff!)

> I had a look and Altemeyer comes up with some objective and precise
> observation as base to identify his authoritarians:
>
> Psychologically these […] personalities featuring:
> 1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
> their society;
> 2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
> 3) a high level of conventionalism.

The mantra: Everyone working in politics or social psychology ought to
have this list engraved in their brains.  Again, I strongly recommend
reading Altemeyer's books if you're skeptical that this is a viable
description of a certain segment of the population.

(snip)

> It takes a village to raise a child and if the traditional information the
> person is exposed to compel her to regard woman as property alike cattle,
> misogyny will prevail. If the person’s cognition is more developed and more
> information are available to validate biased patterns, change will occur.

But what you're describing are examples of behavior in a cultural
context.  As it turns out the *source* of this misogyny (and most
other prejudice) is a relatively small percentage of the population
that has been able to set cultural norms (i.e., those authoritarians).
You don't see this kind of misogyny in LPA tribes because they have
ways to control authoritarian behaviors that we living in more
developed civilizations lack.  It's a trade we made 10,000 years or so
ago, giving up this control over authoritarians in exchange for
allowing them to build hierarchical organizations that enable
agriculture, the building of cities, and other technological
advancements.

If we free ourselves of this authoritarian yoke, we will find that the
majority of people are *not* inclined to display this kind of
prejudice, and they only do it because they are being coerced (i.e.,
if you don't participate in the stoning of an adulterer, they'll stone
*you*!)  The rapid flip of acceptance for gay marriage I think is a
prime example of this: In 20 years the percentage of people in favor
or opposed to it has almost exactly flipped.  The majority of those
who switched sides didn't have some miraculous input of information
that made them see the light, they were merely following cultural
norms even though they had no real inclination to be prejudiced
themselves.  The 25% of those still opposed are primarily
authoritarians and simply will never change their minds because
they're just wired to be prejudiced (though they too will follow
cultural norms and so it will soon *appear* that this particular
prejudice has died out at least if you measure it using public opinion
polls: Private behavior, let alone a brain scan, will tell a different
story, just as it does with racism now).

> I see no need to read any further. Psychologists are a dangerous bread,
> squeezed between superstition and a complex nature they tend to mistake
> causation for correlation more often than not because some explanation is
> always better than none. Blank slate theory? Phrenology? It's in the
> methods!

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater again: Sure there have been a
lot of wrong turns and dead ends in the progress of science, but
that's just the nature of science.  But I'm an engineer more than a
scientist, so I don't have to have "the ultimate truth", I just need
to judge each finding on the criteria "Is this likely to be useful in
designing a better government system than what we have now?".  Most of
what I (and Altemeyer) cite easily meets this requirement.  We might
be wrong in believing that you can't educate out authoritarianism (as
seems to be your claim), but as it turns out that doesn't matter: I'll
design my system to work with authoritarians participating, and if we
later find a way to "fix" them or prevent them from being created,
that's fine too because that system will work even better without
them.

(snip)

> Altemeyer identifies people that are exposed to a certain set of information
> through which they draw conclusions. When we change the composition of the
> information that people are exposed to we would receive another result. It
> also explains why we have so intricate censorship and advertising.

Again, you're being naive if you believe that just controlling access
to information will change people's tendency to be prejudiced.  It's a
*personality characteristic* not a computational result.

> If you take all this noise off the table you will notice that the agent
> simply reacts to his environment in a way to maximize his utility.

Again, naive: Countless studies have shown people are irrational even
when being so works against their utility.  Now one might take a "big
picture" view and say that things like altruism are "rational" based
on survival of the gene (kin selection, group selection, etc.) but
that's not your argument.  And I'm not concerned about achieving
perfect rationality because we don't need it so long as we design the
system to account for the most common failure modes.

> Look at the elections in Ukraine and you will notice that people were much
> more engaged. The reason being is "perceived fear of having reduced access
> to (scarce) resources". They "perceive" this because of unmistakable signs
> and as they recognize the pattern by employing their cognitive capacity they
> conclude that the amplitude of the change that happens has an over
> proportional impact on their access to resources.

As I point out in my book *all* the major wars and genocides started
this way.  Don't know if it's politically correct to say this on a
German mailing list, but 88% of German citizens voted to confirm
Hitler as dictator in 1934 (and, yes, it was a legitimate election,
not like the people "electing" Mugabe or Saddam Hussein) .  So having
the majority of people electing representatives is obviously not a
viable solution because when they are in fear of scarcity, they will
follow *anyone* who promises them a solution to that problem.  But
here's my confession of faith, because I simply don't have the
research to back this up yet: My sincere belief is that if you had
asked the German people whether or not they wanted to invade Poland in
1939 you'd find that the majority of them would vote against that
proposal.  That faith is really our only hope to save our species
IMHO, that although people will elect and follow an authoritarian
leader in times of crisis, they will not vote to commit acts of war
and genocide if they have to do so directly.  Certainly your proposal
to provide them the necessary information would help with this
process, but the real flaw in the system here is representative
government, which will *always* be subject to manipulation by
authoritarians, not merely that the people lack sufficient information
to avoid electing authoritarian leaders in the first place.

> The determining factor is not a constant or predetermination as Altemeyer
> tries to invent but simply information (including experience) and cognition
> (concluding in expectation).
> What complicates the situation is the fact that people have a limited
> cognitive capacity. This means a particular person has only a limited
> capacity to assess the (necessarily biased) information and connect the
> dots. When I talked (downed vodka) with officials in Simferopol it was
> downright obvious that their cognition was so underdeveloped that they
> simply did not have the ability understand what opportunities are available
> in a free world or how to size them. It comes as no surprise that those
> people will fall pray to the next pied piper.

Agreed, but my engineering solution is not to ensure information is
available that will prevent this, it's to design out the position of
"pied piper" so that it simply isn't available.  My way is easier and
better because there are simply too many people who, as you put it,
have such "limited cognitive capacity" that you can't count on them to
resist deferring to their instincts when a threat of resource scarcity
arises.

And it's curious that your philosophy allows for variation in this
"cognitive capacity" but that bias and political orientation are
something that are solely subject to environment.  Why aren't they
like cognitive capacity, something that is largely genetically
determined?

> If you have been raised by doctrine, may it political or religious, your are
> very much predetermined to score high as an authoritarian simply because you
> lack exposure to information together with a likely underdeveloped cognitive
> capacity.

Again, not what the research shows, and naive to boot: There are
people raised in devout households who are not religious, and vice
versa.  The environment does have an effect, but it's only half the
variance.  The other half is genetic, which means an innate
personality characteristic, and not something you can change by merely
changing the environment.

> We all have been exposed to very biased information to some degree. The way
> you make sense of it is by creating an ineffective (distorting reality) but
> justifiable (scapegoat=authoritarians) ideology. You and Altemeyer are just
> a shy step away from religion. I don’t need to concern myself with it
> because it will have no meaningful market share among the ideologies that
> prostitute themselves in this niche.

The profound irony of this is something I hit on repeatedly in my
book.  Maybe you're right, maybe I do lack perspective and this is
simply a matter of faith.  But I've done all the checks of the science
I can think of, and read every "manifesto" I can get my hands on to
practice my skill at detecting this kind of blindness.  And so far I
still think I'm safely on the side of "visionary" rather than
"crackpot".  But this is why I appreciate your attempts to point out
things I may have overlooked.

> Instead, consider the simple 2 dimension I offered, plot a graph to display
> values for two variables: x;y are cognitive capacity and exposure to
> information.
> Distribute all subjects of a given polity across this diagram and evaluate
> the statistical distribution on the coordinate system.
>
> Exposure to information
>     |            *
>     | *       * * *
>     |*    *  * * *
>     | *    *   *  *
>     |*      *  *
>     |________________ Cognitive capacity
>
> My guess is that you find your authoritarians most densely around the origin
> and along the axis lines? Isn't that where the questionnaire "RWA Scale"
> scoops generously but superficially along?

Umm, no: Authoritarianism (and indeed liberal vs conservative) is
*not* highly correlated with intelligence (which I assume is similar
to your "cognitive capacity") dimension.  There is a higher
correlation with "exposure to information" (the usual measure for
which is "level of education"), but again, it's still not nearly as
significant as the purely genetic influence (i.e., data from the twin
studies).  To propose that you can correct authoritarian behavior with
education, or by imposing penalties (and Janos repeatedly promises),
is simply naive IMHO.  We'll have better luck correcting it with
social controls (e.g., peer pressure), but you're never going to
eliminate it entirely, which means consensus is out as a decision rule
and that the only way to compensate for it is to have a system where
the Neurotypicals are carrying most of the burden of decisionmaking.

(big snip, good analysis and no major correction necessary)

> If Altemeyer would check on his findings, let’s say by demography he would
> probably be surprised in respect to the distribution and see the cracks in
> the ideology.

I agree that there is way too little actual demographic info
available. It would be good to have this stuff added to all types of
personality inventories but unfortunately even most researchers in
social psychology are reluctant to do this (not exactly sure why, but
being able to keep their jobs and research grants is probably a factor
;-)

> I am pretty sure you could also make a similar claim that simply proves that
> rural people are more authoritarian than urban dwellers. Consequently one
> could simply divide them by location to come up with a similar theory. You
> can also claim a geocentric universe and find plenty of prove. This is a
> perfectly fine ideology.
> It is just that the logic is not mirroring reality very closely.

I'm especially interested in prison populations.  Certainly there
should be a high correlation between gang membership and
authoritarianism, but I've not found a study that examines this
question.  As for other demographic breakdowns, I'm sure there's lots
of interesting things to be found there, but we already know the big
one: If you look at Altemeyer's data on politicians, they are far more
authoritarian than the population as a whole.

> Democracy requires a certain level of development. That is, a certain weight
> in the top right corner to function efficiently.
> Reality perceived from this angle may indicate that we can't establish a
> democracy in a place like Afghanistan. If people can't read and write how
> are they supposed to gain exposure to information? If the only guidance they
> receive is provided by the imam how are they supposed to develop
> cognitively?
> It would be very fragile. But that doesn’t ring through for people who
> "believe" in democracies divinity.

Again: Hitler.  The German population that elected him dictator was
probably the most educated and "cognitively capable" in Europe at the
time.  The level of "development" you're expecting is simply
unreasonable.  You're trying to change the way the girders in the
bridge were manufactured and my position is we don't have that luxury.
We've instead got to engineer the bridge to work with the girders that
have already been delivered to us.  Sure we can *ask* for better
quality control from the steel mills, but we cannot expect it to
happen anytime soon because they too lack the technology to produce
what we really need.

> A better approach could be a benevolent dictatorship Atatürk-Style, but
> again, believe is in reasons way, so we keep failing forward until haphazard
> produces something that works a bit better from Afghanistan to Iraq.

This is actually covered in my book, but my claim is that humans are
too fallible to do this: Even if you managed to find a benevolent
dictator, some authoritarian below them would figure a way to poison
them and take over the nice hierarchical infrastructure we'd provided
for them.  Maybe someday an all-knowing (and immortal) AI will do this
job, but that is generations away and we need to survive until then,
something I consider to be in doubt unless we can design and implement
systems that prevent authoritarians from coming to power even in times
of scarce resources.

> All of the approaches I have seen thus far just concern themselves with one
> variation of reality that seems obvious to the fool that came up with it but
> is deemed to fall victim to the heinous fuckery of those who have a
> different perception of reality. No need to look any further than the last
> argument around janonymous.

Agreed, but I do claim the moral high ground here: I'm willing to
concede any position that has research or even logic to back it up
(and I've got plenty of both to back up my own positions).  But so far
we've got diddly squat from janonymous or any other supporter of
qKonsens to back up their claims.

> None of it is relevant because they hardly create anything better than we
> have.
> I'd be poor if I gave a satoshi each time I heard an unconventional thinker
> say "I see the current system as having a lot of flaws" without
> understanding it.

Me too, and again this is something I am actually quite fearful of: My
conversations with these other visionaries have been uniformly
disappointing, and most of them, rather than debate their positions,
simply crawl back under their rocks when challenged.  But, again, I've
made an extensive study of this kind of stuff over the last several
months and have yet to face a serious challenge to *any* of the
proposals in my book, even though a lot of them are pretty far out.  I
don't claim to *really* understand politics or economics or even
psychology (even though I have a PhD in the latter), but I think I
understand them well enough to make a few predictions and to start
designing systems to compensate for some of the worst problems we face
with our current political and economic systems.

> It's like a competition for a flying machine were everybody jumps a little
> of the ground and thinks he has figured it out despite ignoring gravity.
> Yes, maybe you jump a little higher from your pedestal than the oddball with
> the feather wings, but it's not flying.

You're right, of course: It's a lot easier to design a system if
you've got lots of science, engineering standards, and technology to
utilize.  But that expertise simply doesn't exist yet, and IMHO won't
for decades, so we'll have to do what the Wright Brothers did: After
all, they weren't scientists either and had a very rudimentary
understanding of aeronautical engineering and yet managed to construct
their flying machine anyway.  I propose we produce a "governing
machine" in the same manner, and let the scientists and engineers do
the necessary experiments to figure out how to refine it later.  There
will be a lot more interest in this domain when we actually build
something that works...
  Regards,
    Scott

> Cheers
> Martin
>

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