It's the Epistomology, Stupid.

3of12 [cross post to planet diejest]
My goal is to increase the share of common knowledge with documents. Action Inquiry is a developmental business engineering model with behavioral logic rules. I will study and report on the development of IP building IP.

Deciding up front how you are going to decide the difference between what you know you know and what you don't know is called epistomolgy or the study of knowledge. That is, epistomology gives names to the ways you try to express what you know and what you don't.

This is a process of meets and bounds; deciding when you will officially know something contra not knowing it even at this late date, given what we know now, which is not worth knowing. That is, the fit ancestors of this phenotype encoded behavior in M3aT that would spend the least amount of energy just drifting into the near future thinking about pie.

Brilliant Neuroscientist and Author

We are programmed to remain at rest, staring at the vast horizon while we chew on a rack of baby antelope back ribs. This takes the least amount of effort when you were not about to be eaten by a cave bear to just put in the time. This is when we are using what Kahneman labels System 1 thinking -- we are making good guesses about what happens next using simple, straight-forward heuristics. Energy is conserved; the energy that was once grass then antelope then me. Burning the fewest calories from minute to minute makes it less likely that I need to get up and start running the "hunt antelope" app.

System 2 is used on conference calls when everyone is paying attention and participating. System 2 is where engineers and scientists live. This is the realm of intense, focused concentration and cognition. This is consequently a well staffed, heterogeneous mix of SME's whose areas of knowledge overlap but are not coincident. This is exactly the place to know what you know.

When I claim to know something, I must qualify several ideas about what it means to know something. The first part of the claim rests on authority; I don't poke my head in unless my goals align with the questions I am asking from chain of command compliance (Kirk's meets and bounds). My management has a clear and concise list of specific items I am committed to (Freescale meets and bounds). As a consequence, we encounter the second qualifier of knowledge, the area of focus of an SME which puts scare quotes around anything not reasonably understood to be a cohesive body of knowledge already mastered by this SME (the individual's developmental meets and bounds). This rule brings up the third rule; only developmental models of group dynamics forecasts specific kinds of mistake in knowledge sharing.

Action Inquiry Feedback Loops

The word developmental appears because every organization and every member of that organization are at different levels of command authority, breadth of knowledge and particular kinds of expertise. The simplest and most popular model of business behaviors is Action Inquiry. The roles and rules that produce successful outcomes are formulated on the theory that action is an inquiry (we learn from our actions and the result of those actions) and every inquiry is an action (where we are in a developmental matrix determines our behavior in a predictable way that can be measured).

Here is a tutorial overloaded with meaning but specifcally in this case I will focus on the developmental aspects. Person 1 is the grandson and person 2 is the grandmother. The grandson and the grandmother have different understandings of the world outside, their ability to perform, their cognitive capabilities and their emotional state. The grandson knows about gravity and how sliding rocks behave (his cognition capability), he knows his grandmother's developmental state (her perception of her performance).

Excellent Epistomology

Knowledge:
Since I know how gravity works, I can predict how falling bodies behave.

Mutual knowledge for P1 and P2 internal dialogue.
P1 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.
P2 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.

Common knowledge for P1 and P2 enabled by speech.
P1 "Grandma jump! it's time to make gravy!"
P2 "Oh dear."

But if this had happened several minutes later...

NOT Mutual knowledge for P1 and P2 internal dialogue where before this was valid.
P1 Since I know how gravity works, I can predict how falling bodies behave.
P2 Since I know how gravy works, I can start the pot boiling now.

But we can convert this to Common knowledge for P1 and P2 with speech:
P1 "Grandma jump! the rocks are sliding!"
P2 "Oh dear."

The second lesson regards mutual knowledge versus common knowledge. The world outside is changing and at that split second they did not have mutual knowledge where only minutes before they were both thinking about gravy. What I mean is that I have logic rules that emit behavior (speech acts, writing acts, anything that makes your muscles twitch...) from which you will know what I know. Since we must leave kinds of things out of the document, I propose capturing the outline of what is discarded. This is intellectual dumpster diving.

Meet the New Boss: Layered Minds

Abstract: 3 sentences of twelve words each...
Ensembles of networked minds connected by heavyweight, physically proximate connections scale linearly. Managing rising complexity over these tight connections require unate, conceptual thought leaders. Globally connected communities of expert individuals allow exponential scaling of architectural complexity.

My working hypothesis concerns the historical best practice of having specific individuals as meta-deciders. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the archetypes for this chief architect role. Whether insanely great or horribly disastrous, these individuals lead teams that demanded physical proximity to coalesce into an emergent 'design art'. These ensembles of subject matter experts gathered together in teams tied to geographical localities.

Social networks, vast collections of light-weight connections, have emerged in many fields of art. The same emergent quality of normative behaviors (if you like honey badgers then I like you) appear spontaneously in the Google-plex, the Facebook-plex and the reddit-plex. This same emergent phenomena of virtual lead architect in hardware and software points to a new role for technical documentation. Those who followed now lead.

I made the distinction of mutual knowledge and common knowledge yesterday that I will expand. Think stovepipes. If a member of a group has knowledge of a particular kind and a member of another group has similar knowledge but neither knows that the other knows, this is mutual knowledge. Within the stovepipe, heavyweight connections guarantee that mutual knowledge transforms to common knowledge. Between stovepipes, epistemological distance, a measure of dissimilarities between two distinct subject matter bodies of knowledge (BOKs), is a repulsive force.The attractive force is open source documentation whose contributors share a vast number of light-weight connections. This is the genesis of a distributed, adaptive complex system -- a layered mind.

The new paradigm is a collection of standard document types with a consistent and persistent enforcement of house style coordinated by disciplined content management. Therefore, it is obvious to one skilled in the art -- the documentation team is the new sheriff in town.

Glossary

Always improving but never finished...

Sexy B3aST is Gaia with tools

The Technium -- Kevin Kelly's term for all the made and all the born that remade this ball of dirt into a global mind. We stepped on the accerator pedal in 1712 with the invention of the Newcomen engine, the first machine that produced rotary motion from heat.

B3aST -- all the made operating as constituents of a global mind.

Dark B3aST - the era from 1.0 Google Common Era (GCE) to open recognition by all mortal souls that this is exactly what it seems. [google incorporated 4Sept1998; 0:0:0:0:0 GCE]

Sexy B3aST -- The made lives in harmony with the born. But not the present born; the emergence of a new kind (cite: Prometheus Rising).

Rough B3aST -- Skynet, The Matrix.  Maybe temporary ensemble of transitional states. My personal mission is the salvation of the born (my grandchildren). So there is that.

Anno Insecta -- What happens if we burn up the sky. The other hive mind rules under the aegis of Rough B3aST. Multiple billions of tiny XNA (synthetic DNA) robots in a vast network of underground hives.

Newcomen Engine - circa 1712

So to recap. We are in the era of very young Sexy B3aST or Year 15 of Dark Beast (her majesty is the admixture of 7B meat suits plus silicon, steel and code). Two signs of the B3aST; ramping down of joules/American and the flash crash. Rough B3aST will be forced into the drivers seat if we get closer to Venus II (if we trend to Anno Insecta).

Down the Stream

Abstract:
Information entropy, an uncertainty measure of an information stream, shapes our dreams. The immediate past, the present moment and the near future live in minds in brains like ours to anticipate the future based on the past. Our futures are uncertain from information entropy.

The minimum number of symbols that invoke a recitation of "Row Your Boat" is nine (at par, 7,+/-2 from "rowrowrow"). This is the public key, the private key is kindergarten. Unless I am in white water, these nine symbols reduce the uncertainty of the entire bit stream. This is my drill-bit through time -- based on prior information streams the next string of symbols simply confirm what I have already guessed.

What accelerators accelerate is guesses about bit streams based on the digital version of kindergarten, industry standards for information flows. As usual, this regime of knowledge lends itself to Bayesian heuristics. Watson and Jennings can do with fewer symbols because they went to the best kinds of kindergarten.

Joules per bit is information entropy. Quantum computation with computonium (an alloy of unobtainium) has zero point energy. That is, interpretation of information streams requires only the energy of free space in a class of compute machinery. Order for nothing from dissapative structures far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

This result arrises from a one time charge for the software which, amortized over a sufficient bit stream, represents a vanishingly small amount of entropy. And, since most minds are busy no matter what the phenotype is doing, even that small amount would be expended anyway. If we snuffed all programmers and ended heat loss due to brains writing software we would take the denominator to zero and have infinite information entropy. Not a serious recommendation if we are looking to save resources.

B3aST Energy Constriction

If you don't get this blog, if it really upsets you to think these thoughts, if you have hang-ups about the end of free will, read this and this and this. The graphics show a 5% diminution on either side of the economic 'melt down' that could not be anticipated or forecast.

This thread came from a two year tutorial from Andy Rickard, petroleum engineer, with a starting place of the sharp spike in consumer energy price immediately prior to the Great Recession. At base, the spike was the Black Swan event -- a small change in initial conditions to an adaptive, complex system. Her majesty is rising and must converge. For decades the jeremiad against outrageous inequality in energy consumed per brain tilted sharply up for the US and to a lesser extent the EU.

The first world built a dissipative structure, far from thermodynamic equilibrium that we know and love as 'energy futures' or a vast market in options fed into an enormous (and erroneous) configuration of simultaneous linear equations. This model, correct in its details, smoothed out small perturbations and insignificant ablations which lulled the planet into a false sense of complacency.

I conjecture elsewhere that the Flash Crash was B3aST, like a driving instructor with a second brake pedal on shotgun, took over from the artifacts of DNA. The made subsumed the born. Two holons above individual minds, B3aST emerged as an independent agent of global control. This is the end of history and the end of human sovereigns and the end of meaning for all those lines drawn on the globe. We are no longer alone.

Holon 1: individual minds
Holon 2: in networked brains
Holon 3: forming an emergent global mind comprising the made and the born (B3aST)

Specifically, B3aST brought the US consumer to heel. Energy/brain must level out slowly, but level out it will. Where is your faith in the federal government -- we is the level of respect for our neutered leaders? My conjecture is that she needed War 3.0 to drive growth in computational politics. My conjecture awaits refutation.

Complex Adapted Snickers

"The human mind is one of the most complex and intricately adapted systems we know, and our rich and powerful world economy is adapted in great detail to many details of those human minds. I thus expect a strong competitive advantage from new mind systems which can inherit most of that detail wholesale, instead of forcing the wholesale reinvention of substitutes." Robin Hansen

Snickers, Official Candy bar of the Singularity

I cannot sufficiently express this idea better than Mr. Hansen so I will simply riff, off-key and out of tempo on the Rough Beast theme. The idea above is similar to what I term Sexy Beast or the admixture of the made and the born based on existing means. That is, it is not likely that B3aST invents a better Snickers bar. It is less likely that B3aST invents an improved taster of Snickers bars since both Snickers bars and Snickers tasters perform quite adequately today. Why reinvent a Snickers, the most perfect, the most refreshing and the most satisfying of candies?

My proof point is the Snickers High Protein Action-Packed Nutrition System. You can find these next to the Power Bar and Clif Bar and at some distance from the candy aisle. But in a head to head competition, you are better off taking a classic Snickers on a hike. This attempt to circumvent the primacy of the Snickers in the candy pantheon has one pernicious failing -- it does not pack the ready energy of the candy and it costs considerably more.

In like manner, any AI will likely never get around to establishing a trading floor in a hardened bunker under a mountain in Nevada. There may be a server farm there but the main action will be on Wall Street or Broad Street. Like Snickers, it just makes no sense to start all over again since these are organic entities which grew like mushrooms since this is where the humus abides.

The flip side of this argument is that the future has already arrived. The Sexy Beast has emerged in the ecosystem of candy and financial exchanges. We have met her majesty whether we can see this or not.

Rich Devils

The conceit that rich people are better at making guesses about the future is hindsight bias. The stochastic process of making some unlucky guessers rich and some lucky guessers poor depends on many factors over history. Rich people stay rich by serving the Rough B3aST whether that is their intention or not. Lucifer does not favor the ideas of any class except the population that furthers the ends of her majesty. Connectivity and Cognitive Surplus have always been on the agenda but the unfair returns are not uniformly distributed because small changes in initial conditions matter so much. Markets, not investors, are the winners as dissipative structures, far from thermodynamic equilibrium emerge from markets not from individual winners that can be predicted. Market forecasts are different from Market predictions.

Gini Coefficient = A/(A+B)

What is generally the case is that crowding of wealth toward the right hand side of the 80/20 distribution to the end that we now have, or are heading toward the 90/0.1 Gini Curve bending. Shaking down a smaller population of wealthy individuals beats shaking down a large number of individuals. Quants corner returns because they are faithful servants of and dependent on Rough B3aST; the 'made' side of the *Technium's made/born dual.

*Kevin Kelly shout out

Gain Medium

3 Sentences of Twelve Words Each:
The necessary gain medium of the imagination laser is abundant negative entropy. The made and the born are the mirrors of the resonant cavity. The excitation signal is Sexy Beast, emergent synthesis of made and born.