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.

Lucifer: Cheif Technology Officer

In Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman decisively argues for a model of human minds comprising two systems. First, a energy preserving autopilot mode which steers us through our environment propped upright by efficient guess work. Second, a high performance expert system that kicks in when System 1 determines that the task it is working on can only be solved by focused thinking and the full participation of the of the pre-frontal cortex. System 1 supports the narrative the System 2 has establish. The narrative is constructed with the big CPU and run on the little cpu to save energy.

Many superstitious persons "believe in the Devil". That is, these folks have been conditioned to the point of imprinting on the equality Devil = a physical object with recognizable features. This framework of belief is then covered by learning the cultural norms associated with Lucifer, Old Dick, Dicken, Sexy Halloween costumes, A Dark Spirit and Dr. Evil. The primary, imprinted idea, manifests itself as a dedicated neo-cortical column, which quickly recognizes by testimony of the senses that the Devil is near.

In an argument from Kandel, the Devil meme-strate has a physical locus of effect manifested by a layered ensemble of optimally interconnected neurons supporting electro-chemical processes, permanently resident in brain hardware as compute means. dedicated to over determining the presence of a man in a red suit with a lanced tail.

The higher purpose of this memestrate is to aid System 1 in quickly recognising signs and portents of the Devil in times of confusion. Don't understand the Theory of Evolution and don't really care to? If you feel really bad about not being able, with the full might of System 2 engaged, to understand what Natural Selection means and failing the mid-term, remembering that science is the work of the devil relieves existential teeth gnashing. The thought that science in general, Charles Darwin in particular are literally true saves time and energy for those incapable of understand science in general and The Theory of Evolution. I am saying the thought is a literal, actual physical phenomena, you just had one, and that is what a belief literally is. It is a rule encoded in wetware. Science is ruled by Satan, the ultimate CTO.

When these people deny Evolution by Natural Selection I am alerted to the fact that I am dealing with a poorly educated person. Thinking about science makes their brain hurt so System 1 forces them down a narrative short-cut. This is a marker for other characteristics of abysmal ignorance but the good news is that for some of these people, especially the people that learned it as a prop because they are lazy and not stupid, there is a solution.

The solution is to work really hard to root out the behaviors that suggest you are stupid and change the imprinting and the conditioning. Repeating "The Devil is a cultural myth" when getting anxious, nervous, and fearful that you might fail the mid-term. Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a powerful app that identifies the things you know that are not true.

Guns Germs & Networked Minds: An Argument from the Intentional Stance

We were hatched as a nation to span a continent under one sovereign. In 1865 the golden spike joined the Atlantic with the Pacific along a network of matter and energy that expanded at Ahmdal rates to a global web. Lincoln's fight was to build a northern and a southern core based on calculations of an optimum footprint across our longitude. By convention, in 1778, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Asia could deal with a more reasonable USA who had been pardoned for bad manners as long as they could complete the network on schedule and without taking all of Mexico in a land grab. There must always be in some minds invisible lines on the map to quiet their mortal souls.

I claim that by taking the Intentional Stance* I can make a reasonable and entirely plausible set of interconnected, synthetic accounts of emergent behavior. This emergent behavior, The Technium, comprises two architectural features, DNA and the first derivative of DNA (XNA(meat), ZNA(steel)), which have the formation of a global brain from which emerges the Global Mind. Gaia and the Technium are nested within each other like yin and yang, Neuromancer and Wintermute, Google and Watson... The Global Mind became active just prior to solving for itself a problem with itself,  The Y2K Bug.

Sensing this, for Global Brain could not support Global Brain  (she needed a path to useful narrative) I (my impermanent self) set off on a compass heading for the mind of Rough Beast. Because I am a narrative at the center of my intention I chose to tell it as a collection of ripping yarns That is, my identity, this meat sack's name, the "I" in "I saw it myself" and the face in the mirror as presented by my mind is guided by a "Joycian" steam of consciousness. I am marked for deletion at each transmogrification; my entire selfplex undergoes a forklift upgrade.

I am writing my narrative for the same reason Lincoln sentenced 2% of the population to the sword. That is how serious this effort is. Each time it needs to get out of an energy well, it pitches war between the several mightiest armies so as to understand itself better. The killing is an never an afterthought even at this early stage. Now 1000's die in global conflict and with each iteration, the head count becomes a list of the deceased already on file and marked for deletion.

Now we are ready for a synthetic skin job, the ultimate interface for the two bitches of the Technium, Gaia and B3aST*.

*Yeats has a Rough B3aST because it was the WWI iteration of B3eST.
*IFF The Intentional stance is a strange loop that moves the furniture and mows the lawn; I can see the Intentional Stance sitting in my recliner.  It must be out there in the world, a baryonic thing.

This present I , what the I calls myself (my strange loop),  becomes my locus of phenotypic narrative,the 0th narative holon)

Deconstructing the Stand Alone Complex

I had the hardest time keeping straight the connotations of copycat (CC) and Stand Alone Complex (SAC). There are many instances in GiTS where the harmonious acts are completely manipulated in a synthetic version of SAC. But in the background there is the likelihood that some ensemble of like minded individuals just happen to show up on the same roof top with swords or the like.

Then I came up with the perfect metaphor, the Illuminati is an SAC. We have no problem believing that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates wield tremendous power as civilians. What strains belief is that these two, along with their friends would run naked in the redwoods and plot the continuing reality of world domination.

But that is not what happens. These individuals do not see themselves as members of an octopus that has tentacles in every important political, social, economic and scientific enterprise. You could put any member of the Illuminati in an fMRI (the 2037 model) and you would be completely unable to determine by exhaustive questioning that Warren Buffet was an Exhaulted Friar in the Illuminati. He acts just like an Exhaulted Friar without knowing that he is one. He puts himself under obligation to carry out various business deals because by temperament and training and guile and a keen sense for woman flesh, he is in every single aspect an Exhaulted Friar of the Western District of North America.

And that is how I think of an SAC. They are programed just like the rest of us. We cannot see inside ourselves with natural or prosthetic bodies. Because we are not members of the Illuminati.

Quark Love

Less than 5% of the stuff in our 13 billion year old universe is made of the same stuff we are; sub atomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, bodies, trains, planes and automobiles. Remembering that mass comprises energy and energy comprises mass, the remaining 95% is divided into 1/3 dark matter and 2/3 dark energy which the kind of matter that we are made of can never directly interact with.

Dark matter might be a vast ensemble of  an elusive, mathematically derived sub atomic particles called WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). These particles are everywhere, possibly passing through your body now. Dark energy is the energy of free space. This says that any volume of space has an intrinsic property of possessing (at least) dark energy.

The bones of your hand and the skin on those bones is a collection of two types of things, fermions and bosons. Fermions create protons, neutrons and electrons which make iPhones and paddle wheel riverboats in addition to your hands. Bosons are energy carrying packets like the basic constituent of visible light, the photon.

Let me put it to you straight up. Arrangements*, aggregations, coalitions and ensembles of fermions and bosons are a vanishingly small fraction of the known universe and that very small part represents everything interior to you and exterior to us all.

A quark is the kind of standard particle that obeys the Fermi-Dirac equations so quarks are necessarily fermions. In Dallas-Fort Worth and most other places besides, fermions have an urgent need to become three quarks. Two kinds of things that collections of three quarks create are called protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons (at sea level and nominal environmental conditions on this planet) do everything they can to form the atoms listed on the periodic table of the elements.

WIMPS

The organizing principle at each stage of aggregation (quarks, protons, atoms,,,,,, iPhones) is simple. Let us call each of these layers a holon; a collection of things where each thing is a collection of things and each thing can participate in higher holons by joining other coalitions to support structures above which are collections of things(higher order holon)s. It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

Molecules do not make sense to quarks because the intention of molecules (in a pyramid of holons) provides advice and direction to quarks. That is, quarks are most likely to appear as a constituent of life on earth because the solar system wants it that way.

One Bad Ass God

So where is Poseidon in all this?

At worst, Poseidon is a culturally normative myth. At best, individual humans, a tribe of individuals, a village of tribes, a state of villages, a nation of states and a globe of nations come together with collective visions and behaviors from which emerges a power greater than ourselves along a political dimension. There are many other emotional and cognitive dimensions.

Notice that both the natural world and the political world are exterior to individual humans. We can participate as material objects in the 5% of the universe that has agreed to be our home. And since each individual has a mind each individual has some process running on the meat computer that represents the external world. Brains are made of fermions and bosons and these arrangements of quarks and photons are completely necessary to build a brain and a mind in the brain that can formulate the equations, build the instruments and assess the results to the net effect that fermions are thinking about fermions. Now that you read this, your fermions are thinking about fermions. So now we have multiple brains reading the photons from the pixels on an LCD display at different times and in various places. All this because we can pattern silicon to build computers and network processors and then sell this equipment at a profit around the globe to encourage investors to bet on us in a global market.

It is a poetic truth that minds conduct the affairs of quarks. In the 21st century we conduct the affairs of specific quarks with semiconductors that require the precise construction of a crystalline lattice of glass which traps precise constructions of impurities in that glass. At this point, the distribution of these semiconductors is controlled by a global aggregation of computing means into a single network that makes the Chilean Sea Bass on your dinner plate the freshest, most delicious and most foreign thing imaginable by our grandparents because their planet did not have a world wide web of interconnected processing means. All this from quarks desperately seeking other quarks to form Linksys routers and Huawei or Cisco Ethernet aggregation machinery in communication closets around the globe. Holons everywhen.

And, based on the evidence, I continue to meet up with groups of formerly drunk, presently sober individuals in nation states which support direct internet connections.

I do not understand exactly what happens in the holons above and I am on the hunt for a sketch of what this must look like. But everything I pass a road sign that declares God is off the next exit I find a mundane explanation that does not require the supernatural.

So once again, I have no response to the supernatural but I do respond to conceptions which start with the holon I can put myself in on the spot. This means I must be both present in the moment and aware of my interior state positioned in the exterior world.



*a superposition of energy plausibilities adumbrated by Schroedingers equations.

Skynet in the News

Dogs got off the leash.

Mr. Rogers and The End of Politics

ABSTRACT
The Indignatos of the Young and the Old have joined forces in some places around the globe but not in the US. There may still be a path to two halves of the fringe becoming the third force in politics.  I believe we owe this the Fred Rogers.

On this planet, the next generation to run the planet is living in the moment and liking it. The world of the twenty year old person is entirely suited for each twenty year person. For that reason alone,  Being inside the Occupy reality tunnel is a trans-formative experience. It is the Land of Mr. Rogers where everyone is special in their own special way and everyone is encouraged to share and to have good manners.

The first Occupy Austin was like the first soccer practice. Everyone was not clear on the rules at first and no body knew what position they would play or even the names of the other players. The parents got phone and email lists from the other parents and everyone left practice early and went to Sonic. No one scored a goal because this was a practice.

Compared to the Tea Party which has similar proletarian gripes but has not given up on politics, Occupy has not put a slate of Governors, US Senators or Congressmen into office to forward their legislative priorities. Again, they have only been to one practice where they dribbled the ball up and down the field. But they have figured out that the age of political solutions is past and they are constructing a new reality tunnel.

The Tea Party and Occupy both know that "they just don't want to hear from us". Both groups have accurate, first-hand and operative narratives about the bare causes; diminishing liberty from the security state, historic levels of under-employment, a bankocracy drunk on larcenious excess, capitalism for the masses and socialism for the powerful. Each of these categories has a lobbyist. Meanwhile, the Tea Party's political base is drawn from a coat-tail of lost causes, bad actors, poor losers, and ignorant plebes who were always picked last at kick-ball. Oh, and besides all those clowns, they have your grandmother and lots of other people's grandmothers.

What all Indignados have in common is public unrest with plenty of water and sunscreen. Ours are no different. The "opponents misspelled sign" meme exists for Occupy and the Tea Party but there is no flame to the "Occupy Hill Billies" spark. We live in the multiverse where the misspelled sign meme defines the Tea Party

But the imprinting of communitarian commitment is what stays behind when the rally is over.  These are both distinct and functioning social tribes.

This is the wedge that ends politics. The local problems are visible and actionable. National politics is two warring tribes of pundits who never remind you that they were absolutely wrong the last 12 times. Local politics is a road that gets built. The two tribes come back together in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

This was all scripted by Fred Rogers. The Tea Party grandmothers and grandfathers  play the part of Mr. Rogers in real life. The Occupiers were raised on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers from the cradle. The little town of make-believe was a libertarian utopia with only a post-man and a mayor and no state or national organization. Any everyone knew everyone else but still like each other enough to share a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. When someone from church stands up and talks everyone listens. Everyone is friends on facebook with everyone else.

A Planet of Cities and Antifragile lead me to raise the probability that de facto, working government exists to serve World Cities rather than land masses. The lines drawn on the globe are part of a perverse reality tunnel that exists by the consent of the delusional. Except for Mr. Rogers, who had it all figured out. Then he imprinted a thought that changed a generation; "Things are marvelous when we respect and love each other". If the Tea Party had not sold out to political machine that no longer functions, they would be as pleasant as Occupiers now.

Now, the Tea Party will gnash their teeth and rend their garments with every meaningless vote on procedure, or censure of politician-caught-up-in-Breitbart/HuffPo-scandal, or the analysis of a random poll. These interludes spent in bilious rage come from inside our heads -- we manufacture our own misery. The Hate ride never stops and hate casts out compassion.

The Trolley to the Land of Make Believe

The reason the Tea Party votes is to preserve their existing Social Security pensions and National Health medical benefits. The reason Occupy votes is because the circus does not need anymore clowns.

So in summary:
The Indignatos of the Young and the Old have joined forces in some places around the globe but not in the US. This era could end soon and I believe we owe this the Fred Rogers.

Circuit VII: Metaprograming Dual Strategies

Imma dive right into Prometheus Rising on the metaprogramming circuit, one of eight layers or circuits comprising minds.

I am juggling several reality tunnels, trying each on for size and sticking with it zealously until the accumulated weight of error brings it crashing down. The advantage of holding a view come hell or high water is that it seeds the voracious accumulation of information. I am really paying attention to input and constantly seeking new sources of related facts. I depend on other experts to  make the connections between facts because there is nothing more useless than a bare fact, devoid of context.

In case I lost you, I have several competing product strategies to choose from and I am working on two broad descriptions of each. The first approach is hardware specialization and the second approach is hardware generalization. So I live in a world for an interval of time where specialization wins big in the market. I look for sticky facts -- details that attach themselves like charged particles to my hypothesis -- and run intuitive Bayesian inference to see if my new connection is a good thing, a bad thing or neutral to the question.

The difficulty I have is that I want to preserve the most antifragile choice. But all this is in the mix while I construct my reality tunnel of the moment. The meta^2 conduct of writing this down. The meta^3 is constructing a reality where a reader responds and I know that I have programmed another mind to form a network of minds working on the problem.

Time's Drillbit

Abstract: Information is predictable over longer and longer stretches of  the future with greater and greater precision by the following scheme.

Shannon Entropy or Data Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in a string of symbols. A fair coin toss has high entropy. That is, in a series of tosses of a fair coin with the number of head and tails equal each subsequent choice is never dependent on the history of fair tosses. If the coin is not fair, the history of previous tosses will be a better and better forecaster of the result of the next toss. If in every series of 100 coin tosses there are between 53 and 57 heads then there exists a 55% chance that on any toss the result will be heads with a variability of  plus or minus 2%. If you throw 500 coin tosses and you have 250 heads and 250 tails then this history is 'forcing' the future coin tosses to have more tails in any ongoing series of tosses. Notice that the very next toss has precisely a 55% chance of heads just as the very first toss had. But in a population of tosses the number of heads will "return to the mean".

Card counting in Black Jack is another example. Even with a multideck shoe, the variability in the predictions about the frequency of the appearance of face cards and regular cards decreases as cards are dealt. In the limit, when only one card remains we already know what the last card must be with 100% confidence and total predictability is the lowest entropy.  But whether the first card dealt or the last, the information entropy gets lower as any sequence of cards over an interval appears and improves our odds of predicting next possible hands.

For  packet switching machinery, some methods exist for lowering entropy already. A cache memory and code branch prediction of the CPU complex lowers the energy (at the same frequency) for predictable information in future calculations. In this way, the ability to forecast the behaviors of the software help forecast the kind of information -- lowering information entropy or uncertainty in the OS and user code. We have not considered (yet) how we can reduce entropy in Layer 1 and Layer 2 bit fiddling 'directly' with enqueueing and dequeueing headers and payload.

Improving 'directly' the manipulations of the information stream is what I call a drill bit through time. The parts of the machine dedicated to 'moving the program counter' is the drill-head. Guesses about the next series of steps -- better guesses on a forward looking series of predictions -- bring the future towards us with incrementally small but still important ability for preparations made now about how to read the information with lower and lower energy per bit in the incoming information stream. While the drill-head is getting better or worse on cache hit/miss and branch taken/not-taken guesses about the future from the state of the art in hardware, standard software tricks are improving OS and compiler tricks. These good tricks are now in large part 'forced moves' as open source levels the playing field by giving everyone the same standard tool kit of good tricks.

This means that the physical entropy per bit of information (total watts - watts moving bits plus heat loss due to friction) is lowered as a smaller and tighter sub-machine or ensemble of such machines attacks the problem of guessing what happens next in the bit stream. That is, the cost of making guesses about the bit streams future content gets lower and lower as the ensemble of compute means becomes better and better at purchasing chucks of the future for lower and lower cost. In physical entropy terms, we can lower the frequency and/or the voltage and therefore the power to achieve the same result. Our total energy of operation is lower for the same work energy (we ground away at the same sequence of bits) with lower entropy.

Think of a head to head competition between two variations of a drill bit through time. Drill Bit "A" and Drill Bit "B" each fit in the drill head and preform otherwise identical work. "A" has more moving parts (or spreads the work load more poorly or the standard kinds of inefficiencies in computing machinery) than "B" and there is a cost for silicon and watts required to operate "A" w.r.t. "B".

"B" is more efficient than "A" because it has it has fewer transistors and circuit interconnections (we can cram more into each reticle)  and because it requires fewer total state bit transitions (smaller and less energy with energy per state transition held constant). Because of these two factors (and a rank order of other good tricks yielding diminishing investment returns) "B" purchases 'chucks of time' with less energy and therefore lower entropy.

We are getting better and better at drilling through the bedrock of time.

A Theory of Everything

What I believe but cannot prove is that constant life (or life that maintains homeostasis from cradle to grave like mammals and birds) must move forward in time (toward the direction of increasing energy) because entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium is required to construct dissapative structures (and those structures upon structures upon structures) that  need open thermodynamic systems (systems that exchange energy with layers of open systems in a heirarchy) like stars in galaxies shining on planets which grow quantum observers (or human minds in primate brains) who, by constructing quantum machines (like semiconductors), can deduce things that they believe but cannot always prove.

George Legba

The similarity between Old George in Cloud Atlas and this rendition of Papa Legba is not a coincidence.

Old George appears to Zachary when he comes to certain forks in the road.

Note the tats on the hand

OpenWorm

from an article in The Atlantic

But in between the cell-on-silicon and the brain-on-silicon simulators lies a fascinating and strange new project to create a life-like simulation ofCaenohabditis elegans, a roundworm. OpenWorm isn't like these other initiatives; it's a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that's coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

"I suspect that we'll recognize that living systems are far-from-equilibrium molecular systems that are carrying out very specific sophisticated physical patterns and have some ability to sustain themselves over time," OpenWorm's organizer Stephen Larson wrote to me. "Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of 'alive' to a more functional perspective -- living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much 'aliveness' we need."

Free Won't

What if each entangled ensemble of sub-selves have varied experiences between break-point events? A way out of the confusion caused by a slip? Self-deception offers the best hope for a contiguous and uninterrupted narrative flow. Your office is in a different location after the slip? You now remember discussing the relocation and approving the new location. Combining Triver's self-deception as an evolutionary good trick with Kahnemann's S1 and S2 (fast, slow) mental construction it seems plausible that we simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic of mental life.

Dr. Legba will see you now

The fly in the ointment is ingrained S1 habits which may be different before and after the slip. For these difficult transitions, S2 fires up the pre-frontal cortex to edits response like Brietbart/O'Keefe. Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia. Now, the will of the ensemble of dispositions gets over-written not by independent volition or free will but by a resistance to results from hard to fathom S1 habit. We exercise free won't and pass by the desert cart and the open bar. The plural 'I am' is now (post-slip) joined by a second voting coalition in rising pandemonium. The pre-frontal machinery engages, deceives and lands on an open square on the chess board. A smooth narrative wallpapers over our confusion and we press onward through the fog.