universal web comment protocol needed for tunable search

Email and the web triumphed by defining open decentralized protocols that in principle anyone with a computer could use, and still can. Unfortunately, they are a bit high maintenance, so most people do not run their own server with a direct connection to the internet backbone. Most use an ISP. The ISP can spy on them.
Web 2.0 enabled crowdsourcing. We contributed to the construction wikipedia.
Web 2.0 deprecates protocols. Google, facebook, twitter etc. capture our comments and wall off our/their content from the rest. Every web site wants you to get a username and password to make content for them. AOL's walled garden strikes back from the grave! Governments like China love to target the centralized data vaults. Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. He wants to own our data. Faceless... bookless.
We need a truly decentered protocol for commenting and collaborating. I should be able to publish comments on anything, and find useful comments on anything, one system everywhere. Wikipedia should be like a torrent, a truly decentralized peer-to-peer document perpetuated by usage. Similarly with Google's web index. Facebook is just training wheels for the web.
If anyone came up with a better search paradigm than Google's could they resist becoming another Google? Can the web return to its internet roots, or is there no turning back?
Diaspora*, Identi.ca, Friendica, tent, and the open microblogging standard are Daviding against the web Goliaths. I guess there is still some hope.

Why did delicious fail? My comments should be on my server in a peer-to-peer network, and searchable from google or any search engine. I should be able to comment on any URL or URI. Authentication based on public key crypto web of trust.

I should be able to tune my searches on google depending on who I consider an expert. If you are my only expert, stuff you like would top my search results, stuff you ignore would be in the middle, and stuff you dislike would be at the bottom. Or I could mark you as an anti-expert - stuff you dislike goes to the top. Or I have multiple experts, and their attitudes vote on my search results.

Google had the right idea - people's use of the web should self-generate the rankings of pages. But because both humans and bots inhabit the webosphere, this didn't work out. Can we fix this with pubkey crypto/web of trust and tunable search? It doesn't matter if x is human or a bot if I can make x an expert or antiexpert. Otherwise we need a turing test or captchas.

Bots may end up with even better reputations than some humans, by aggregating humans, or by evaluating mechanically. Biz model for bloggers?

Reverse reputation lookup - who rated this page highly? Who uses this page a lot?

Things to do

Things I want to do.
Things I used to want to do.
Things I have to do to avoid things that would be even worse.
Things I have to do to avoid feeling guilty.
Things I need to do to avoid smelling bad.
Things I am curious about.
Wild ideas.
Things to do with my family or friends for fun.
Things I wish I had done already.
Things I wish I could do right now.
So many Things. What's first?

When has the government shrunk in a good way?

In the U.S., abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Second Bank of the U.S., plus deregulation of trucking and communications in the 1970s reduced the scope of government slightly. Alfred Kahn, the unsung hero. Cypherpunks defeated the idea that the government should treat cryptography as a munition and control it's use.

In New Zealand in the mid 80's, budget and foreign exchange crises forced major reforms including privatization of public monopolies. Not sure whether it had so much lasting effect. I'm sure almost no one in New Zealand thought the crisis was a good thing. I think Canada went through a similar but milder crisis more recently.
Switzerland and Hong Kong were never that big to begin with.

Pretty underwhelming. Is government like cancer, it gets bigger until you die?

We don't want the government to collapse, because it will damage many lives as it falls. We need it to evolve. O'Reilly Press was touting the idea of "gov 2.0" http://gov20.govfresh.com/social-media-fastfwd-defining-gov-2-0-and-open-government-in-2011/, the idea being that we should exploit the Internet to make government more transparent, flexible, and accountable. I guess I am looking forward to gov 3.0, which will be polycentric, contractual, and voluntary.

Hating Haidt

Well, actually Haidt is pronounced like 'height', so not such a clever title after all. Damn. And I don't really hate him, in fact I like his book and enjoyed his TED videos.

I do want to criticize Haidt's confounding moral stories. His empirical work involves telling subjects stories where someone breaks some sort of social taboo in a way that he hopes will make it really hard to find a victim that was harmed by the violation of the taboo. That way, he eliminates the care/harm basis of morality and will reveal the intuitive role of his other 'moral modules' (fairness, autonomy, sanctity, loyalty, authority... am I getting those right?).

For instance, he has a story of a brother and sister who commit incest, but it's only once, they are careful not to cause a pregnancy, and though they decide never to do it again, it makes them feel closer, in the story at least. Other stories involve the guy who had sex with a dead chicken before cooking and eating it, and the family who ate the family dog after it died accidentally. I see three problems.

1) Morality should condemn risky behavior, even when the gambler does not lose. Your moral evaluation of a decision should not change based on the outcome. When people make decisions, they must consider risk of harm. This before-the-fact aspect of moral evaluation seems at least as important as the after the fact, ex post aspect. Yet they must be the same, since it makes no sense to condemn something that hasn't happened yet, but excuse an identical choice after it has played out. Since the ex ante evaluation is more restrictive, it wins out.

Imagine this story, in Haidt style, as an example. A man goes to a bar and without initially intending to, gets drunk. He stumbles to his car, aware (and amused) that his abilities are impaired, but he gets in the car and drives home successfully, though with some weaving, etc. He flops into bed, and other than a headache in the morning, no one is worse off or knows anything about his adventure, which he barely remembers himself. What is our moral evaluation of this person's actions? Although he took a serious risk, he has not actually harmed anyone. What is the moral difference between him and a nearly identical person, making identical choices, but who was unlucky enough to kill 4 people accidentally? Risk of harm is relevant to the care/harm foundation.

2) In these stories, the protagonists break various social taboos in secret, and Haidt claims no harm is done and no one knows. But the persons involved know. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have any of these incidents show up in my personal narrative, the story I tell myself about me. I want to just say no to the chapters on incest, bestiality, and dog cuisine, even if you could guarantee secrecy and 'harmlessness'. That's part of morality for me, not just "Is someone else harmed?" but also "Will I be harmed? Is that the sort of person I want to be?" I guess you could say that if we did not have these social taboos, I would not consider myself to be harmed by experiencing them. I doubt that Haidt would accept what I say, but I don't know how he would respond. Should I impose my own decision on others, or theirs on myself? Does it make sense for me to treat myself differently?

3) Haidt asks his subjects to evaluate the morality of the actions of the persons in his stories. He avoids the question of whether these actions if morally condemned should be formally proscribed by law and hence punished formally, or perhaps legal but informally punished. I can't see how he would ignore this. To me, only violations that involve significant harm (the care module) seem worthy of being backed (and punished) by formal law. I condemn plenty of other things as wrong, but I'm not so willing to give these evaluations the force of law. Perhaps this makes sense, because only harm caused by force should be punished by force. (What about fraud?) The punishment should fit the crime.

Haidt seems to want to add a new category to the old pair of 'malum prohibitum' (evil by prohibition) and 'malum in se' (evil in itself). Unfortunately my latin stinks, so I don't know a good latin word to make the phrase 'evil because it's disgusting'.

I should probably have admitted at the beginning of this post that I had trouble processing some of his ideas/claims about 'thicker' morality in other less individualistic cultures, based on the sanctity, loyalty, and purity modules. Maybe it's not the sort of thing you can easily learn from reading a book. Haidt himself claims to have only barely intuited the outlines before visiting India, where it became much more real for him.

Saletan reviews Haidt: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Helion: http://helian.net/blog/2012/08/14/morality/jonathan-haidt-and-the-new-atheists/

my kinda socialism (rant on)

The music labels tried to hang on to their deal, suing napster and grokster and your grandma. And they won every battle, right? So now they're happy, right? Kazaa & emule etc. Has Apple saved their business? They're on life support. That industry, music distribution,  got socialized - now everyone owns it. No more stupid lawyer tricks, no more getting the government to subsidize your business model, and the whole idea of intellectual property has a black eye. This is revolutionary entrepreneurship. Who's next?

No, I Won't Sue

I adopted my motto, "Breakfast impossible" back in the 1980s, though I doubt I can prove it. How long has this blog been sitting around gathering dust on blogger.com? Well, no longer than blogger.com has existed, anyhow.

Now a google search reveals that youtube is hosting a web video series titled "Breakfast Impossible". Crud. There goes my SEO. What shall I do?

Hmmm, maybe someone looking for a fan site for an extreme low budget Americanized Dr. Who superhero ironyfest will enjoy getting bait-&-switched to my self-indulgent rants on cognitive biases, skepticism, epistemology, and libertarian theorizing?

Maybe they should make me a character in the series. But instead of a superpower, all I do is sit around making blog posts and sending them into the past of the primitive internet (series is set in 2171) in order to alter history.

There you go.

Inconvenient Geniuses and Annoying Saints on Damascus Pilgrimage

We easily fall into the trap of explaining our political, religious, philosophical, etc. differences as caused by the ignorance, laziness, selfishness, stubbornness, or stupidity of those with whom we disagree. Surprise me by showing me someone who never feels this temptation. Some of us try to resist, but none escape the impulse. 

I claim that everyone who has a position on some significant idea could find, if they cared to, the name of some person widely regarded as a genius or a saint that opposes them on this particular issue (or once opposed them, if the genius/saint is dead or experienced a change of mind/heart). (Feel free to send me counterexamples, I'd love to receive them.)

In some ideal rational world (Plato's Republic?) we would all be open-minded and look dispassionately at reasons and evidence, and if we disagreed, we would disagree exclusively on values, not on facts or theories. Perhaps, in these circumstances, we would more easily find agreement, and find disagreement less divisive. The saints and geniuses, at least, would all be in agreement in regard to the facts.

We do not live in that world. Debates rarely (never?) change anyone's mind. When we encounter an idea that contradicts our intuition, we ask ourselves "Must I believe this?" Often the answer is no, and any small perceived ambiguity or difficulty in the evidence or reasoning lets us off the hook. In other cases, when presented with arguments that appeal to our intuition, we instead ask "Can I believe it?" and we find that just a crumb of credibility will suffice. 

I've stolen this "Can I/Must I" from Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. He claims that intuition evolved as a quick and dirty guide to action, and that reasoning evolved to defend the decisions made by the intuition. From this standpoint, our thinking fails to bring us to agreement because we have pushed beyond the boundaries of the circumstances where it evolved. We face decisions about abstract ideas that impact us only indirectly, while our thinking excels at dealing with immediate concrete decisions that impact us and our immediate social group directly.

We could examine the implications of all this, and the difficulties and weaknesses, and perhaps I'll make another blog post on that someday (or you can send suggestions). What I am actually interested in now (finally!) is to wonder about those persons who finally do change their minds. Perhaps it reveals my bias, but I easily thought of some famous right-wingers who repudiated the left: David Horowitz, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan. John Stuart Mill supposedly moved toward socialism at the end of his life, though I'm not sure whether he repudiated his individualism or merely radicalized it (Fabian society? Karl Marx? or Henry George? Lysander Spooner?) And we cannot overlook Saul's experience on the road to Damascus. Friedrich Hayek? John Stossel? Julian Simon? Bjorn Lomborg? David Ramsay Steele.

I hope my readers will suggest names to add to this list, but even more urgently, names of scholars or scientists who have examined this question of how someone's passionate dedication to one side of a debate moves them to passionately support the opposite.