Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 14:09:19 -0800
To: cburke@nexus.yorku.ca
From: bwg@bwg.com (Bryan Griffin)
Subject: Interpedia, CMU,illusion of reality, memory oddities, etc.
Hi,
I ran accross your pages while looking for info about the current status of the Interpedia project. I'd discovered a defunct link to the project pointing at hmc.edu (the ones you have are broken as well), so while doing a search your "Cartwheels on the edge of reality" newsletter came up.
I wound up getting drawn into reading your diary and related pages and discovered some diverse things I identified with that I thought I'd comment on in case my thoughts might be of interest. I've probably written too much, since I suspect you get too much email because of your web diary, so I understand if you you don't have time for most of the message, but I'd really appreciate it if you could find time to give me some info about Interpedia's final state.
I wondered if you could tell me what happened to the project, if you know if there are any remnants of the work still around, since you wrote about prototypes:
As time went on, the organization became organizationally top-heavy. We stayed in the design phase too long. As well, there was a hope that we would design an interface system for the InterPedia that would allow optional censoring features of every kind. The software required would have been relatively simple to write, and indeed a number of prototypes emerged. At the same time though, the rest of the Internet community kept creating too.
I was on the mailing lists and following the interpedia project when it first got started but lost track of it when it seemed to die out a few months later. I hadn't realized it had even gotten as far as you say here. I actually had ideas that paralleled the Interpedia ideas a couple of years before it got started, including a superset of the SOAP concept, Xanadu'ish ideas, and a number of related ideas to facilitate massively distributed creation and organization of information, and to tame the problems with overloading of the current online discussion media (newsgroups, etc), However, after doing nothing with the ideas for a while, I had finally just started a company partially in hopes of eventually implementing and commercializing them somehow, so I didn't wish to give away ideas a the time.
I was in the odd position of being forced to lurk on a list where there were discussions about subjects I found interesting by like-minded people. I did hope to find a way of contributing to the free Interpedia project while still coming up with a related commercial enterprise. I was considering starting to participate a little but my business partner at the time was wary of leaking ideas, though some of them such as the SOAP idea the group came up with independently.
I'm just starting to look into the ideas again since we got sidetracked by trying to boostrap the company so I never got to make use of the ideas anyway (one small part of why last year I sold my half of Cyberspace Development, "http://marketplace.com", though it looks like I will need to sell some easier software first just to make money) .
And the InterPedia? It may not have taken the form many in the planning committee expected, but I'd say its nearly completed. The Web has it all.
I'm curious if you still think this, though you do acknowledge that some of the ideas are still unimplemented and of possible use:
The Interpedia Project wherever it went to before getting completely superseded by the success of the World Wide Web. This was one exciting project, and some of the ideas could still find fertile ground in implementation. My favorite is the SOAP or Seal Of APproval, see Section 4.
It seems to me that although the web has alot of information, despite catalogs and search engines there is still a problem extracting the signal from the large quantity of noise (which the SOAP concept was a small step towards), there are no user attachable links to allow info to be critiqued or elaborated on by others, no new discussion mechanisms to replace the newsgroup type discussion forum which doesn't scale up well to the large number of users that are out there now, etc.
Its perhaps partly the signal-noise ratio problem, and the sound-bite piecemeal current nature of most of the web in part that leads to this comment you made:
I don't surf the web anymore. Don't have time. Don't have interest these days. More in business then web business now. That is fun.
I found myself more likely to read print media which had a higher signal-noise ratio due to the editorial filtering process than to find time for web stuff due to the various problems with the media. Partly though of course it is lack of time, its often those caught up in developing the new media that have less time to explore it. In the midst of getting CSD going we found we'd stopped finding time to read newsgroups or surf the net, it was odd being assumed to be in touch with everything going on whereas folks not working in a net business often knew more about what was out there than I did.
Since you were interested in the Interpedia I thought I'd mention that there are groups now that are working on some of these problems I see with the web, along the lines of the ideas I'd previously had stacked up. As part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library project, "http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib" they have done some work on the framework to support other online structures on the web:
"Beyond Browsing: Shared Comments, SOAPs, Trails, and On-line Communities" "http://mjosa.stanford.edu/diglib/pub/reports/brio_www95.html"
More interesting is the work at the MIT Media Lab and Agents inc, which involve collaborative filtering and the idea of effectively automating the word of mouth recommendation process (part of the superset of the SOAP concept that I'd been considering a few years ago, but it will take alot of work to get right, their stabs at it with music leave alot to be desired with currently and will take a while before they work with web in general):
"http://agents.www.media.mit.edu/groups/agents/research.html#Software"
Among other things this type of work may lead to a solution to the problem you mentioned here:
This is important. I suppose that for people who maintain circles of fellow readers, there is the option of having this happen more often through the reccommending process. Norbert used to recommend good sci fi, although nothing that exactly fit as well. I wish that I would stumble upon another.
This may eventually allow you to both get the recommendations as well as perhaps stumble upon people that had the same tastes that those recommendations derive from.
Anyhow, the point is that the WWW world has achieved cactus level development in its growth. In theory, the many-to-many linking that is possible is not being practiced. Each
I want to complement you on your use of hypertext embeded throughout your writings. Much of the net is still either lists of links with little content within the list, or chunks of text with no links (partly due to the fact that most of that content was either created prior to the web or is also meant to be used off the web standalone).
I'm starting to look into the interpedia ideas again since I may perhaps more actively be trying to make use of them. I'm starting to setup a site on liberty.org (which is down at the moment after a disk crash) for distributed collaboration among libertarian activists at the state and local level around the US to share information and create concrete proposals, attempting to avoid reinventing the wheel time and again and leverage the combined efforts of lots of people. I'm not sure how it will evolve, but in some ways it parallels the distributive collaboration of lots of folks to create an interpedia. There may not evolve much interesting from it, but I figured it is a useful concrete testbed so I'll see if there is anything I can come up with after I start with just basic mailing lists and archives. (I am of course also interested in commercial applications of the ideas but still trying to get the right angle to bootstrap them and make money amidst all the free stuff on the net).
Sometimes I see the universe from afar. Earth as a molecular cluster nomore significant than anything else. Its like looking at a table, and cognitively understanding that there be molecules there as plain as day; that my fist could pass right through it if only the fist's molecules and the table's could only be a little bothered to do so.
Just thought I'd comment that this isn't quite right. Its true that the seeming macroscopic structural continuity of surfaces is an illusion, and in some sense these objects are mostly empty space if you simply think about the partical structure.
However, they are also composed of the fields of various forces like electromagnetism, which although they are in some sense abstractions and only virtually there, are in some sense "solid" in that they are continuous (sort of, in that values can be expressed for the field values values at each point), and are what make those objects "solid" and prevent them from acting as anything but "solid". Its those fields that prevent your fist from passing through the table and so might be perceived as embodying "solidity" and making objects not necessarily as "empty" as some mental pictures of structures composed of atoms portray them .
We are used to thinking of those "particles" as if although small, they were "real" or "solid" and that somehow the fields that exist between them aren't "real" or "solid". Yet those "particles" aren't like the macroscopic particles of dust we might picture them as, they are part wave, and in general abstractions that we can't really picture since we only have experience interacting with macroscopic objects that we try to analogize from but aren't really the same. Although our conventional image of solid objects is an illusion, so is the common approximate attempt at visualization of them as empty space with tiny blobs of "solid" particles.
One thing that for me brings to mind the oddity underlying our intuitive view of the world is the probabilities involved in quantum mechanics. They aren't seen at the macroscopic level usually, but each particle in an object like a glass on my desk is defined by a probability distribution, there is some probability, though small, that particles from the glass might be spotted on the other side of the room. Taken together, there is an infintesimal, but real, probability that the glass could suddently appear on the other side of the room, since all its particles have some probability of being there. In the many-worlds view of qm in some universe that just happened.
And from this perspective, the human condition seems irrelevant. And I look around at my neighbours shoveling the sidewalks (its their civic duty) and keepng the curtains closed properly in their front windows, and I can't generate any enthusiasm to dothe same. The arbitrariness
The "arbitrariness" is what does get to me, why this particular universe exists out of all the possible ones (perhaps they all do exist in some sense, thats why), how odd humanity and the reality we perceive really is when we aren't so caught up in the middle of it.
Alan Watts describes in his book on Taoism how this sense of the illusion of arbitrary social conventions and structures which are conditioned in and usually unquestioned was in some ways the "maya", the veil of illusion, that some Taoists strove to see past and extract themselves from. Also from a book by Alan Watts, "The Book: On the Taboo against knowing who you are, a passage I identified with:
"It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd - uncanny and highly improbable. G.K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or giraffe, creatures which do exist and look like they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible wolrds, this colossal and apparently unecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of tube-speices playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of 'doing it' from the elegant architecture of a snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or peacock?"
For me this feeling is related to something I also read about long ago in an article on "Nothing" by Martin Gardner: "Whatever their metaphysics, those who have puzzled over the superultimate question have left much eloquent testimony about those unexpected moments, fortunately short-lived, in which one is caught up in an overwhelming awareness of the utter mystery of why anything is. That is the terrifying emotion at the heart of Jean-Paul Satre's great philosophical novel Nausea. Its red-haired protagonist is haunted by the superultimate mystery. "A circle is not absurd", he reflects. "It is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist." Things that do exist, such as stones and trees and himself, exist without any reason. They are just insanely there, bloated, obscene, gelatinous, unable not to exist. When the mood is on him, Roquentin calls " the nausea". WIlliam James earlier called it 'ontological wonder sickness'.
an infinite and yet bounded universe, statistical messiness at the subatomic level, the more than likely complete determinism of the brain/mind, etc. Together, these mix into Christian physicists, new age engineers, church and state distinctions. Puzzles of the human potential.
Though there is a sense in which the brain/mind may be deterministic, of course doesn't it is necessary easy, or even theoretically practical to predict its outcome as in the newtonian view of determinism vs. the QM/chaotic view of the world. It seems to me that some amount of determinism in the mind should be accepted by people paradoxically as being required to have free-will.
Free-will to me implies self-determination, the ability to some degree for the self to control and (re)construct itself. Control, or construction of something with the intent that it operate in a certain way, implies some amount of predictability and determinism. If we were mostly non-deterministically driven by random numbers or other factors, then we wouldn't be able to control ourselves or to some degree determine our own actions/thought processes since we'd be at the mercy of these non-determinisitc processes that we couldn't predict/control by definition. Not sure if I've explained this well, since of course there are levels at which we can't control and predict the functioning of our own minds.
Many things have happened to me... but those are for making memories with. That's an odd subject. Why don't I remember anything much ever? .. And yet.. here I am the person least likely to repeat myself... How canI know is repetitive if I don't remember my own past? Clearly I must. So its probably an access problem
My memory situation seems to be fairly similar to yours so I wanted to mention that I'd agree that it may be an access problem from lack of use/practice to build up the retrieval structures.
It sounds as though you, like I, spent somewhat of an isolated childhood and didn't spend much time being asked to recount stories of events to other people. Some isolated children dwell in the memories of good events, but I was more inclined to live in the present&future and didn't feel like watching repeats in my own mind any more than on TV. Since our memories weren't being used in the way many peoples are we didn't develop the same sorts of associative structures to get at them in the usual way people remember events, even though the info is still there linked in other ways, or some of it at least.
Much of what people remember is reconstructed, people don't photographically store all the details of a memory but infer them from the pieces they do remember. It may be that with less practise we aren't doing that inference process as well, or perhaps our minds are being more honest in a sense in that they aren't reconstructing as many details that aren't truly remembered.
And according to both, this is a result primarily of not rehearsing the inforamition and index link sufficently .. 2 seconds of rehearsal to build the information leaf and .8 seconds (?) to build each index reference. So I build just one in -- the one that tells me when that thing was said, and where too I think.
Information is indexed in different ways depending on its usage and how it was acquired. Its possible you just have the wrong type of indices if you didn't develop the habit of relating events. I know that I am more focused on remembering concepts than remembering where I read them. This sometimes causes problems when I need to go back and find details and can't remember the source of a piece of info or cite sources to someone else.
But back to memory. I have almost no memory most of the time. I have specialized mentally to have an uncanny on the spot ability to understand absolutely anything that passes uder my nose during that spot of time.
I'd say this parallels my cognitive structure as well, I am more focused on abstract concepts and the structures of knowledge rather than the details plugged into those structures. I haven't seen in your diary an indication of why that might be in your case, I can picture in mine partly how that tendency arose. I remember (one of the memories I can somehow dredge up or reconstruct) as a kid reading about something in an encyclopedia and being referred all over the place tracing down links. I remember recognizing at the time the problem of information overload and knowing that I could never hope to remember and learn all the little details about various things, names, dates, etc. I was more concerned about understanding concepts and structures. Details could always be looked up later when needed (which obviously does waste time, the cs problem of storage space and cpu time spent indexing vs. cpu time for recomputation if/when needed) and plugged into the structure.
. While zooped up on info, I'm as fast as any expert in that field. Two days later, I don't even remember I had the conversation. I try to hide this from people.
It sounds like you might have fit in well among knowledge engineers and AI research types who often need to do the same thing, rapidly understanding the structure of a field even if not having a firm grasp on all the details which they then pull out of the experts as needed.
I can remember at CMU helping tutor people in areas I didn't know much about, effectively grabbing the details of the field from them and figuring it out on the fly. ( they didn't always realize that I was just standing on their shoulders so to speak to use their knowledge, vs. just getting details of the particular problem they were solving). I know I've felt odd trying to explain to people at times that something I've just told them was off the top of my head and not something I'd spent much time thinking about.
Sometimes have the same problem with conversation that you mention, for some reason I think I've worked on that and other times people have a hard time dealing with how much I do remember of exactly what we've talked about, even if it were months before.
. I mostly rely on conversational partners to fill me in on the details before I then engage them more abstractly. I enjoy this but it takes a lot of lead time.
This is often how I tend to do things, I know I often do that with work when collaborating. Some folks have had to get used to the idea that they are a necessary part of the process, that I may seem to be solving the problem they are working on for them but I could only have done it by thinking abstractly, that they provided the details and structure and I as an outsider had an easier time stepping back from the problem and not getting caught up in the details, that I perhaps couldn't have done that if I'd been the one caught up in the details and less focused on the abstract structure.
How doyou introduce into a conversationwith someone you know you've met before thatyouhave no clue whatyou last talked about with them .. their life details, their loves and concerns (cat fur in the keyboard for instance), their personal revelations and lifelong goals.
I suspect that more people than you might realize have this particular problem and just manage to handle it well so we don't notice. I usually assume they've are more likely to remember their concerns than I am so generic prompting will sometimes bring forth an update without needing to know what I'm getting an update on exactly. (I'm bad with names so asking about someones "girlfriend", etc., has often saved me).
Many aspects of my mind were constructed in this way, by pursuing the different and repelling from conventions. I can't say that I am fundamentally different from other people. But I can say that in trying to be different from everyone else using the mechanism of avoiding the adoption of conventions, I have certainly walked some odd paths when looked at all in one person's's life.
Its interesting that you talk about the construction of your own mind, most of the people I've had that sort of conversation with have been AI researchers or cognitive scientists. (since you were at CMU I assume you've probably been around those types. AI folks, not just the "knowledge engineers" that do expert systems, as I said tend to be the sort who can pick up a new field quickly as you were describing you do. The key being in knowing how to pick up the general concepts and plug details in when needed instead of getting overwhelmed by details and lost in the forest not seeing the trees)
There is a book by Sherry Turkle of the MIT Media Lab called "The Second Self" where she talked about that as a common phenomenon in the AI field:
"What is valued and most beautiful is what is most freely constructed. In the AI culture that has grown up around Minsky at MIT, the greatest pleasure is building worlds out of pure mind. And his students speak long and lovingly of their earliest experiences of doing this. ... Artificial intelligence takes the hacker's aesthetic of free construction and turns it into a theory of themind. The hacker speaks of programming as building from the mind. AI sees the mind as built from programming - and not only robot minds but the human mind itself. And, says AI 'constructivism', there is something more. We construct our own minds: 'mind building mind'. This last notion is central. It influences the way people within the field speak about their own lives - they are fascinated with those experiences in which they felt themselves the builders of their own minds - and it influences their attitude toward childhood in general. They imbue it with an almost religious importance and are attracted by Piagetian ideas in which the child is seen as an autonomous builder of mind rather than as a recipient of 'education'".
Upon entering grad school many years ago, it came to my attention that the only time I wrote things that other people could read and understand was when I while I parodied others' writing styles and choices. I received the best marks on papers when I researched that professor's own work and spoofed it. Of course the content shifted in my own work, but essentially the paper's structure and style came from the authority in charge.
I further learned that when I didn't do this, my work was considered in comprehensible. Writing exactly what I think out on paper, unless clearly labeled a poem, would cause undue amounts of contusion.
Turns out that in rejecting convention acquisition, I had rejected human language as well.
I'm not sure if I would put it quite that strongly, you'd just rejected some immediate proficiency with efficient written communication and simply needed to take longer than others to learn how to translate your thoughts into a form that makes use of more widely accepted assumptions and background knowledge. It sounds similar to the learning process I've had to go through.
Many, perhaps most, people that can read and understand the communications of others, and do well enough in conversation one on one (where differences in assumptions and language use are interactively dealt with), still find it takes practise to write well since they don't have the understanding as they do in one-one conversation of the assumptions and background knowledge of the audience. They can't as in conversation interactively add information to what they understand of the other persons conceptual structure (since they are writing for an unknown audience).
You knew the language, but you just didn't understand well enough the mental structures of those you were writing for. People understand things in terms of what they already know, attaching info to the structures they have in place. A piece of writing is intended for a particular audience to understand, and if the only audience you understand is yourself then thats all you can write for.
If someone is fairly isolated when young, when they begin to write, their writings make perfect sense to themselves. They know what they intended to say and they understand all the background contextual assumptions that are being made since they are their own. Unfortunately other people don't have the same background knowledge and aren't necessarily making the same assumptions. That knowledge and those assumptions need to either be made explicit, or the writing needs to be done in terms of the assumptions that others standardly will posess and background knowledge they can be assumed to have. Its alright to "reject convention acquisition", the problem is to at least understand even if not accepting those conventions that others have in order to translate your ideas into a frame of reference they can understand.
I tend to often be far too verbose at timespartly I suppose worrying that there is enough redundancy and explicit calling out of assumptions to make sure I'm understood, though that goal still isn't always acheived, I tend to type write stream of conciousness at times and not edit enough afterwards.
I said "lessoned" above knowing full well there is probably some conventional way of putting that, but that making up a word was so much easier. In linguistic terminology, I have substituted higher productivity for a smaller lexicon.
I tend to be more concerned with ideas than with the exact terms used to convey those ideas as long as they are understood, I'm sure you would have found the word "taught" if you'd thought about it but it wasn't worth the time since you conveyed the idea anyway. Personally I think that tends to go along with concepts being able to be more creatively applied between various domain areas if your mind is linking ideas by concepts and not by narrowly defined terminology. (ie, during design discussions I intermix the terminology of object-oriented programming and that of knowledge representation languages, associative links, datbases, etc., because I'm using conceptual structures form all of those rather than worrying about the arbitrary term used in that particular field when people understand what I'm saying anyway).
Actually my first would have been when I defined swearing to depend on tone of voice and not on the specific words used.
This is interesting since I've actually felt somewhat the same, perhaps because of hearing parents arguing and avoiding "swear" words in front of the children and yet still using the same tone they would have used if they had been "swearing".
Perhaps the less finely gradiated one's mind is, the easier it is to connect to someone else. Less brain fissures, more surface area, more contact area. I guess there's a bit of arrogance-prompted-by-envy in that, but so be it.
I'm not sure that there is, or if it is then its a common arrogance since I've discussed this with other people who have mentioned the idea as well. Obviously multiple people sharing an idea doesn't make it right but it seems to make sense.
I have noticed that within certain groups even those with decent minds tend to have a fair amount in common beyond the basic shared interest/viewpoint that made them a "group", presumably because of parallel evolution rather than outside conditioning ("good minds think alike" so to speak), such as among AI folks, libertarians, skeptics, etc.
What I have been thinking about lately, not what others try to talk to me about, I asure you, is vague. A sense that the mind readapts to a different environment by taking with it the abilities and tools, and leaving behind the subject area. I find myself thinking complexes of organizational thingamajigs [and I'm sure there is a way to spell that word].
Folks working in the applied side of AI especially tend to hope for this, so they can create tools which will work in multiple domains, transference. Obviously we apply low level tools such as basic logic and inference in different domains, you are observing that there are higher level structures which aren't necessarily easy to articulate or to even internally (ie, inarticulately) to map within our own minds which still exist even if we can't clearly point them out. (which makes sense since we often can't explain how we know what we know or how we think).
I suspect that the popularity of celebrety gossip, etc, was one of the first helaing moves our society made in response to the alienated society, the society where each of us lives alone and drives alone, and never has to make any rel contact with others. Homepages may be the second healing.
In part healing can I suppose come from online communities that grow from things like the homepage, but not easily in the current environment where those that find some interest in a homepage don't then form a "community", but only either some dialogue with the 1 person who has that homepage or just stay uninvolved spectators. If there were discussion forums attached to these home pages that may be more of a seed for "communities". Even in terms of the 1-1 connections that homepages make there is still currently the problem of finding interesting homepages among the growing crowd of them.
There is also still the urge to be sharing some experience with a larger physical local "community". Viewing mass media allows people to have some shared eperience with those they encounter in their physical community, things to talk about. Yet most people they encounter will not have seen the same homepage. Online they may encounter others who share the same online experiences but currently there aren't good tools for linking those people up into "communities". Newsgroups and mailing lists attempt this for some areas but are broken in various ways and don't scale up when there is a large collective interest in some area.
My life is somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 over! Neat. I cannot begin to grasp what that means.
Though in truth it may be a much longer life than that, if nanotechnology arises, which is somewhat linked to what you are talking about here:
Materials ... not just the wave of the future ... the building blocks of the wave. I've been arguing for quite a while now about how the really cool and exciting tech advances - the revolution if you will - is happening inthe materials sciences, and not really so much in the information tech expansion. :)
I basically think the information (vs. data) revolution is just starting now, its only the tip of the iceberg visible now, and it'll provide the leverage tools to make some other revolutions possible.
Eudora is complaining about the message length so I'll stop here and hope I haven't rambled too long and bored you, I'd like to hear about the Interpedia if naught else, thanks,
Bryan Griffin
bwg@bwg.com