Dynamic Workspace — for doing some rewriting …QUOTE
Es ist passiert, "it just sort of happened", people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself.
—
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Sun 23rd March 2008, 10:54am)
QUOTE
Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving
on its own, just data and people shuffling it
around. Then something happened, and it …
it knew itself.
—
William Gibson, Count ZeroIt makes a good science fiction story, but it doesn't make such a good science reality story. The reason why we evolved immune systems is because evolution is too damn slow. The reason why we evolved brains is because immune systems are too damn slow. Designing media on the model of evolution is two giant steps backward — a double devolution.
Jonny
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sat 22nd March 2008, 8:54pm)
QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Sat 22nd March 2008, 5:10am)
Dear Count Zero,
That
Self-Organizing Connectionist Brains O' Mush Bit (SOCBOMB) has flashed in the brain-pan of intellectual fadism every 20 years like schlockwerk since 1900 — so you're either 8 years too late or a dozen years too early to take the tide of times at the flood.
Syncerely Yores,
Jonny Mnemonic
Dear Jonny. Please get a brain-dump before that skullbusting load of cynicism destroys your acting ability or explodes your cerebrum. Oh, the acting problems came before, you say. Ahem.
Yes, the ideas in one way or another have been around far longer than 1900 — at least since Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin (who read Smith), Spencer and so on. But that doesn't make them any less interesting, or that new instances of evolutionary thinking don't need pointing out.
For example, Google, which uses a voting scheme to sieve the net, which also has a lot of parallels with neural nets. Think Google isn't thinking? Then how come the other web search engines are so dumb by comparison?
We're all just hydrogen atoms that have been given a lot of time to jossle, and a good entropy sink. Wikis should be faster.
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sat 19th April 2008, 5:35pm)
QUOTE
But when the wine had stolen about the wits of the Cyclops, then I spoke to him with gentle words:
"Cyclops, thou askest me of my glorious name, and I will tell it thee; and do thou give me a stranger's gift, even as thou didst promise. Noman is my name, Noman do they call me — my mother and my father, and all my comrades as well."
Homer, The Odyssey, 9.362–367, A.T. Murray (trans.), Loeb Classical Library.
QUOTE(Moulton @ Sat 19th April 2008, 11:49am)
QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sat 19th April 2008, 11:47am)
Wikipedia is an anarchy
It's an oligarchy.
No, Man, Nemocrasy.QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sun 20th April 2008, 12:00pm)
QUOTE(CeilingCrash @ Sun 20th April 2008, 11:45am)
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sun 20th April 2008, 3:30pm)
Oh Look, yet another recitation of the
Nobody's In Charge (WP:NIC) myth …
See Also
- TINC
- TINCC
- Nemocracy
- Unseen Hand
- Rex Absconditus
- Jimbo Krack Korn
Jon
Ya didn't read the second half where I compare Jimbo to Lenin
Ah hell, the post is too long and on a Sunday morning I wouldn't read all of it myself …
It's not that I didn't read it all, it's just that the Nemo theme resonates with some recent reps of ritual rubrics by a motley crue of Wikipediot Altar Boys — Doc Glasgow, Newyorkbrad, and others. So that is what jumped out at me from the Mass, er, mass.
If I ask myself
Why They Need To Be Able To Say That To Themselves, I guess the first answer that suggests itself is a tune from
Tommy —
I'M FREEEEEEEE !!!!But methinks they doth protest too much.
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 23rd April 2008, 3:22pm)
I selected the following couplet as representing one of the critical tropes or turning points in Doc's envoi.
QUOTE(Doc Glasgow @ Wed 23rd April 2008, 2:27pm)
Of course the initial decision making process has a Godking as a safety valve. Alas, Olympus is now distant and probably impotent anyway.
Many people — yea, verily, even who walk and quack among us — falter at this step and uncritically accept what further reflection unmasks as
Yet Another Comforting Bit Of Mythology (WP:YACBOM).
My declamation of that fact rightfully raises a couple of further questions:
- Why Is It Mythology?
- Why Is It Comforting?
Exorcise For The Reader.
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 23rd April 2008, 9:23pm)
If there is anything like the Eternally Recurring Fallacy (ERF) about Wikipedia, it is the notion that its dynamics is driven exclusively by Tertium Non Datur Dyadic Cyclones taking place solely between two classes of Wikipediots — for example, the shift-changes that occur on the plane of experts and novices, among many others — all ungoverned by, er, Control.
The motive for languishing in this false and untenable assumption is the very engine that drives every con game — the mark simply prefers not to believe that he or she is living in such a world that has such perfidious creatures in it.
Control has screwed nothing up.
Control is right on the money.
Control is right on the mark.