Here's my solution. Create a position new directly elected (like the president) official whose only job is to fight corruption and oversecrecy in government, and whose only powers are:
* Access to information. Like the president, the tribune automatically has the highest possible security clearance, and is empowered to demand any information from any government agency or offical. * Declassify information. Like the president, the tribune has the power to unilaterally declassify information. * Prosecute. The tribune has the standing to take the government to court over any issue relating to infringement of rights, corruption, or a violation of procedure.
Apparently, Google Wave's goal is to be what email would be, if email were designed today, but this line of reasoning leads to realization of one case in which email does something that Google Wave apparently cannot.
If one recipient of an email is reading the email offline, they can write reply to it a queue it up to be sent, and then (assuming that their reply is delivered successfully), they can assume that their reply was received by the other participants on the thread.
However, with Google Wave, it seems that one could receive a message, go offline, compose a reply, go back online to 'send' the reply, and find that there is a merge conflict. (I am assuming that offline reply composition is possible with Google Wave; if not, there's an even bigger failure)
Perhaps merge conflicts after offline replies could be guaranteed to be avoided if all participants in a discussion agree to certain rules (such as always adding replies at the end), but this is not as good as email, because with emails the same guarantee can be had without any assumptions of the users acting in a certain way.
You may not see a person with a brain enter an infinite loop. Yet, if you explain to a person what a Turing machine is, and then ask them to compute the state of a certain Turing machine when given a certain input after a certain number of steps, then (given enough time*) they will be able to do so.
Therefore, people can emulate Turing machines. Therefore, people actually can perform computation.
The fact that humans don't actually enter loops in everyday life simply means that the program they are running** doesn't have an infinite loop in it (or, it means that the conditions to go into the loop are never met in everyday life; consider if you could put someone in a sensory isolation chamber and keep them alive for five billion years; are you sure they won't loop?).
*: Technically, finite time and memory means that humans can't be more than finite automata. But I don't think that's really what we're asking; I think our goal in this discussion is to consider human minds with these limitations abstracted away (I think the thing to do formally is to consider humans as representatives of a "uniform family" of finite automatons, in order to say that humans are not quite Turing machines, but that there exists an abstract notion of a human-like mind unbound by lifespan or memory which is, in fact, at least as powerful as a universal Turing machine).
**: although maybe humans are something strictly MORE powerful than Turing machines, in which case it may not be sensible to talk about which "program" they are running
> Reagan had the saturn line killed. When funding was sought to preserve the info, they felt that it was not needed. We have learned the hard way that that kind of info is difficult to get back.
Interesting fact. Could you provide a source for the info being trashed by the Reagan admin? Thanks
There's a list of collaborative real-time document editors at
WikiPedia:Collaborative_real-time_editor
One of them is Gobby, which is multi-platform and free software.
But you want version control, too; so I guess that would be a wiki which support real-time simultaineous editing. Some of the wikis have been talking about this (example), but I don't know if it's been implemented yet. I believe one project along those lines is the Yarrr extension to MediaWiki.
If you have the time, I'd be interested in some citations for your bullet points, particularly the last one -- I'm not disagreeing with them, I'd just like to read the articles.
Sure, but then why not apply that analysis to Larry's action to pull the license?
Once the tool has been developed, Larry has two choices:
* Pull the license (which is bad for everyone) * Ignore the tool (which isn't so bad)
So, looking at it this way, Larry's action of yanking the license had no good (profitable, valuable) results.
Now of course, Larry can say, but the point of yanking the license is that my threat to yank the license was intended to deter people from doing what Tridge did. I am just protecting my right to make a living off my software. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop people from profiting off my coattails?
But Tridge can say, but the point of reverse engineering the system is that my threat to reverse engineer the system was intended to deter Larry from imposing unreasonable conditions on the community. I am just protecting the the commnity's right to access its data. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop Larry from continuing to refuse to give us the access we deserve?
So, as you see, the "what is practically good (profitable, valuable)" analysis doesn't give us a conclusion here. Either Tridge or Larry could have avoided having the license pulled.
The type of analysis that WOULD decide the conflict is one which looks at who is being treated fairly or unfairly, or one which considered the "rights" of all parties (i.e. my right to make a living off BitKeeper without having it reverse engineered, vs. my right to access the metadata of the Linux kernal development).
For example, if a criminal mastermind had an atom bomb aimed at New York city and demanded your wife and your firstborn child as ransom, and you refused, and he blew up New York, then it wouldn't make sense for someone to say that the mastermind was a good man but that you are responsible for the destruction of New York. But, using Linus's "good (practical, valuable)" analysis, all that can be concluded is that both the criminal and you were responsible. The more sensible conclusion is that your wife and your child have a right not to be ransomed to some criminal, but that the criminal has little right to your wife and child, therefore he is the bad guy here. But this necessarily involves taking a stand on the fairness of each side's demands.
Linus seems to be claiming that he doesn't want to get caught up in a discussion of rights, but by blaming Tridge, he is probably implicitly assuming that Larry's putative right not to have others "ride his coattails" holds more weight than Tridge's putative right to interoperate and to access metadata without signing a license agreement.
I couldn't disagree more. I thought Larry's article was an excellent read and that it clearly expressed phenomena sometimes seen in wiki communities. I think it was a very substantial article and was not just self-promotion.
Even if you disagree with the validity of his points (I myself disagree with many of his conclusions), you have to admit that many people (perhaps even future historians) will be interested to read the point of view of someone so pivotally involved in the formation of such a monumental organization.
i'm not convinced - wearables should be here today
on
Whereables?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
looks to me like people are saying:
1) they don't want it 2) tech isn't there yet to make it small enough
as for (1), i'm personally convinced that plenty of people will be using it once they see how convenient it makes things. everyone claims their PDA is good enough, but i bet they don't dispense with their home computer and use their PDA full-time like we'll be able to when "full-power" wearables are eventually available. and i bet they don't constantly check the GPS on their PDA. or IM strangers in Times Square. (see http://www.headmap.org/book/manifesto/hm-blank.htm and http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3...,9223 37,00.html)
but, besides all these "new" applications, computing will be nicer when you don't have to sit in front of the computer to do it.
however, that's a long way away; what I'd like today is just a $3000 low-resolution, slow, B&W sunglasses-embedded HMD and "virtual keyboard" (finger tracker). I do see people's point here; a PDA can do much of what this would be used for, and it would be cheaper, and color, and not feel weird. Personally, I'd shell out for the low-resolution sunglasses-enabled model and finger-tracker because the extra bandwidth (large display area (assuming the display changed when you moved your head) and large "virtual" keyboard) would allow me to do a lot of stuff "on the road" (waiting in line at the supermarket, etc) that I can't do efficiently on a tiny PDA interface.
as for (2), i'm a little confused because, as some posters noted, corps started using cell phones before they were small. my feeling is that none by the nerdiest even think about wearable, much less realize the convenience and efficiency gains that wearables could bring. if corporations had it on their radar, I think they would buy them even now.
Oh, and I guess I should answer your last post more directly. Here's the reason I don't think the example of the earth shows anything. I feel that yes, at any given time, a few beliefs which were widely held were wrong. But I think that is general, if you looked at the set of all beliefs, and then divided them into two groups, "widely held beliefs" and "non-widely held beliefs", the proportion of correct beliefs would be greater in the "widely held beliefs" group.
So, there might be examples like "earth is flat" which were, at some time, in the "widely held belifs" group, yet incorrect. But I conjecture that there are proportionally more incorrect beliefs in the "non-widely held beliefs" group.
As I noted in my other message, this would be hard to test because you first have to have a way of getting a fair sample of "beliefs". Does "the sun is bright" count as a belief? Does "44 + 2 = 46"? It's not fair to just look at currently contentious political beliefs, because it's probably that the reason they are contentious is that there is an abnormally high probability of being about to change.
If there is such a correlation, you would expect to see it by looking at lots of facts which are now known, but which used to be uncertain, and lots of people's opinions about those facts when they were contentious.
Such an experiment would be hard to do, though, because those issues which you hear the most about are often the ones in which some minority is talking about a lot because they have new evidence which upsets the consensus view (for example, global warming). Almost any method for choosing a sample of "previously contentious issues" might have this sort of bias. So I can't even think of a good way to test it right now.
No single example or small set of examples could decide the issue, since the rule I propose is probabalistic rather than deterministic. Unfortuntely, I don't know of any study which has been done which looks at this. So, in the lack of hard evidence either way (note that your feeling that there is no such correlation would require a difficult study to examine it as much as my feeling would), I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
You don't think there's even a probabilistic relationship?
You would go so far as to say that two points of view A and B are almost equally likely even if 90% of people believe A and 10% believe B?
Because I conjecture that is the case with extreme points of view; a large proportion of people probably believe something in the "middle".
If you do think that truth is uncorrelated with opinion, then how do you explain society's seeming to advance to hold more "true" ideas about the world over history? How could we move towards the truth if we have no compass to guide us?
Hmm.. maybe in some cases I'd agree. But consider this. Let's say there's a topic for which a range of points of view exist along a 1-dimensional continuum. We'll label the points of view with numbers, 1 through 10.
Now, if there's lots of people who believe in numbers in the middle, but only a few who believe in numbers close to 1 or close to 10 (e.g. a bell curve centered at 5), then I would say that the middle has a greater probability of being true (I am assuming here that probability of truth of a proposition is proportional to the # of people who believe in the proposition)
I would expect that this is what we would actually see if we looked at, say, people who believe in U.S. democratic party ideals vs. U.S. republican party ideals. In fact, I would expect the distribution would look like this for most issues which people think about linearly.
Now, if you had the same amount of people who believed in each point along the continuum (i.e. 10 people who are "1"s, 10 people who are "2"s, etc), then it's true that most of the points will be equally probable (assuming again that the probability is proportional to the # of points who believe in nearby points). But this seems less likely to happen to me.
It's unpleasant to think of the innocents that will be caught in the cross-fire; for example, I'm a big fan of the Rock Bottom restaurant chain mentioned in the article and often evangelize it to friends. And I happened to move in July 2003. I hope I'm never mistaken for a "secret agent".
However, in the long term it seems to me that BzzAgent is a step closer to the ideal than traditional advertising; a way to get the word out about new products. Providing free samples to ordinary people who are interested in their product and who may be willing to talk it up if they like it is exactly what companies should be doing. This is more helpful to society than spending lots of money to shoot slick commercials and to have famous people appear in them.
A precursory look at the BzzAgent website (particularly http://www.bzzagent.com/pages/WordOfMouth.php) shows that they aren't encouraging a "secret agent" mentality. In fact, they even use the word "open" a lot, and they let you look at their blog without even signing up as an "agent". And take a look at http://www2.bzzagent.com/pages/CodeOfConduct.jsp; they expect Agents to be open and honest, and they enourage them to talk about being Agents.
It's regrettable that (quoting the nytimes article) this is coupled with suggestions that people "call bookstores and pretend you don't know the exact title or author you're looking for".
In my opinion, BzzAgent is one step away from the ideal. They should even more actively encourage their members to mention their membership in BzzAgent whenever possible to dispel mistrust. Finally, they should actively discourage things like calling the bookstore and pretending you don't know about something.
Imagine that instead being associated with "undercover marketing", BzzAgent became a household word, a program that everybody knew about and that many people participated in, in order to get samples of products, and in order to provide a service by advertising good products. BuzzAgents' friends and acquaintances would know that they participated, and if an Agent friend brought Al Fresco sausage to your BBQ, it would be no secret where they got it from. The net effect would be, first, to encourage people to try new things through free samples, and second, to devolve the job of getting the word out about good new products from professionals to amateur volunteers.
In fact, I think this is probably what they are aiming at even today, and they just need to take a few more steps to address everyone's concerns about openness.
I have one more suggestion that is a little more radical, but that I think would help BzzAgent prove once and for all that they mean well. I understand that sometimes it may be difficult and awkward to make Agents mention their affiliation each and everytime they happen to mention the product in passing. So, the company should ask Agents to affix a small, visible, brightly colored "BzzAgent" sticker to the product when they bring it somewhere to tout it. This should remove any mistrust.
(incidentally, one of the things that is probably hurting people's perceptions of BzzAgent is to use the word "agent" to describe their members. It seems to me that this is clearly intended as a silly/campy/goofy parody. But it comes off as if they're seriously trying "infiltrate" us. It is ironic that this inconsequential choice of words, a "branding mistake" perhaps, will probably do a lot to galvanize opposition amongst people who don't like being influenced by advertisers with their carefully chosen words)
Your site is a good idea, though -- we may as well have a place to put a list of products which may be being astroturfed, either by this company or by others, as well as have an open forum to discuss these sort of things.
wikis can be used for a couple of other things besides FAQs:
whiteboard of the internet
like the whiteboard
in your hallway, except that it's online, it's for text instead of drawing (usually), it's hyperlinked, and it archives all of the content and lets you "diff" between versions.
wikis in this mode can be used by a project team to keep track of ideas and to share documents like to-do lists
message board/usenet newsgroup, but more organized
wikis can act like a message board, except that instead of posts being organized by date, they are organized by subject. this lessens the tendency of the community to rehash old conversations every few months -- instead of old conversations being buried in the archives, they are still right there on the relevant wiki page.
see MeatballWiki for a great example of a wiki which is used to discuss things without old topics being "buried in the archives".
incidentally, a discussion on the relative strengths of discussion board software and wikis for the task of holding an online discussion can be found at CommunityWiki:DiscussionBoardVsWiki
a related topic is the idea of creating a "standard" simple subset of XHTML for wiki page interchange (i.e. to make it easy to copy wiki pages between different wiki software packages):
http://interwiki.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/Xhtm lI nterWikiMarkupStandard
we're working on the spam problem. nobody bothered to implement even the most basic anti-spam safeguards because it wasn't a problem until this year. but they're coming. For example, the OddMuse wiki software implements a blacklist of "forbidden content", like MT-blacklist does for movable type. The software can automatically pull new entries from the blacklist from another OddMuse site, creating a "network immune system" of sorts.
I expect that Captchas will become available soon, as well.
As developer of WikiGateway, I certainly think that allowing bots to post is important! This is the keystone of a whole range of future features such as local wiki editing clients, alternate wiki frontends which automatically interface with the backend using bots, utilities to copy pages across different wiki sites, proxy services to connect wikis to other protocols such as email, etc.
Many of these could be implemented if every wiki developer added some feature. But with bots, third parties can write overlays. In other words, bots are the key to decentralizing the addition of new features to the wiki experience; without bots, everything is limited to the pace of the wiki engine developers.
I suggest that a captcha be implemented by default in the edit box to prevent bots from posting. But, registered and community-verified users should be able to enable bot-posting for bots which can authenticate with their username and password.
"Community-verified" means that the community, by consensus (the same way wiki pages are edited), adds a flag to your user account that indicates that you are eligible to run bots.
My impression was that for a captcha, you want to have the system be able to generate new images and grade them automatically. Otherwise, if there are a small (thousands, millions?) of images, an attacker could download them all and somehow solve them once, then program their bot with the solution. This isn't possible if the captcha is auto-generating a different test each time.
So, generating a picture of an apple doesn't qualify because a computer can't do it automatically.
Btw, other posts on this thread say that indeed, spammers are actually mounting the above described attack (d/l all the test images and solve them once). Apparenly they are copying the images to porn sites and then requires human visitors to the porn sites to answer the questions! This way they don't have to spend time answering the question themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my solution. Create a position new directly elected (like the president) official whose only job is to fight corruption and oversecrecy in government, and whose only powers are:
* Access to information. Like the president, the tribune automatically has the highest possible security clearance, and is empowered to demand any information from any government agency or offical.
* Declassify information. Like the president, the tribune has the power to unilaterally declassify information.
* Prosecute. The tribune has the standing to take the government to court over any issue relating to infringement of rights, corruption, or a violation of procedure.
More details at:
http://bayleshanks.com/wiki.pl?ideas-groupDecisionMaking-tribune
Apparently, Google Wave's goal is to be what email would be, if email were designed today, but this line of reasoning leads to realization of one case in which email does something that Google Wave apparently cannot.
If one recipient of an email is reading the email offline, they can write reply to it a queue it up to be sent, and then (assuming that their reply is delivered successfully), they can assume that their reply was received by the other participants on the thread.
However, with Google Wave, it seems that one could receive a message, go offline, compose a reply, go back online to 'send' the reply, and find that there is a merge conflict. (I am assuming that offline reply composition is possible with Google Wave; if not, there's an even bigger failure)
Perhaps merge conflicts after offline replies could be guaranteed to be avoided if all participants in a discussion agree to certain rules (such as always adding replies at the end), but this is not as good as email, because with emails the same guarantee can be had without any assumptions of the users acting in a certain way.
Yes, there is research on neural net hardware.
C arver/dp/0201059924
I don't work on this myself, but some links:
http://www.amazon.com/Analog-VLSI-Neural-Systems-
http://www.google.com/search?q=neural+vlsi
http://www.google.com/search?q=neuromorphic
I agree with ardor here.
You may not see a person with a brain enter an infinite loop. Yet, if you explain to a person what a Turing machine is, and then ask them to compute the state of a certain Turing machine when given a certain input after a certain number of steps, then (given enough time*) they will be able to do so.
Therefore, people can emulate Turing machines. Therefore, people actually can perform computation.
The fact that humans don't actually enter loops in everyday life simply means that the program they are running** doesn't have an infinite loop in it (or, it means that the conditions to go into the loop are never met in everyday life; consider if you could put someone in a sensory isolation chamber and keep them alive for five billion years; are you sure they won't loop?).
*: Technically, finite time and memory means that humans can't be more than finite automata. But I don't think that's really what we're asking; I think our goal in this discussion is to consider human minds with these limitations abstracted away (I think the thing to do formally is to consider humans as representatives of a "uniform family" of finite automatons, in order to say that humans are not quite Turing machines, but that there exists an abstract notion of a human-like mind unbound by lifespan or memory which is, in fact, at least as powerful as a universal Turing machine).
**: although maybe humans are something strictly MORE powerful than Turing machines, in which case it may not be sensible to talk about which "program" they are running
Wikipedia has cataloged a few proposals to fix division by zero:
e r_number_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero#Oth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_theory
See also http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RatingGroups
> Reagan had the saturn line killed. When funding was sought to preserve the info, they felt that it was not needed. We have learned the hard way that that kind of info is difficult to get back.
Interesting fact. Could you provide a source for the info being trashed by the Reagan admin? Thanks
There's a list of collaborative real-time document editors at WikiPedia:Collaborative_real-time_editor One of them is Gobby, which is multi-platform and free software. But you want version control, too; so I guess that would be a wiki which support real-time simultaineous editing. Some of the wikis have been talking about this (example), but I don't know if it's been implemented yet. I believe one project along those lines is the Yarrr extension to MediaWiki.
If you have the time, I'd be interested in some citations for your bullet points, particularly the last one -- I'm not disagreeing with them, I'd just like to read the articles.
Thanks,
bayle
Sure, but then why not apply that analysis to Larry's action to pull the license?
Once the tool has been developed, Larry has two choices:
* Pull the license (which is bad for everyone)
* Ignore the tool (which isn't so bad)
So, looking at it this way, Larry's action of yanking the license had no good (profitable, valuable) results.
Now of course, Larry can say, but the point of yanking the license is that my threat to yank the license was intended to deter people from doing what Tridge did. I am just protecting my right to make a living off my software. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop people from profiting off my coattails?
But Tridge can say, but the point of reverse engineering the system is that my threat to reverse engineer the system was intended to deter Larry from imposing unreasonable conditions on the community. I am just protecting the the commnity's right to access its data. I had to follow through on my threat to protect my credibility; if I didn't, then what would stop Larry from continuing to refuse to give us the access we deserve?
So, as you see, the "what is practically good (profitable, valuable)" analysis doesn't give us a conclusion here. Either Tridge or Larry could have avoided having the license pulled.
The type of analysis that WOULD decide the conflict is one which looks at who is being treated fairly or unfairly, or one which considered the "rights" of all parties (i.e. my right to make a living off BitKeeper without having it reverse engineered, vs. my right to access the metadata of the Linux kernal development).
For example, if a criminal mastermind had an atom bomb aimed at New York city and demanded your wife and your firstborn child as ransom, and you refused, and he blew up New York, then it wouldn't make sense for someone to say that the mastermind was a good man but that you are responsible for the destruction of New York. But, using Linus's "good (practical, valuable)" analysis, all that can be concluded is that both the criminal and you were responsible. The more sensible conclusion is that your wife and your child have a right not to be ransomed to some criminal, but that the criminal has little right to your wife and child, therefore he is the bad guy here. But this necessarily involves taking a stand on the fairness of each side's demands.
Linus seems to be claiming that he doesn't want to get caught up in a discussion of rights, but by blaming Tridge, he is probably implicitly assuming that Larry's putative right not to have others "ride his coattails" holds more weight than Tridge's putative right to interoperate and to access metadata without signing a license agreement.
I couldn't disagree more. I thought Larry's article was an excellent read and that it clearly expressed phenomena sometimes seen in wiki communities. I think it was a very substantial article and was not just self-promotion.
Even if you disagree with the validity of his points (I myself disagree with many of his conclusions), you have to admit that many people (perhaps even future historians) will be interested to read the point of view of someone so pivotally involved in the formation of such a monumental organization.
looks to me like people are saying:
m and http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3...,9223 37,00.html)
1) they don't want it
2) tech isn't there yet to make it small enough
as for (1), i'm personally convinced that plenty of people will be using it once they see how convenient it makes things. everyone claims their
PDA is good enough, but i bet they don't dispense with their home computer and use their PDA full-time like we'll be able to when "full-power" wearables are eventually available. and i bet they don't constantly check the GPS on their PDA. or IM strangers in Times Square. (see http://www.headmap.org/book/manifesto/hm-blank.ht
but, besides all these "new" applications, computing will be nicer when you don't have to sit in front of the computer to do it.
however, that's a long way away; what I'd like today is just a $3000 low-resolution, slow, B&W sunglasses-embedded HMD and "virtual keyboard" (finger tracker). I do see people's point here; a PDA can do much of what this would be used for, and it would be cheaper, and color, and not feel weird. Personally, I'd shell out for the low-resolution sunglasses-enabled model and finger-tracker because the extra bandwidth (large display area (assuming the display changed when you moved your head) and large "virtual" keyboard) would allow me to do a lot of stuff "on the road" (waiting in line at the supermarket, etc) that I can't do efficiently on a tiny
PDA interface.
as for (2), i'm a little confused because, as some posters noted, corps started using cell phones before they were small. my feeling is that none by the nerdiest even think about wearable, much less realize the convenience and efficiency gains that wearables could bring. if corporations had it on their radar, I think they would buy them even now.
-- bayle
well, write it down and post it, man!
Oh, and I guess I should answer your last post more directly. Here's the reason I don't think the example of the earth shows anything. I feel that yes, at any given time, a few beliefs which were widely held were wrong. But I think that is general, if you looked at the set of all beliefs, and then divided them into two groups, "widely held beliefs" and "non-widely held beliefs", the proportion of correct beliefs would be greater in the "widely held beliefs" group.
So, there might be examples like "earth is flat" which were, at some time, in the "widely held belifs" group, yet incorrect. But I conjecture that there are proportionally more incorrect beliefs in the "non-widely held beliefs" group.
As I noted in my other message, this would be hard to test because you first have to have a way of getting a fair sample of "beliefs". Does "the sun is bright" count as a belief? Does "44 + 2 = 46"?
It's not fair to just look at currently contentious political beliefs, because it's probably that the reason they are contentious is that there is an abnormally high probability of being about to change.
If there is such a correlation, you would expect to see it by looking at lots of facts which are now known, but which used to be uncertain, and lots of people's opinions about those facts when they were contentious.
Such an experiment would be hard to do, though, because those issues which you hear the most about are often the ones in which some minority is talking about a lot because they have new evidence which upsets the consensus view (for example, global warming). Almost any method for choosing a sample of "previously contentious issues" might have this sort of bias. So I can't even think of a good way to test it right now.
No single example or small set of examples could decide the issue, since the rule I propose is probabalistic rather than deterministic. Unfortuntely, I don't know of any study which has been done which looks at this. So, in the lack of hard evidence either way (note that your feeling that there is no such correlation would require a difficult study to examine it as much as my feeling would), I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
You don't think there's even a probabilistic relationship?
You would go so far as to say that two points of view A and B are almost equally likely even if 90% of people believe A and 10% believe B?
Because I conjecture that is the case with extreme points of view; a large proportion of people probably believe something in the "middle".
If you do think that truth is uncorrelated with opinion, then how do you explain society's seeming to advance to hold more "true" ideas about the world over history? How could we move towards the truth if we have no compass to guide us?
Hmm.. maybe in some cases I'd agree. But consider this. Let's say there's a topic for which a range of points of view exist along a 1-dimensional continuum. We'll label the points of view with numbers, 1 through 10.
Now, if there's lots of people who believe in numbers in the middle, but only a few who believe in numbers close to 1 or close to 10 (e.g. a bell curve centered at 5), then I would say that the middle has a greater probability of being true (I am assuming here that probability of truth of a proposition is proportional to the # of people who believe in the proposition)
I would expect that this is what we would actually see if we looked at, say, people who believe in U.S. democratic party ideals vs. U.S. republican party ideals. In fact, I would expect the distribution would look like this for most issues which people think about linearly.
Now, if you had the same amount of people who believed in each point along the continuum (i.e. 10 people who are "1"s, 10 people who are "2"s, etc), then it's true that most of the points will be equally probable (assuming again that the probability is proportional to the # of points who believe in nearby points). But this seems less likely to happen to me.
However, in the long term it seems to me that BzzAgent is a step closer to the ideal than traditional advertising; a way to get the word out about new products. Providing free samples to ordinary people who are interested in their product and who may be willing to talk it up if they like it is exactly what companies should be doing. This is more helpful to society than spending lots of money to shoot slick commercials and to have famous people appear in them.
A precursory look at the BzzAgent website (particularly http://www.bzzagent.com/pages/WordOfMouth.php) shows that they aren't encouraging a "secret agent" mentality. In fact, they even use the word "open" a lot, and they let you look at their blog without even signing up as an "agent". And take a look at http://www2.bzzagent.com/pages/CodeOfConduct.jsp; they expect Agents to be open and honest, and they enourage them to talk about being Agents.
It's regrettable that (quoting the nytimes article) this is coupled with suggestions that people "call bookstores and pretend you don't know the exact title or author you're looking for".
In my opinion, BzzAgent is one step away from the ideal. They should even more actively encourage their members to mention their membership in BzzAgent whenever possible to dispel mistrust. Finally, they should actively discourage things like calling the bookstore and pretending you don't know about something.
Imagine that instead being associated with "undercover marketing", BzzAgent became a household word, a program that everybody knew about and that many people participated in, in order to get samples of products, and in order to provide a service by advertising good products. BuzzAgents' friends and acquaintances would know that they participated, and if an Agent friend brought Al Fresco sausage to your BBQ, it would be no secret where they got it from. The net effect would be, first, to encourage people to try new things through free samples, and second, to devolve the job of getting the word out about good new products from professionals to amateur volunteers.
In fact, I think this is probably what they are aiming at even today, and they just need to take a few more steps to address everyone's concerns about openness.
I have one more suggestion that is a little more radical, but that I think would help BzzAgent prove once and for all that they mean well. I understand that sometimes it may be difficult and awkward to make Agents mention their affiliation each and everytime they happen to mention the product in passing. So, the company should ask Agents to affix a small, visible, brightly colored "BzzAgent" sticker to the product when they bring it somewhere to tout it. This should remove any mistrust.
(incidentally, one of the things that is probably hurting people's perceptions of BzzAgent is to use the word "agent" to describe their members. It seems to me that this is clearly intended as a silly/campy/goofy parody. But it comes off as if they're seriously trying "infiltrate" us. It is ironic that this inconsequential choice of words, a "branding mistake" perhaps, will probably do a lot to galvanize opposition amongst people who don't like being influenced by advertisers with their carefully chosen words)
Your site is a good idea, though -- we may as well have a place to put a list of products which may be being astroturfed, either by this company or by others, as well as have an open forum to discuss these sort of things.
whiteboard of the internet
like the whiteboard in your hallway, except that it's online, it's for text instead of drawing (usually), it's hyperlinked, and it archives all of the content and lets you "diff" between versions. wikis in this mode can be used by a project team to keep track of ideas and to share documents like to-do lists
message board/usenet newsgroup, but more organized
wikis can act like a message board, except that instead of posts being organized by date, they are organized by subject. this lessens the tendency of the community to rehash old conversations every few months -- instead of old conversations being buried in the archives, they are still right there on the relevant wiki page.
see MeatballWiki for a great example of a wiki which is used to discuss things without old topics being "buried in the archives".
incidentally, a discussion on the relative strengths of discussion board software and wikis for the task of holding an online discussion can be found at CommunityWiki:DiscussionBoardVsWiki
a related topic is the idea of creating a "standard" simple subset of XHTML for wiki page interchange (i.e. to make it easy to copy wiki pages between different wiki software packages):
m lI nterWikiMarkupStandard
http://interwiki.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/Xht
we're working on the spam problem. nobody bothered to implement even the most basic anti-spam safeguards because it wasn't a problem until this year. but they're coming. For example, the OddMuse wiki software implements a blacklist of "forbidden content", like MT-blacklist does for movable type. The software can automatically pull new entries from the blacklist from another OddMuse site, creating a "network immune system" of sorts.
I expect that Captchas will become available soon, as well.
this page has pointers to some emacs front ends:
i sc ussion
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WikiModeD
Here's the link I meant:
WikiGateway
As developer of WikiGateway, I certainly think that allowing bots to post is important! This is the keystone of a whole range of future features such as local wiki editing clients, alternate wiki frontends which automatically interface with the backend using bots, utilities to copy pages across different wiki sites, proxy services to connect wikis to other protocols such as email, etc.
Many of these could be implemented if every wiki developer added some feature. But with bots, third parties can write overlays. In other words, bots are the key to decentralizing the addition of new features to the wiki experience; without bots, everything is limited to the pace of the wiki engine developers.
I suggest that a captcha be implemented by default in the edit box to prevent bots from posting. But, registered and community-verified users should be able to enable bot-posting for bots which can authenticate with their username and password.
"Community-verified" means that the community, by consensus (the same way wiki pages are edited), adds a flag to your user account that indicates that you are eligible to run bots.
My impression was that for a captcha, you want to have the system be able to generate new images and grade them automatically. Otherwise, if there are a small (thousands, millions?) of images, an attacker could download them all and somehow solve them once, then program their bot with the solution. This isn't possible if the captcha is auto-generating a different test each time.
So, generating a picture of an apple doesn't qualify because a computer can't do it automatically.
Btw, other posts on this thread say that indeed, spammers are actually mounting the above described attack (d/l all the test images and solve them once). Apparenly they are copying the images to porn sites and then requires human visitors to the porn sites to answer the questions! This way they don't have to spend time answering the question themselves.