Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn’t truth what’s really at stake, he asks.

Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We’ve always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there’s a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we’ve wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or “essential”…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

[Tags: truth categories philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonmy episteomology]

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Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and the author of Dreaming in Code, has posted at Salon an interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous.

At his blog, Scott adds some “out-takes” from the interview, and recommends the book. [Tags: salon scott_rosenberg everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy tagging ]

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Radio Open Source has posted the mp3 of yesterday’s show about everything being miscellaneous, with me, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding. Chris being Chris, he drives it more towards than the broad and philosophical than, well, anyone else on radio. And best of all, you can hear me get the name of the author of Moby-Dick wrong! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous radio_open_source christopher_lydon karen_schneider tim_spalding media taxonomy folksonomy]

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AKMA responds at some length to Rowan William’s lecture on Biblical interpretation. Having just read (and blogged) Ethan Zuckerman’s post about the history of knowledge, I’m left this morning thinking: Good G-d almighty, I love the Internet. I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee and I’ve been given access to two brilliant, engaged minds wrestling with issues that really matter and that I would never have come across without the Linkosphere.

Now, on Akma’s response to my response to Dr. Williams (which I got to via Akma’s original recommendation)…

Williams says the Bible should be read “not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’.” As I said in my first post, understanding Scripture as more than something to be known strikes me (a Jew) as important and true. But I remain unconvinced that the Jewish more-than-that response is to see Scripture assembling a community. I may well be misinterpreting what Williams means by “community,” but I thought he meant that Scripture creates community by binding together believers listening to Scripture together. (Clearly the community goes beyond mere listening; I’m not getting the nuance right here.) I thought that was the “out of nothing” he has in mind. But (my point was), Jews aren’t Jews because of what they believe, any more than, say, Italians are. Akma’s response to me is that the Jewish “out of nothing” was the foundational event — the calling (Revelation at Sinai?) and the convenant.

This has me thinking, as Akma’s post always do. Akma’s interpretation makes the creation out of nothing an historical event. But if that’s what Williams meant, “community” is too weak a word. Jews are a people, not a community. (Of course, Jews also form communities; in fact, the religion is designed for community practice.) And, I assumed — thus making an ass out of u and med — that Williams’ reference to communities forming “out of nothing” wasn’t (just) to the historic foundational event of Christian history. but to the continuing creation of communities by hearing the Bible read in particular houses of worship at particular times.

If my interpretation of Williams is right — and I have no confidence that I’m getting any of this right, starting with what Jews believe — then Akma’s interpretation makes Williams’ lecture right for Jews but at the expense of obscuring an important difference between the two religions…a difference that comes down to the difference between being a people and being a community.

The truth is that I am spring-loaded on this topic — being ready to pounce is not a good intellectual position — because all too often, in my experience and opinion, Christians assume too much continuity with Judaism. (Akma is extraordinarily open to the possibility of difference — he defines “respect.”) So, when I read Williams, I tripped over that one little phrase of his.

In short: Let’s take the hyphen out of Judeo-Christian. [Tags: judaism christianity judeo-christian rowan_williams theology ]

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John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I’m typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]

John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he’s interested in how virtual worlds “allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities.”

The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is “highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged.” Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. “It’s more a reflex.” He points to our “mirror neurons,” that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but “our identities are socially embedded.” And we all have multiple selves.

How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. “But the Web was born without an identity layer.” We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. “How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc.” John refers to biological signalling theory — there’s a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That’s essential to any kind of trust network, says John.

In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They’ll want to have a persistent identity. They’ll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They’ll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they’ll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.

Over the past two years, John’s been working on a project called “Higgins,” an open source interoperable identity system. (It’s called “Higgins” because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)

We are getting “new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine.” This is a kind of “social physics”: there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for “evolutionary stable strategies.”

There’s an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China’s interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]

Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems?
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn’t mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.

Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust?
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there’s another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.

Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I’m interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.

Q: Do you see a role for government?
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.

Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer?
A: The layer won’t be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.

Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it’s insecure to have a single number encode so much…
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can’t get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.

Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel.
A: They’d be persistent, not consistent. It’d be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.

Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they’ll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not?
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.

Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn’t know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it’s ham-fisted. It’s either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That’s the new generation of social technology we now need.

[Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an “identity layer.” And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]

[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Steven Johnson just keeps getting better as a writer and as a thinker. He takes big ideas and makes them compelling by finding their connections to unexpected ideas, and then uses them to pry up the floorboards of our assumptions. Just at the level of putting words together, Steve is a master. Best of all, he’s young, so we have many more years of his writing to look forward to, if the wily universe permits.

Although the topic of The Ghost Map is the cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery that the disease is spread through contaminated water, it operates on several levels. In fact, it’s about the need to operate on several levels. So, at one level it a terrific procedural mystery with compelling real-life characters, at another it’s about the biology of bacteria, and at a third level it’s about the structure of cities. We would still be at the mercy of cholera if the hero of the tale had not been able to go up a level of abstraction to see the statistical pattern of deaths. And Johnson’s own meta-explanation requires going up to another meta-level to show how all the levels are required to tell the tale and understand the truth. It opens up a means of explanation that is rich and sometimes so surprising that it makes me laugh with delight. This fluidity with levels of abstraction also informs Steve’s books Emergence and Mind Wide Open. And with its multilayered points of view, The Ghost Map serves as further evidence for Steve’s point in Everything Bad Is Good for You that our culture is becoming more comfortable with complexity.

Steve is an intellectually sympathetic writer, which is a rare virtue. Rather than dismissing the then-prevalent theory that a “miasma” caused cholera, he is able to explain the good reasons why the miasmists held on to their theory so long. A lesser writer would have dismissed them as stupid, hide-bound, or buffoons. Steve is also able to explain why the doctor who figured it out was able to do so, tracing it to his previous work with ether, rather than claiming it was a bolt of genius lightning.

And to top it all of, The Ghost Map is a compelling, fun page-turner…a terrific read, as we say nowadays.

Steve makes my writerly cheeks burn with envy.

(Disclosure: I’m delighted to know Steve a bit. ADDED April 20 ’07: I should also have noted that Steve blurbed my book. Nevertheless, The Ghost Map is a really good book.) [Tags: ghost_map steve_johnson books reviews ]

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Akma highly recommends Dr. Rowan Williams’ lecture on the interpretation of the Bible. If the endorsement of a non-observant Jew matters—and why should it?—I agree. The lecture is fascinating to me, although also quite foreign. I would love to hear the reaction of some learned and observant Jews.

For example, Dr. Williams says that the Bible was first heard in a community, not read in isolation. It should therefore be read (he says) “not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’.” I both recognize this as a deep summons and hear it as expressing foundational presuppositions different from mine and my people’s. Although non-Jews often don’t give this full credence, Jews are a people. You are a Jew by birth, not by belief. (It’s more complex than that, but what isn’t?) Thus, the community isn’t created “out of nothing.” And the community with which one hears the holy text is an historical one with which one is supposed to discuss the text. Reading the Torah, at least as I’ve watched my wife and others do it, is about conversing with the tradition of great commentators on it. I think that is a different type of community and different experience than Dr. Williams is discussing. And yet, of course, there are elements of Jewish community that are much like what he describes.

Anyway, I find myself useful provoked by the lecture. [Tags: rowan_williams bible hermeneutics akma judaism torah ]

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I’m still sleep-dprived, but I’ve had a day to think about what I posted yesterday about truth being a property of networks.

It would have been clearer for me to say understanding is a property of networks. Then I wouldn’t have left the impression that I think facts are a matter of majority opinion. Facts are facts. That’s pretty much their essence. Understanding, however, is plural, at least in many domains — less so in the sciences, more so in the humanities.

On the other hand, our age should be embarrassed that we’ve reduced truth to mere facts.

[Tags: truth philosphy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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It’s three in the morning in the US. I am in the Zurich airport, waiting for my flight to Helsinki. I am high on Dramamine. All of which will help explain why at the moment it seems plausible to me to say: Truth is a property of networks.

I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn’t an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.

It is, of course, an unowned, self-contradictory, unsettled truth that is too big to be contained by any individual. It is outside of us and among us. It is gained not by trying to contain it but by traveling through it.

Of course, the fact that I’m traveling at the moment has no effect on my choice of metaphors.

And the fact that I’m dog tired has no effect on my decision to post this instead of letting it melt in the light. [Tags: truth philosophy networks wrong_in_public everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Harvard Law has approved a course I’ll be co-teaching with the Berkman Center’s John Palfrey during Spring 2008. Holy crap.

It’s called The Web Difference? Digital Media, Entertainment, and the Law. Here’s the description:

This course will examine the claim of Internet exceptionalism and the implications of this claim in the context of the law and society. Is the Web something substantially new that is changing the fundamentals of who we are and how we’re together? Or is it just the next in the communication media humans have invented? What are the problems to which these changes give rise? Which of these problems are ones that we’d like to address through reforms in the law, technology environment, markets, social norms, or other yet-to-be-discovered modes of influence? This course will cover the legal and policy issues to which changes in the news media and entertainment businesses, wrought by the web, give rise. Key doctrinal areas of inquiry include intellectual property, the First Amendment, defamation, and privacy. Students should be prepared to experiment with new technologies, including a course weblog, and to perform some coursework collaboratively. Course requirements include gro up coursework and a final paper, and no examination.

Oy. Not only haven’t I taught since 1986, the topics the course plans on covering are way beyond my reach. So, thank heaven for John Palfrey. I am totally thrilled to work with him. (I won’t go on to list JP’s virtues both because he’s modest and because he’s my boss at the Berkman Center. But you can just ask anyone.)

By the way, does anyone know what “gro up coursework” is? [Tags: harvard berkman exceptionalism john_palfrey teaching]

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