Odd that he doesn't mention slashdot. (Not odd that he doesn't mention Sterling's _Distraction_, with its rival confederations of nomadic biker-gangs, oriented around competing reputation systems.)

"Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.”  Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering (like these people haunting a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [beginning @ 1:50]).

Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.

"This article analyzes the role in the credit crisis of the processes by which market participants produce knowledge about financial in- struments. Employing documentary sources and 87 predominantly oral history interviews, the article presents a historical sociology of the clusters of evaluation practices surrounding ABSs (asset-backed securities, most importantly mortgage-backed securities) and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). Despite the close structural simi- larity between ABSs and CDOs, these practices came to differ sub- stantially and became the province (e.g., in the rating agencies) of organizationally separate groups. In consequence, when ABS CDOs (CDOs in which the underlying assets are ABSs) emerged, they were evaluated in two separate stages. This created a fatally attractive arbitrage opportunity, large-scale exploitation of which sidelined previously important gatekeepers (risk-sensitive investors in the lower tranches of mortgage-backed securities) and eventually mag- nified and concentrated the banking system’s calamitous mortgage- related losses."

"Over a period of more than 30 years, more than 100 mathematicians worked on a project to classify mathematical objects known as finite simple groups. The Classification, when officially declared completed in 1981, ranged between 300 and 500 articles and ran somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 journal pages. Mathematicians have hailed the project as one of the greatest mathematical achievements of the 20th century, and it surpasses, both in scale and scope, any other mathematical proof of the 20th century. The history of the Classification points to the importance of face-to-face interaction and close teaching relationships in the production and transformation of theoretical knowledge. The techniques and methods that governed much of the work in finite simple group theory circulated via personal, often informal, communication, rather than in published proofs. Consequently, the printed proofs that would constitute the Classification Theorem functioned as a sort of shorthand for and formalization of proofs that had already been established during personal interactions among mathematicians. The proof of the Classification was at once both a material artifact and a crystallization of one community’s shared practices, values, histories, and expertise. However, beginning in the 1980s, the original proof of the Classification faced the threat of ‘uninvention’. The papers that constituted it could still be found scattered throughout the mathematical literature, but no one other than the dwindling community of group theorists would know how to find them or how to piece them together. Faced with this problem, finite group theorists resolved to produce a ‘second-generation proof’ to streamline and centralize the Classification. This project highlights that the proof and the community of finite simple groups theorists who produced it were co-constitutive–one formed and reformed by the other."

"Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States--Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music.
"What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary genres? Do genres follow patterns in their development? Lena discovers four dominant forms--Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist--and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the Government-purposed genre, which she examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work."

"In this paper we address the general question of how social influence determines collective outcomes for large populations of individuals faced with binary decisions. First, we define conditions under which the behavior of individuals making binary decisions can be described in terms of what we call an influence-response function: a one-dimensional function of the (weighted) number of individuals choosing each of the alternatives. And second, we demonstrate that, under the assumptions of global and anonymous interactions, general knowledge of the influence-response functions is sufficient to compute equilibrium, and even non-equilibrium, properties of the collective dynamics. By enabling us to treat in a consistent manner classes of decisions that have previously been analyzed separately, our framework allows us to find similarities between apparently quite different kinds of decision situations, and conversely to identify important differences between decisions that would otherwise appear very similar."

"Complex problems in science, business, and engineering typically require some tradeoff between exploitation of known solutions and exploration for novel ones, where, in many cases, information about known solutions can also disseminate among individual problem solvers through formal or informal networks. Prior research on complex problem solving by collectives has found the counterintuitive result that inefficient networks, meaning networks that disseminate information relatively slowly, can perform better than efficient networks for problems that require extended exploration. In this paper, we report on a series of 256 Web-based experiments in which groups of 16 individuals collectively solved a complex problem and shared information through different communication networks. As expected, we found that collective exploration improved average success over independent exploration because good solutions could diffuse through the network. In contrast to prior work, however, we found that efficient networks outperformed inefficient networks, even in a problem space with qualitative properties thought to favor inefficient networks. We explain this result in terms of individual-level explore-exploit decisions, which we find were influenced by the network structure as well as by strategic considerations and the relative payoff between maxima. We conclude by discussing implications for real-world problem solving and possible extensions."

"The authors propose that a trade-off between network diversity and communications bandwidth regulates access to novel information because a more diverse network structure increases novelty at a cost of reducing information flow. Received novelty then depends on whether (a) the information overlap is small enough, (b) alters’ topical knowledge is shallow enough, and (c) alters’ knowledge stocks refresh slowly enough to justify bridging structural holes. Social network and e-mail content from an executive recruiting firm show that bridging ties can actually offer less novelty for these reasons, suggesting that the strength of weak ties and structural holes depend on brokers’ information environments."

"Social web users are a very diverse group with varying interests, levels of expertise, enthusiasm, and expressiveness. As a result, the quality of content and annotations they create to organize content is also highly variable. While several approaches have been proposed to mine social annotations, for example, to learn folksonomies that reflect how people relate narrower concepts to broader ones, these methods treat all users and the annotations they create uniformly. We propose a framework to automatically identify experts, i.e., knowledgeable users who create high quality annotations, and use their knowledge to guide folksonomy learning. We evaluate the approach on a large body of social annotations extracted from the photosharing site Flickr. We show that using expert knowledge leads to more detailed and accurate folksonomies. Moreover, we show that including annotations from non-expert, or novice, users leads to more comprehensive folksonomies than experts' knowledge alone."

"I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it's R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn't find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock." --- See also the very last link.

"The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on those propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. In this paper, we motivate that quite often, we do not only want to make a factually right decision, but also to correctly evaluate the reasons for that decision. In other words, we address the problem of tracking the truth. We set up a probabilistic model that generalizes the analysis of Bovens and Rabinowicz (2006) and use it to compare several aggregation procedures. Demanding some reasonable adequacy constraints, we demonstrate that a reasons- or premise-based aggregation procedure tracks the truth better than any other procedure. However, we also illuminate that such a procedure is not in all circumstances easy to implement, leaving actual decision-makers with a tradeoff problem."

"This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the collective political intelligence of the many. The paper hypothesizes that two main democratic mechanisms - the practice of inclusive deliberation (in its direct and indirect versions) and the institution of majority rule with universal suffrage - combine their epistemic properties to maximize the chances that the group pick the “better” political answer within a given context and a set of values. The paper further argues that under the conditions of a liberal society, characterized among other things by sufficient cognitive diversity, these two mechanisms give democracy an epistemic edge over versions of the rule of the few."

"Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.
If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production."  (That last seems more like a hope to me than a real observation.)

"Do economists accept absurd and unsupported claims about reality, and if so, why? We define four types of claims commonly made in economics that require different types of evidence, and show examples of each from the rational addiction literature. Claims about real world causal mechanisms and welfare effects seem poorly supported. A survey mailed to all researchers with peer-reviewed work on rational addiction theory provides some evidence that criteria for evaluating claims of pure theory and statistical prediction are better understood than those needed for claims of causality or welfare analysis. ... The rational addiction literature illustrates that this can lead to absurd and unjustified claims being made and accepted in even highly-ranked journals." See also http://freakynomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/flaw-in-modern-economics-and-how-to-fix.html

"The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability."

"the Borat humor is taking people whose jobs are to behave a certain way under a familiar, professionalized script and then start acting like a weirdo. ... They all try to keep to their scripts while the person opposite of them acts like a buffoon,,,, instead of going “stop acting like a buffoon.” ... These right-wing videos take this and amplify a particularly interesting part of the service/professionalized economy. When so much of our economy is driven by professionals there is a lot of work done in making sure that there are layers of people between the consumer and the professional. ... You don’t want the expensive brain surgeon making sure you’ve filled out your address and contact information correctly or taking your temperature – that’s why there’s a secretary and a nurse in-between these steps at the hospital.What the right-wing videos do ... is present the front-line staff as the actual decision making professionals. ..."

Review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2011-08.html#laughlin

Actually, I heard the talk about this and some even more impressive follow-up work, which Jadbabaie said will be in working paper form very soon.

"Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. ...analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, ... posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an insect theory of media, one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien lifeworlds of insects."

"Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. ... two experimental paradigms in which we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals and patterns of behavior at the group level, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources and how innovations diffuse through a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanatory and predictive accounts. Together, the models and experiments point to tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation—that is, compromises between individuals using their own innovations and using innovations obtained from their peers—and the emergence of group-level organizations..."

"This article engages with problems that are usually opaque: What trajectories do scientific debates assume, when does a scientific community consider a proposition to be a fact, and how can we know that? We develop a strategy for evaluating the state of scientific contestation on issues. The analysis builds from Latour’s black box imagery, which we observe in scientific citation networks. We show that as consensus forms, the importance of internal divisions to the overall network structure declines. We consider substantive cases that are now considered facts, such as the carcinogenicity of smoking and the non-carcinogenicity of coffee. We then employ the same analysis to currently contested cases: the suspected carcinogenicity of cellular phones, and the relationship between vaccines and autism. Extracting meaning from the internal structure of scientific knowledge carves a niche for renewed sociological commentary on science..."

"A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. The authors examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated that the optimal network structure depends on the problem space being explored, with networks that incorporate spatially based cliques having an advantage for problems that benefit from broad exploration, and networks with greater long-range connectivity having an advantage for problems requiring less exploration."

"this book is about political culture. It examines developments in the social sciences and integrates them into a theoretical explanation of historical changes in political values. The starting point is the premise that political culture is rooted in the interaction between individual thinking and social norms. Through discourse, individual conceptions of social life are transformed and, interactively, social norms and cultural orientations as well. The first two parts of the book explore these issues theoretically. The second two examine them empirically by showing the ways that political cultures have changed over time. In the modern period the differences in the political cultures of capitalist and communist systems are contrasted; although both coneptualize social life in terms of property accumulation, they utilize different cultural orientations to reduce institutional transaction costs. The way the tensions between these two systems can be resolved is also explored."

"As Burke puts it, the comparison makes sense; individual reason (or, for that matter, the individual social science study) is highly limited in its epistemic power in comparison to settled social practice. There is typically some reasonable basis for even highly perplexing social practices; and individual reason is likely to be highly misleading in many circumstances. Individually, we suffer from so many cognitive biases and defects that it is a wonder we get up in the morning; and even highly trained experts are often wrong, even in their own fields. ...
"But as an argument the comparison is flawed; the relevant comparison should not be that between settled practice and individual reason, but between settled practice and some alternative social practice (e.g., the social practice of science, with its various self-correction mechanisms), or between settled practice and some other collective judgment (e.g., the collective judgment of an assembly or a market)."

Obviously, I need to read this book.

"We present a model of social learning of both language and skills, while assuming—insofar as possible—strict autonomy, virtual embodiment, and situatedness. ... The aim of the article is to investigate what sociocognitive mechanisms agents should have in order to be able to transmit language from one generation to the next so that it can be used as a medium to transmit internalized rules that represent skill knowledge. We have performed experiments where this knowledge solves the familiar poisonous-food problem. ... we show that agents need to coordinate interactions so that they can establish joint attention in order to form a scaffold for language learning, which in turn forms a scaffold for the learning of rule-based skills. Based on these findings, we conclude by hypothesizing that social learning at one level forms a scaffold for the social learning at another, higher level, thus contributing to the accumulation of cultural knowledge."

Nothing very profound or surprising, sadly.

But, but, but, Pandora was never _in_ the box!  ETA: Andy was making a joke which went over my head.

"(Attention Conservation Notice: this is an unholy mashup between historical speculation and experience from 23 Things, exacerbated by too much checking footnotes and not enough sleep)."

"The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This groundbreaking collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing and critiquing a range of modern cultural theories (including those of Michel Foucault and Edward Said). How was knowledge shaped into textual forms, and how did those forms encode relationships between emperor and subjects, theory and practice, Roman and Greek, centre and periphery? Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire will be required reading for those concerned with the intellectual and cultural history of the Roman Empire, and its lasting legacy in the medieval world and beyond."

"Still, just as a brief refresher, recall that over the past two years, the movement’s flagship publications and most prominent pundits have found it urgent to discuss: Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor…"

"We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic “superstars” who died prematurely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5% to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor, and star/coauthor dyad characteristics, we seek to adjudicate between plausible mechanisms that might explain this finding. Taken together, our results suggest that spillovers are circumscribed in idea space, but less so in physical or social space. In particular, superstar extinction reveals the boundaries of the scientific field to which the star contributes—the “invisible college.”"

An interesting essay with a false central premise, viz., that the American right ever _did_ have a genuine openness to innovative ideas. There is a natural antipathy between that and being _conservative_...

review of a possibly-interesting book.

" focus on Flickr and Last.fm, two social media systems in which we can relate the tagging activity of the users with an explicit representation of their social network. We show that a substantial level of local lexical and topical alignment is observable among users who lie close to each other in the social network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local alignment between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user activity and centrality in the social network. ... suggests that users with similar topical interests are more likely to be friends, and therefore semantic similarity measures among users based solely on their annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test this ... on the Last.fm data set ... social network constructed from semantic similarity captures actual friendship [better] than Last.fm's suggestions based on listening patterns"

Very sad.

"In 1917 ... Jacques Loeb published a short essay, ... `Biology and War', [on] his disagreement with World War I. He was deeply saddened by the break-up of the international scientific community as a consequence of the actions of bellicose politicians. ... in direct opposition to his efforts to promote social reform, mechanistic biology and scientific internationalism. ... examine Loeb's activities aimed at these efforts before, during and after the war. ... how Loeb's scientific work was formed, what was special about it and why it was both successful and attacked. ... how Loeb reacted to the War and the subsequent forced disintegration of his international scientific network.... the circumstances of World War I, the reaction of his German colleagues to it and the demolition of the international scientific community changed: (1) Loeb's feelings towards his old home; (2) the direction of his scientific endeavours; and (3) his engagement in science politics."

"Everyone who ever dealt with a Troll knows of the strong, nagging urge to argue back at him ; and they know, of course, that this urge must be repressed at all cost, for it is what Trolls feed on. Thus trolling is powered by the same basic motivation that it serves to satisfy : that crazy desire to get the last word in a conversation. Trolls exist because there is enough Trollhood in everyone of us for them to feed on." Plus: Socrates and Hui Shi as trolls.

Again, check Pitt library

See if Pitt's library has a hardcopy?

Institutionalizing BMI, despite its ineffectiveness and the existence of superior alternatives. (Which, errr, make it even more obvious that I'm way over-weight, so this isn't rationalization on my part.) Lots of issues here for a data-mining class.

""The number of available ideas [about society and morals] seems limited rather than infinite. If there is one well-established law in the field known as the History of Ideas, it is that whatever has been said has also been said by someone else on an earlier occasion. Although a certain relative originality is possible, it is largely a matter of the combination of primary ideas and of context. The ledger already seems to contain very nearly all possible ideas, and the unsatisfactoriness of that tacit sociology which is half incapsulated in the history of social ideas lies in the fact that it seems to explain what people do in terms of what some thinker said or wrote. But, as all the ideas are in effect ever-present, the problem is rather why some of them acquire a powerful appeal at a given time."

"network of political discussions on one of the most popular Polish Internet forums.... The comments of the participants are ... mostly disagreements, with strong percentage of invective and [provocation]... Binary exchanges (quarrels) play significant role in the network growth and topology. Statistical analysis shows that the growth of the discussions depends on the degree of controversy of the subject and the intensity of personal conflict between the participants. This is in contrast to most previously studied social networks, for example networks of scientific citations, where the nature of the links is much more positive and based on similarity and collaboration rather than opposition and abuse. The work discusses also the implications of the findings for more general studies of consensus formation, where our observations of increased conflict contradict the usual assumptions that interactions between people lead to averaging of opinions and agreement."

"Coevolutionary arms races between brood parasites and hosts involve genetic adaptations and counter-adaptations. However, hosts sometimes acquire defenses too rapidly to reflect genetic change. Our field experiments show that observation of cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) mobbing by neighbors on adjacent territories induced reed warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) to increase the mobbing of cuckoos but not of parrots (a harmless control) on their own territory. In contrast, observation of neighbors mobbing parrots had no effect on reed warblers’ responses to either cuckoos or parrots. These results indicate that social learning provides a mechanism by which hosts rapidly increase their nest defense against brood parasites. Such enemy-specific social transmission enables hosts to track fine-scale spatiotemporal variation in parasitism and may influence the coevolutionary trajectories and population dynamics of brood parasites and hosts."

"Policy-based evidence-making" (from the comments) is a nice coinage, and a real problem. It's something that needs to be addressed _especially if_ you are an Enlightenment rationalist/scientific realist/etc....
(I am not sure that d^2's analogy to predictive relationships being invalidated by their use in setting policy is valid. After all, as Herbert Simon pointed out a long time ago, that just means you need to look for a fixed point.)

with commentary by Kenneth Arrow (!)

"I develop a model of (individually rational) collective reality denial in groups, organizations
and markets. Whether participants’ tendencies toward wishful thinking reinforce or dampen
each other is shown to hinge on a simple and novel mechanism. When an agent can expect
to benefit from other’s delusions, this makes him more of a realist; when he is more likely
to suffer losses from them this pushes him toward denial, which becomes contagious." --- This is a really brilliant paper.

Aleks Jakulin on the _Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis_ (with links to more such in the comments)