Blogito, ergo sum
After
the first two lectures in that mass course of one hundred students
(back in Finland that would be, what, an average-size or smallish
course?), I have to say that it feels suprisingly strange to lecture to
such an amorphous blob of students. With a small group, the overall
mood and experience is completely different. Fortunately, today's
lecture was held in a smaller room that was therefore full of people
(as opposed to a giant hall where most of the seats were empty), and
after a while I started to make out and recognize individual faces and
even noticed that heck, there's actually a whole bunch of good blokes
in this course who I have taught before in my other courses.
Now that I wrote the above paragraph, I can't help but contrast it to the blogosphere experience, where writing to one is the same as writing to a thousand, an abstract faceless mass of readers that I never actually really get to meet. Perhaps I am the only real human blogger in the world (I sure as hell don't know any others in real life), and all the text that I ever read on my screen is generated by a malicious AI to trick me. What a disturbing thought.
But even if this were really so, would it actually make a slightest difference? All the same to me, since either way, every experience that I have in my life is completely identical. Bits are bits and characters are characters, no matter how they were "really" generated. And perhaps this AI is not at all malicious, but perfectly benevolent as it constantly generates posts and web pages and articles by virtual personae for me to read with the goal of providing me maximum amusement and education in the long term. In a sense, that makes this thought even more disturbing. On the other hand, this would be perfectly in line with the worldview of the Singularity and transhumanism gang. Keep your red pill and shove it where the sun don't shine!
While we are pondering these existential conundra, I can meanwhile take a look what this magnificient artificial brain has generated for my amusement today. First, I can see that in his post "Morality and the underclass", Udolpho (or whatever subprogram or data structure I have learned to associate to that name) responds to the issue of how smoking has recently suddenly became almost entirely a lower-class activity, as discussed in my post "A few matters of morals and the social order" and my old post "The freedom to stink", from a smoker's point of view. Perhaps Panu will soon write a whole column about this issue.
In "Know way out", the blogger at "I, Ectomorph" responds to the question that I posed in "Oh boys, if you only knew", suggesting the typical opera plots as situations where meta-knowledge about other people's beliefs can reach levels four and five. I have heard of the game of "Diplomacy" but never actually played, but based on the comment by "Leonard", I can easily believe that game features high-level handling of other players' meta-knowledge as an important aspect. As Leonard explains:
Now that I wrote the above paragraph, I can't help but contrast it to the blogosphere experience, where writing to one is the same as writing to a thousand, an abstract faceless mass of readers that I never actually really get to meet. Perhaps I am the only real human blogger in the world (I sure as hell don't know any others in real life), and all the text that I ever read on my screen is generated by a malicious AI to trick me. What a disturbing thought.
But even if this were really so, would it actually make a slightest difference? All the same to me, since either way, every experience that I have in my life is completely identical. Bits are bits and characters are characters, no matter how they were "really" generated. And perhaps this AI is not at all malicious, but perfectly benevolent as it constantly generates posts and web pages and articles by virtual personae for me to read with the goal of providing me maximum amusement and education in the long term. In a sense, that makes this thought even more disturbing. On the other hand, this would be perfectly in line with the worldview of the Singularity and transhumanism gang. Keep your red pill and shove it where the sun don't shine!
While we are pondering these existential conundra, I can meanwhile take a look what this magnificient artificial brain has generated for my amusement today. First, I can see that in his post "Morality and the underclass", Udolpho (or whatever subprogram or data structure I have learned to associate to that name) responds to the issue of how smoking has recently suddenly became almost entirely a lower-class activity, as discussed in my post "A few matters of morals and the social order" and my old post "The freedom to stink", from a smoker's point of view. Perhaps Panu will soon write a whole column about this issue.
In "Know way out", the blogger at "I, Ectomorph" responds to the question that I posed in "Oh boys, if you only knew", suggesting the typical opera plots as situations where meta-knowledge about other people's beliefs can reach levels four and five. I have heard of the game of "Diplomacy" but never actually played, but based on the comment by "Leonard", I can easily believe that game features high-level handling of other players' meta-knowledge as an important aspect. As Leonard explains:
The board game Diplomacy has something of this nature, especially when played slowly via email. There's no randomness in die-rolling or whatever to resolve turns. Instead the new state is a simply-computed result of the orders given. The orders are submitted secretly until the turn. So, the diplomatic aspect is all: convincing other players that you will support their moves, and then (maybe) not doing so. It gets complicated when you get into spinning your moves to the other players, trying to manage their impressions of which side you're really on. For example, if you do a move that objectively hurts X, you might be doing it to create the impression that you're against X even if you are actually in league, and will later support him.
I was playing once online when I got up to three levels of indirection, that is, making a move that was "really" doing one thing, helping country X. But then I spun it to another player Y as really against X (i.e., apparently-helping-X-to-lull-X), and I also spun it to a more sophisticated player (who I knew Y would talk to), as helping-X-to-appear-to-lull-X-to-lull-Y.
Another reader who is a fan of The Danimal
emailed me about his concern that the man has not been posting anything
for a few months now. Hopefully there hasn't been an obituary about a
bicyclist who was flattened by a speeding cement truck. It would be the
greatest thing ever if The Danimal had left the dying Usenet and
entered the blogosphere, where it's at. I think that I would link to
him, or something.
Wednesday is always The Onion day. This week, I laughed most at the opinion column "Any Idiot Could Have Come Up With The Car".
One wonders what the sex ratio is in your class, and, ummm, just how smart the fairer sex is.
Posted by Loki on the run | 4:49 PM