In gossip we trust

The article Multiple gossip statements and their effect on reputation and trustworthiness explains indirect reputation and trustworthiness in a simple iterated and networked Prisoner's dilemma-style game in which user may donate at a positive sum to another. The amount of gossip correlated to the level of accuracy.

I first became interested in gossip in the Army training, where it pervasive, and (as far as I was able to hear) frequently inaccurate, distorted, and more of a fantastic leap from data to conclusion. The kind of gossip I received, though, had less, I believe, to do with cooperation than with norms. I was outside the norms, because I often read books.

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Goodbye Vince

Vince Miller, the president of the International Society of Individual Liberty passed away on June 30.

I had first met him at a libertarian discussion group in 1994. He inspired all around, and I was pleased to show him a high school zine I had edited, Spare RIBS. This felt like more than coincidence, since I already had a $69 ticket for a vagabond bus trip to San Francisco three days later. I saw the bookstore, their inky old printing press, and crashed at his and Mark Valverde's apartment in the outer Richmond. A few years later when I was working in the Silicon Valley, I helped webmonkey the ISIL website. And I would see him at libertarian parties at Jeff Riggenbach's, until Jeff (and I at the same time) moved from the Bay area in February 2006.

Vince, we'll miss you.

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Empower your thinking

Research in the current issue of Psychological Science suggests that those without political power become worse at solving problems. As a person making a living off of his creative thinking, I'm lead to wonder what techniques can boost problem solving, beyond the obvious correlation of responsibility and authority recommended by management wisdom, such as Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What else can one do while or in preparation for a creative problem to solve that would put you in an empowered frame of mind?

For the design of interactivity, to get the best performance, the research suggests that a user should have a powerful role, perhaps the ruler of an empire, as in Civilization. To challenge performance under stressful conditions, strip that power away. Capriciously change the objectives of play.

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More comfort, more misery

TD Houfek passed along an excellent article commenting that our increasingly comfortable and customized environment is eroding our tolerance for annoyance and circle of friendship. At Burning Man, besides just the lack of commerce, I noticed that the physical hardship made interaction more obvious; everybody needed something physical (shelter, food, love), and it was relatively direct to communicate a desire to meet this need on the playa. In the real world, transactions often enter us into interactions with people we care nothing about, and for whom our goals are an efficient resolution with minimal friction, and therefore minimal contact.

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I am afraid, therefore I do not think

When a predator is at a distance, a human worries but still makes plans. But when contact with a predator is imminent, a human stops thinking and starts reacting. This was the conclusion of a simple "Pac-Man" videogame experiment, recently in the news.

That people are afraid of predators, especially when they are close is not the major insight of the experiment. This experiment reveals details on brain centers: activity in ventromedial prefontal cortex (which "helps control strategies") shifts to periaqueductal grey (which is "associated with quick-response survival mechanisms"). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is also believed to overcome extinguished fear and consider long-term risks.

This experiment may explain the convention in horror movies and light gun shooting videogames like House of the Dead, in which a monster pops up in the face of the camera. By the experiment's model, the audience is expected to process the image of a nearby monster with the quick-response survival mechanisms, and their consideration of long-term risks is inhibited. Although not part of this experiment, presumably the audience's consideration of the plausibility of the threat is also inhibited. Even though the videotape in The Ring is implausible, when its monster is out of the TV and in the camera's (or protagonist's) face, our ability to consider the implausibility of the scenario is inhibited.

If this predator experiment is applicable to the broader scope and scale of political economics, the individual fears of a populace may translate into mass disregard for long-term risks in the face of perceived, immediate crises. Robert Higgs founded his insightful book on understanding American politics, Crisis and Leviathan, on the supposition that quick-fix programs, once institutionalized, remain long after the crisis has disappeared. This experiment exposes detailed mechanisms to explain from the individual up, how a society can fail to make plans for the future and thereby trade today's crises for tomorrow's systematic dysfunction, which burdens future generations with a loss of health and happiness. Briefly put, each individual, in the face of crisis, ignores long-term risk.

Such a model of fear's inhibition of consideration of consequences might explain why nations support their leaders' wars, as Hermann Goring noted in the Nuremberg trials:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

What is not newly revealed by this experiment is that people don't think when afraid; politicians and war-mongers have known that for centuries. To short-circuit critical thought, simply broadcast THREATS such as: terrorists, environmental disaster, sexual abuse, economic crisis, health care crisis, and job security. Not that these aren't legitimate issues; they are, but these legitimate threats are tactically employed to fund corrupt campaigns and stuff pockets that are not solving the problems. One tactic to inhibit consideration of long-term risks is the emphasis of imminent danger through threat keywords that can be avoided by the proposed action. For example, George Bush routinely pads and punctuates his speech with threat keywords, such as: freedom, terror, rape, mutilation, and ballistic airports.

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1984 by 2024, or: Better mind control through neuroscience

"Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end." says John Stanton.

I like my "time consuming conscious activity," thank you very much. Keep your blood-stained fingers off of it.

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Utilitarian Calculus

While reviewing the literature of mathematical methods in utilitarian ethics, I came across a summary of perhaps the original utilitarian calculus, formulated by Jeremy Bentham. His is a hedonistic model similar to my own. Here is Bentham's felicific calculus.

One of the things I saw missing, though, was a metric of quantifying pleasure. I had quantified pleasure, or so I thought. As I looked at an overview of utilitarianism, I found that the metric of quantification of well-being I had employed was a form of the more general notion of preference (not just of psychological pleasure), which in the 1950s Kenneth Arrow had already suggested for utilitarian evaluation. That is, what one prefers ought to be the axis of ethical evaluation.

To give the numerical value a scale, my own quantitative approach modeled such preferences through a scale that (as Rob Bass brought to my attention) resembled quality-adjusted life years, but goes on more generally to allow for better than normal health conditions. Since it is posed as a thought experiment, it is also based on individual preference rather than systematic one-size-fits-all assumptions of what diverse members of a population might prefer.

Encouraged by this interesting and compatible prior art, I was about to update my own arithmetic model of comparative ethical calculus when I stumbled upon a resource that showed clearly, someone had beaten me to a definitive mathematical model of utilitarian ethics. Not just in theory but in actual application, boiled down to a form in the style of one of the greatest institutions of utilitarianism. From Swift magazine, here is the definitive utilitarian calculus.

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Comparative Ethical Calculus

At USC, fellow students and I designed and developed a crude version of a casual videogame with a political and ethical message about livestock farming, namely factory farming versus free range farming. A number of testers confused its free range advocacy with veganism (which advocates abstinence from animal products regardless of the quality of life of the animal). The issue seems to be hard to disentangle during discussions on what it means to value the quality of life for animals while recognizing that in living, tradeoffs in quality are necessary.

Being a game designer who has held a number of diverse dietary, religious, and political positions, I have wondered what the "game" mechanisms (or in nicer clothes: the mathematics of interaction) are for the ethical treatment of animals and humans.

So last Christmas while inspired by conversations with the animal rights philosopher, Rob Bass, I explored a model that aims to alleviate some of the contradictions of ethical calculus when comparing different species to each other. Read the article in its evolving draft.

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Better Violence through Videogames

While playing Indigo Prophecy, a videogame about a possessed murderer's search for his controlling killer, the in-game representation of the Internet had a story about children gunning down their classmates. The title of the story alluded Videogames claims Children, blaming videogames for real world violence. Quantic Dreams' succinct satire article reminded me of my own longer piece. As a game designer and veteran, I am compelled to raise the concerns for our children: What are the facts of videogames and violence? And, intimately related to this, what are government videogames doing to our children? Read the full article.

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American idiot: Politics for interactivity

(or, How I learned to stop worrying and love democracy)

Today at lunch, Bruce Block brought up the limited interactivity of Heroes TV show, in which a viewer's response to a television show could alter the outcome of that show (or some future show?) I was reminded of American Idol which employs the gimmick of user votes (in the form of cellphone calls according to Robot Chicken), to affect the selection of the winner. All at the table who were listening agreed that it wasn't interactive. It was a weak illusion only capable of sustaining the belief of the feeble-minded.

"Like politics," I muttered. Modern voting at the Federal level in the United States is less interactive than a banal television show. The cycle of interactivity for a TV show might be once per week, but for the president or members of congress, it is once every four years, about 200 times less frequent than a week. And the amount of interactive impact (or influence) that any single citizen has is less than one in a million. Generally it is closer to one in 40 million. One in 40,000,000 over the span of about 1300 days. That's terribly noninteractive as far as any system is concerned.

Suppose your typewriter only responded once every four years, and not if just you had a request, but 20,000,000 others did as well, for say, a different computer. (Nevermind the enlightened realization that typerwriters are obsolete technology.) You wouldn't consider it responsive or interactive. Yet millions of simpleton sheep vote with conviction that they are participating in the machinery of democracy. Their participation amounts to less of an impact than a cellphone call to American Idol. And I would suspect, their entertainment value was not nearly as good as that banal broadcast. Why is that some of us insist on upholding the illusion that once a few years ritual participated in by millions, is an interactive, choice-centric ritual? If the votes are indicative of anything, it is a bellweather for the American Idiot.

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