Eric and Mohammed,
I don’t think anyone can be Off base at this point in sketching out a scenario. But you might be trying to tackle Goliath in the first round! Firstly I assume human beings are not very bright, They seem to use extremely simple rules of self satisfaction, though the emotions might be more complicated. It is not widely accepted but dogs can figure things out as quickly as humans on occasion and there is no wearisome Narrative. I look at it from the point of view that agents are simple but Stupid . This gave me a headache until I realized that many human beings actually do not know why they did something in particular, then and only then do they invent the Narrative. They are not actually attempting to deceive anyone but simply wish to convince me that they did something for a Good reason. They avoid acknowledging the fact that they did not think.They then drop into the socially acceptable lexicon to explain everything. Often I have remarked that the act of speaking out loud convinces others as well as most importantly the speaker himself.. So the speaker is lying to himself first and then accepts this as his story and probably could pass a lie detector test afterwards. The fact that narratives are spun is a red herring. They did not know how they made the decision. That frightened the hell out of me in complex engineering projects. I had no way to anticipate human error of this sort. People actually can construct insane scenarios to motivate themselves and then totally forget them. This form of misperception is internal to the brain. I have watched audiences fall for magicians tricks so completely that I have been stunned into disbelief. Yet it is so repeatable. I have seen some references to hidden Blind spots in reason explored by neurologists. Generally I think Biology was too cheap and lazy to give us a completely functional brain. I will be the first to admit to having difficulty with my brain at times. To cope we have a pervasive belief that we are intelligent in spite of many serious flaws. As a scientist I consider determining the extent of thinking important. I am forced by language to say what I Think for lack of an alternative. I repeat the phrase for more than half a century but still do not understand what it actually means, nor do the philosophers directly address the act. Seems they were more preoccupied by passion in contradiction. We say Man is a learning animal which implies it progresses somewhat. But I suspect culturally we have found many insidious means to prevent learning. Why ? Is it unconscious. Somewhat like the vexed mother fed up answering questions about the color of the sky and butterflies and moths. Ignorant people are easier to control, suggests history but why? Let’s build something Stupid (Whimsical and arrogant)rather than Intelligent. If we have no idea what one is how can we answer what the opposite actually entails. An agent should have more than one choice of action and some of those should be utterly insane. Your institutional Review boards you describe sound as nasty as a Byzantine Palace Intrigue. So let’s start much simpler. For the present the agent should not know what is in his best interest , that is only to be determined by which emotion dominates at any moment. He can make up stories afterwards. I often consider the role of Historians that of making reasonable explanations out of stupid events. The conspiracy theorist will hate this if it bears out. As for the gains first we waste time looking for reasons where there are none. Next we can find some way of warning individuals not to encourage group think. With near to 7 Billion on this planet maybe it is time to alert ourselves to the flaws in our own brains.; Fear, Gullibility, Conformity, short sighted self interest emotional reasoning. In the early stages I would limit the agents to simply responding and not have them try to become operators of other agents, but that seems to be the goal. Jochen forwarded an interesting article to the group on the ecology of the mind, I have yet to study the material but it looks intriguing . It is an old joke , but the more people in the room the dumber it gets. Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky PhD <mailto:vbur...@shaw.ca> vbur...@shaw.ca 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg,Manitoba, R2J3R2 Canada (204) 2548321 Land (204) 8016064 Cell From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES Sent: May-08-11 4:00 PM To: Mohammed El-Beltagy Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Modeling obfuscation (was - Terrorosity and it's Fruits) I think I know what you are talking about, but I'm not sure what the best way to model it would be, or what we would gain from the modeling exercise. Are you talking about something like this? Institutional review boards (IRBs) oversee research that involves human participants. This body was formed due to laxness/nastiness on the part of biomedical researchers. It was later extended due to (perceived) laxness/nastiness on the part of social science researchers. At first, all they did was to declare studies ethically alright, or not. Later, they were taken over by a number of outside forces, including university's "risk-management" departments. Their main function is now to try to avoid lawsuits, with secondary functions of promoting arbitrary bureaucratic rules and arbitrary whims of committee members. Giving a "pass or fail" on ethics is, at best, a tertiary goal. To make things worse, the lawyers and bureaucracy have actually done a lot to undermine the semblance of ethical stricture they produce. If this is the type of thing you are talking about, it seems an oddly complex thing to try to model, mostly because it is extremely open-ended. You need 1) agents with different agendas, 2) the ability to assess and usurp rules created by other agents, 3) the ability to force other agents to adopt your rules. Note, also, that in this particular case, the corruption is accomplished by stacking contradictory rules on top of each other. Thus you need 4) an ability to implement contradictory rules, or at least choose between so-called rules. The bigger challenge seems to be figuring out a way to accomplish such a model without in some essential way, pre-programing the outcome (for example, in the way you set agent agendas and allow agents to form new rules). What variables would be manipulated in the modeling space? What is to be discovered beyond "agents programmed to be self-interested act in their own best interest"? I'm also not sure what this has to do with agents that "actively obfuscate the participatory nature of the democratic decision." So... maybe I'm completely off base. Can you give a concrete example? Eric On Sun, May 8, 2011 06:56 AM, Mohammed El-Beltagy <moham...@computer.org> wrote: Eric, Thats an interesting way of looking at it. As complex game of information hiding. I was thinking along the line of of having a schema for rule creation. The schema here is like a constitution, and players can generate new rules based on that schema to promote their self interest. For rules to become "laws" they have to be the choice on the majority (or subject to some other social choice mechanism), this system allows for group formation and coalition building to get the new rules passed into laws. The interesting bit is how the drive for self interest amongst some of those groups and their coalitions can give rise to rules renders the original schema and/or the social choice mechanism ineffective. By "ineffective", I mean that they yield results and behavior that run counter to the purpose for which they were originally designed. What do you think? Cheers, Mohammed On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 2:44 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES <e...@psu.edu> wrote: I can't see that this posted, sorry if it is a duplicate -------- Mohammed, Being totally unqualified to help you with this problem... it seems interesting to me because most models I know of this sort (social systems models) are about information acquisition and deployment. That is, the modeled critters try to find out stuff, and then they do actions dependent upon what they find. If we are modeling active obfuscation, then we would be doing the opposite - we would be modeling an information-hiding game. Of course, there is lots of game theory work on information hiding in two critter encounters (I'm thinking evolutionary-game-theory-looking-at-deception). I haven't seen anything, though, looking at distributed information hiding. The idea that you could create a system full of autonomous agents in which information ends up hidden, but no particular individuals have done the hiding, is kind of cool. Seems like the type of thing encryption guys could get into (or already are into, or have already moved past). Eric On Fri, May 6, 2011 10:05 PM, Mohammed El-Beltagy <moham...@computer.org> wrote: I have a question I would like to pose to the group in that regard: Can we model/simulate how in a democracy that is inherently open (as stated in the constitution: for the people, by the people etc..) there emerges "decision masking structures" emerge that actively obfuscate the participatory nature of the democratic decision making for their ends?
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