Steve Smith wrote at 03/14/2013 08:50 PM: > Obviously (to me?) Owen's (and the others discussing such things) stake > is not whether to buy GOOG but rather whether to invest one's > personal/professional energy and attention in learning/using/integrating > their tools into one's workflow (or Digital Ecology as Owen is wont to say).
Yeah, I get that. And I suppose there's a lot of inter-individual variability as to how much variability (or uncertainty) each individual sees (expects) in their tools ecology. I think it was RA Wilson who claimed that all it took was 20 years to turn a liberal into a conservative. Perhaps it's natural that, as we grow older, we want a more stable tools ecology? But, in general, I reject that. I think it's mostly a matter of focus. When I'm tightly focused on a single objective, interference like a broken tool really frustrates me. But being mostly a simulant, my focus goes tight-loose-tight-loose all day long every day. So, perhaps it's my domain that prevents me from becoming frustrated at the ability to predict the stability of my tools ecology. > Absolutely... and secondarily to considering Google and how/when/if/why > you might integrate their products/systems into your workflow/ecology, > there is the more speculative questions of "what would I develop if I > were GOOG" or "since I am not GOOG but the ARE the 800lb gorilla, where > do the tools I might develop fit into whatever oddly shaped phase-space > is left after GOOG takes theirs?" This is also a good point. I'm privileged that my produce tends to be stand-alone. I'm not usually coerced into negotiating a large, highly connected tools ecology, and finding a reliable place to plug in my products. But that's partly because I force those around me to think in terms of stand-alone produce (hence my fascination with closure). It makes me a less desirable contractor to some because they've committed to an ecology that I readily criticize. > In this case, C. > Elegans relative simplicity and ancient roots are roughly opposite > Google's complexity and very recent roots. I'm not convinced that the worm is relatively simple compared to Google. The closure between layers for Google seems pretty clear: machines vs. humans vs. corporate structures. While it's true that there is some fuzziness between the layers, it's nothing like the fuzziness between, say, the neuronal network and the vasculature in the worm. But, to some extent, the higher level of modularity in a system like Google does make it more logically deep. It's difficult to poke your leads into the Googlebots to find out why they behave the way they do. So, I could say that while the complexity of the worm and Google are probably ontologically similar, the apparent complexity of the two will be quite stark depending on how they're measured. > gepr said: >> Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort >> of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. >> You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. > > I'm not quite clear on this point. It sounds as if you are identifying > corporations such as LockMart and Google as being more like evolved > organisms than machines? Sorry. I'm asserting that organisms like Owen are pattern recognizing machines evolved to find patterns (even when there are none). I speak reflectively, here. I'm arguably the most biased pattern recognizer I know, despite my Devil's Advocacy of arbitrary decision making within Google. I find patterns everywhere, which is why I'm a fan of conspiracy theories. > This fits my biases as well... but apparently in a different way. > There are many services I am happy (smug) to provide for myself (heat > and water) and/or at least lust after being able to provide for myself > (electricity). There are others I suppose I am happy to defer to "the > cloud". While I *likely* am able to rebuild my starter motor or > alternator, I probably wouldn't be able to fabricate a good enough > bearing or brushes to do the rebuild and therefore depend on the "cloud" > including AC/Delco and many other industrials of that ilk to supply me > with such things. I definitely am happy that we have a Michelin and > Yokohama in the cloud, I can't imagine making tyres that would be useful > to me. Having a public/common Internet or even a private/common > telecomm or private electrical grid (cloud) are almost required... I'm > still holding out for a fully distributed mesh network to grow together > from it's many tiny patches (see the recent posting on Mesh networks > here) or a fully distributed electrical grid (home/neighborhood > solar/wind/???) but there are good (non political, non-social) reasons > that we didn't get broadly scalable infrastructure until it came from > one or a small handful of entities (public or private), behaving in a > "paternalistic" way for the most part. Yeah, you took that in a different direction, which is why I have to quote it whole. My focus is on the frustration at not being able to grok a sub-system and/or the desire to do so in the first place. Here, you seem to be talking about an absolute/ontological benefit or cost of various structures in the ecology. To me, there's only one reason for frustration and that is when I hit a blockage I don't want (or didn't expect) to hit. I wouldn't care if my home-made tires didn't work as well as tight tolerance, robot made tires. I still might make and use them. But I _would_ care if I couldn't find out how those robot made tires are made, even if just to satisfy my curiosity as to whether or not I should buy/steal my own robot ... or perhaps to be able to parse the gobbledygook coming out of the mouth of a professed tire robot maker. It's the lack of access that frustrates me, not the lack of any particular extant structure. Hence, i don't care if Google Reader exists. But I do care if I can't (pretend to) figure out how it works. > gepr said: >> If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you >> wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a >> sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for >> Linux). > I'm not sure *that* follows... I suspect they could *still* abandon it > on a whim. Sorry. No, I did NOT mean to imply that if they distributed the GMail server software, they'd be less likely to abandon it. I meant to imply that I would care much less because I could either fork their code or use it to design my own based on what they did if they abandoned it. To me, this is what Debian does for us with Linux. It's a very good base distribution. > IMO the very best rants do end in a [sigh]. As with Dennis Miller > back in the day when he started with "Don't let me get off on a rant > here" and ended with > "Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." OT: I used to love Dennis Miller. I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden, he started sounding like a right-wing wacko to me. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella I got an itch in my cosmic pocket and it won't go away, ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
