Re: Net Baud Rate
Thomas: This essay came from a website http://mitpress.mit.edu/MITECS/culture.html put out on Jay Hansons List. It was under the heading of cognitive psychology. Your attempt to increase net baud rate has to take into account the actors - ie humans and how they operate. The following is the best academic ideas of how humans achieve cognition - I will make some comments to defend my thesis that it is how individuals process information that is the relevant criteria, not interests, common terminology or other factors you have mentioned. 3. The Science of Information Processing In broad strokes, an intelligent organism operates in a perception-action cycle (Neisser 1967), taking in sensory information from the environment, performing internal computations on it, and using the results of the computation to guide the selection and execution of goal-directed actions. Thomas: One of the goal directed actions would be speech. The initial sensory input is provided by separate sensory systems, including smell, taste, haptic perception and audition. The most sophisticated sensory system in primates is vision (see MID-LEVEL VISION; HIGH-LEVEL VISION), which includes complex specialized subsystems for DEPTH PERCEPTION, SHAPE PERCEPTION, LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION, and COLOR VISION. Thomas: We have developed a visual society due to our reliance on the printed and written word. Before Guttenburg, the primary sense was auditory and I would question their assumption that vision is the most sophisticated sense. A lot has to do with the culture you are brought up in as to where your attention has been focused in your formative years. The interpretation of sensory inputs begins with FEATURE DETECTORS that respond selectively to relatively elementary aspects of the stimulus (e.g., lines at specific orientations in the visual field, or phonetic cues in an acoustic speech signal). Some basic properties of the visual system result in systematic misperceptions, or ILLUSIONS. TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION serves to integrate the local visual input with the broader context in which it occurs, including prior knowledge stored in memory. Theorists working in the tradition of Gibson emphasize that a great deal of visual information may be provided by higher-order features that become available to a perceiver moving freely in a natural environment, rather than passively viewing a static image (see ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY). In its natural context, both perception and action are guided by the AFFORDANCES of the environment: properties of objects that enable certain uses (e.g., the elongated shape of a stick may afford striking an object otherwise out of reach). Thomas: You can't know what you haven't experienced. Memory is the primary tool we use to extrapolate new information. If you have no memory, you probably have no understanding. Memory is stored internally as a visual image, a sound, a feeling, a thought or verbal description. Different people access memory from different storage senses depending on how the have encoded the memory. Across all the sensory systems, the quantitative functions relating physical inputs received by sensory systems to subjective experience (e.g., the relation between luminance and perceived brightness, or between physical and subjective weight) is investigated by the methods of psychophysics. SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY provides a statistical method for measuring how accurately observers can distinguish a signal from noise under conditions of uncertainty (i.e., with limited viewing time or highly similar alternatives), in a way that separates the signal strength received from possible response bias. In addition to perceiving sensory information about objects at locations in space, animals perceive and record information about time (see TIME IN THE MIND). Knowledge about both space and time must be integrated to provide the capability for animal and HUMAN NAVIGATION in its environment. Humans and other animals are capable of forming sophisticated representations of spatial relations integrated as COGNITIVE MAPS. Some more central mental representations appear to be closely tied to perceptual systems. Humans use various forms of imagery based on visual, auditory and other perceptual systems to perform internal mental processes such as MENTAL ROTATION. The close connection between PICTORIAL ART AND VISION also reflects the links between perceptual systems and more abstract cognition. A fundamental property of biological information processing is that it is capacity- limited and therefore necessarily selective. Beginning with the seminal work of Broadbent, a great deal of work in cognitive psychology has focused on the role of attention in guiding information processing. Attention operates selectively to determine what information is received by the senses, as in the case of EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION, and also operates to direct more central information processing, including
net net baud rate and simulation question and reply
octech.html for more on this distinction. Thanks again for your comments and questions, and I hope you will comment further on what I've written here. Text from various messages I've posted about "net baud rate" has been compiled into a web page at http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/netnet.html and this text will probably wind up there too. I always like it when people ask good questions because they stimulate me to write, and writing clarifies the ideas (which are always a bit murky at first). dpw Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html Douglas, I have one quick comment that might apply to simulation as well. I question whether formal models can describe/explain complex phenomena like human communication or whether they merely translate them into a form in which they are amenable to logical operators. At 04:02 AM 12/17/98 -0800, you wrote: For anyone who has read my web pages or earlier messages, it won't come as any surprise (news) to read that this network optimization problem is a combinatorial optimization problem, and that I propose to solve it by matching people to each other based on personality, interest, and education profiles. But let me just emphasize here that this is a very solid plank in my platform -- I have written a great deal of nonsense over the years, but I think this one point is completely solid, susceptible to mathematical proof. Of all the things I have to say, if there is only one thing you take seriously let it be this: We can maximize the global net baud rate for interpersonal communications by using combinatorial optimization to match people based on personality, interest, and education profiles. I'd appreciate your comments on this, whether you agree or not. More important, perhaps, I'd appreciate your advice on who might be interested in what I have to say. Many of the people reading this will be taking it in at a low net baud rate for one reason or another, lacking either appropriate educational background or interest in the topic, or perhaps being already familiar with the ideas. But even so, you could probably recommend a person or a mailing list of people that might absorb it more completely. If so, please let me know! dpw Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html Rick Jonasse Dept. of Communication University of California, San Diego [EMAIL PROTECTED]
reply to Peter Marks, re: net net baud rate
My thanks to Peter Marks [EMAIL PROTECTED] for his comments on my "net net baud rate" message, in which I wrote Of all the things I have to say, if there is only one thing you take seriously let it be this: We can maximize the global net baud rate for interpersonal communications by using combinatorial optimization to match people based on personality, interest, and education profiles. Peter Marks replied: This approach breaks "interpersonal communication" into two streams, + the actual interpersonal communication + communication of each potential communicant's "parameters" to the optimizer This is more or less what I intended, but it might help to spell it out a bit. ALL acts of interpersonal communication involve a separate step of deciding who to communicate with. Sometimes this is done directly in person, or by addressing a piece of e-mail to a single recipient, and it may also be done quite indirectly by sending a message to a mailing list, but it must happen. Somehow people must make some kind of choice to take part in interpersonal communication, and making that choice is something quite distinct from the actual communication itself. A mailing list is one way in which society helps people make these choices, and sometimes it works quite well. The comments of Peter Marks illustrate this -- they raise good points and show considerable understanding of what I was trying to say, so my choice of mailing list to send my message to was probably a good one. But http://www.liszt.com/ lists something like 90,000 mailing lists, and I've barely scratched the surface -- it is hard to choose from amongst the 90,000 mailing lists, let alone the 50 million people I could conceivably send e-mail to. Years of bitter experience have proven to me that the ideas I'm trying to communicate are hard to understand and that I'm not very good at presenting them. Another interpretation could be put on this: it may be that what I am trying to communicate is simply wrong, and the real barrier to communication is my failure to understand the arguments of the people I talk to. But either way, there is a barrier to communication. I daydream constantly about partaking in true high-net-baud-rate discussions with other people and I think that would mean discussions which would conclude with either of these results: 1) they understand what I am trying to say and agree with me, OR 2) I understand their arguments against my views and have to agree with them. Of course I have a preference, I would obviously prefer the first outcome over the second. But if I am wrong, I'd like to know it, and I'd like to be thorougly convinced -- then I could stop wasting my time. So really either outcome would be productive. Let us suppose my poor writing, choice of topic, or pig-headedness raise a barrier to communication so high I could have a productive high-net-baud-rate discussion like that with only one in a million people or so. That would mean there are somewhere around 50 such people out of the 50 million I could send an e-mail to. What are my chances of finding those 50 people? In pre-web days the chances were almost zero, but now because of search engines the odds are somewhat improved. Somewhat. But not much. I'm sure we all know how frustrating search engines can be. The bulk of the latter stream must be considered in determining overall system efficiency. If the amount of information required by the optimizer is high (because a lot more detail must be specified than would be present in any individual interpersonal communique), or if the parameters have to be frequently updated, then the overhead of optimization could swamp any direct gains, and the efficiency comparison could actually go against the optimization scheme. Well, yes, this is correct as it stands. But note the "If" that begins the long second sentence. What I have planned involves filling out a questionaire on a web page. And yes, IF it took two weeks to fill out the form and the results were only useful for a ten minute conversation, then this just wouldn't work. But I'm thinking more along the lines of an hour to fill out the questionaire and the results being useful for a matter of weeks or months. Please note that I'm not talking about perfection here, just improvement. Instead of the result being a precise list of the 50 best people to talk to, it might be a list of 150 candidates and an estimate that there is, say, a 90% chance that 20 of the ideal 50 are amongst the 150. I can think of a few people out there who know me and my favourite topics quite well, people who can read most of my text quickly and still understand it almost perfectly. "People who know me" presumably means that there has been significant prior communication and that (some interpretation of it) has been remembered. This i
FW -- net net baud rate
I'm taking a short break from simulation and matching work to post a couple of messages stimulated by recent discussions and web pages visted about Gross Progress Indicators and about population. I started out to address those topics, but instead wrote a preamble discussing a related question. For now I'll just post this preamble, and will get to the actual amble itself next message. On my web pages I talk about "true bandwidth" or "net baud rate" by which I mean the amount of actual communication on a channel between two people, as opposed to the number of bytes sent and received. I won't worry here about the technical details, but there is a major concept here that everyone should be aware of. Suppose it takes you one minute to read a 6000 byte message -- that would be 100 bytes a second or 800 bits per second, roughly 800 baud. But that is a gross baud rate, measuring only the flow of bits from screen or page to your eyes. What I'm trying to communicate to you here is the idea of "net baud rate", the actual amount of communication taking place. For example, suppose you can only read and write in an unrelated language that uses the same character set, such as Malay, or Finnish. You could still run yours eyes over this page and see each character of the text, but there would be no actual communication taking place: a net baud rate of zero. Personally I'm not very good at communicating with people, and I expect that for many of you, even though you can read English perfectly, the net baud rate for this text is very low, near zero. In part this is because of my deficiencies as a writer, but mostly its my choice of topics and underlying assumptions. If I to was write a cheerful account of my last trip to Vancouver mentioning only the places visited and people seen, the net baud rate would be much higher. I can think of a few people out there who know me and my favourite topics quite well, people who can read most of my text quickly and still understand it almost perfectly. But for those people the net baud for a piece of text like this one is much lower than you might think, because the people I have in mind already have some understanding of what I am saying here. In information theory 'information' is really 'news', what is new, and to people who know me this text is "just more of Wilson's crazy ideas" -- not news. The maximum net baud rate for this message would be for someone who has a good understanding of English, an interest and understanding of technical matters, BUT has never heard of or seen these ideas before. Or we could turn that around, and say that if one of you writes a message that I can understand easily, but which contains a lot of new ideas I've never encountered before, then the net baud rate for me reading that message would be quite high. What I most want to do is to increase the net baud rate for all the communication I partake in. I want to send my messages to people who will understand them and will find them interesting and newsworthy. And I want to receive messages from people who will write stuff I can understand, and be interested in, and will find newsworthy (new, novel, etc.) Your own motives for reading and writing messages are unknown to me, but I can guess that what I just said in that last paragraph holds true for you as well. Doesn't it? Don't you also want to increase or maximize the net baud rate of your communication? Think about it, please! One of the ideas that I have been working on for many years involves network optimization to maximize the effective or net baud rate of all communication on a network (the "net net baud rate", so to speak). I've written both about doing this for messages flying about the internet, and for interpersonal communication on what I call the social network, the network of interacting human beings, mediated mostly by speech. For anyone who has read my web pages or earlier messages, it won't come as any surprise (news) to read that this network optimization problem is a combinatorial optimization problem, and that I propose to solve it by matching people to each other based on personality, interest, and education profiles. But let me just emphasize here that this is a very solid plank in my platform -- I have written a great deal of nonsense over the years, but I think this one point is completely solid, susceptible to mathematical proof. Of all the things I have to say, if there is only one thing you take seriously let it be this: We can maximize the global net baud rate for interpersonal communications by using combinatorial optimization to match people based on personality, interest, and education profiles. I'd appreciate your comments on this, whether you agree or not. More important, perhaps, I'd appreciate your advice on who might be interested in what I have to say
Re: FW -- net net baud rate
dpw writes: Of all the things I have to say, if there is only one thing you take seriously let it be this: We can maximize the global net baud rate for interpersonal communications by using combinatorial optimization to match people based on personality, interest, and education profiles. This approach breaks "interpersonal communication" into two streams, + the actual interpersonal communication + communication of each potential communicant's "parameters" to the optimizer The bulk of the latter stream must be considered in determining overall system efficiency. If the amount of information required by the optimizer is high (because a lot more detail must be specified than would be present in any individual interpersonal communique), or if the parameters have to be frequently updated, then the overhead of optimization could swamp any direct gains, and the efficiency comparison could actually go against the optimization scheme. I can think of a few people out there who know me and my favourite topics quite well, people who can read most of my text quickly and still understand it almost perfectly. "People who know me" presumably means that there has been significant prior communication and that (some interpretation of it) has been remembered. This is sometimes characterized as establishing a shared context. It is these contexts that must be somehow encoded for the optimizer. It's still an open question how usefully such contexts can be reduced to byte strings; much of Artificial Intelligence research has been an attempt to do this. But even accepting that possibility, it is not at all obvious to me that the many separate contexts which one person shares with other individuals and groups can be combined into a unified set of optimizer parameters for each person. For example, suppose you can only read and write in an unrelated language that uses the same character set,... there would be no actual communication taking place: a net baud rate of zero. If I to was write a cheerful account of my last trip to Vancouver mentioning only the places visited and people seen, the net baud rate would be much higher. Mathematical information theory speaks to the probability of different messages - low probability messages contain high information. It doesn't require that each bit be equivalent to every other bit; such an assumption simply makes the math easier, and is adequate for assessing _maximum_ channel capacities. Discounting bits that contain 'less information' than they might otherwise is well within the capability of the formulas of information theory. Transmitting in an unknown language is one such discounting, but so it transmitting bland, "unsurprising" messages. In other words both examples seem to me of arguably low net baud rate (but for different reasons). From this perspective, it is in this flexibility of discounting that the overall scheme will ultimately break down. It will prove impossible to find a discounting scheme which is simultaneously 1. consistent 2. general enough to usefully summarize a wide range of "intended meaning" 3. specific enough to make adequate distinctions for optimization purposes 4. computationally efficient In short, the notion of "net baud rate" will turn out to not have a practicable definition, and therefore to not be subject to optimization. -- P-) ___o -o Peter Marks [EMAIL PROTECTED] _-\_, -_\ /\_ 15307 NE 202nd St., Woodinville, WA 98072 (*)/ (*)-(*)^(*) (425)489-0501 http://www.halcyon.com/marks -- More comfortable AND faster ... that's REAL technology!
