It's been a while since I posted anything written about my own work on this list.
I wrote this for my own [EMAIL PROTECTED] list, but in proofreading
it I noticed that it talks about both the future and work. (good jobs for all, etc.)
so:
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Great message from Frederick Mann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> about
solutions. I'll write some comments on it in another message, but
now I feel challenged to describe my version of a "Genuine Solution".
If added to the Tentative Typology of Solutions mine would read:
Make the world a better place, then use the other solution types.
That may seem unrealistic, futile, annoying, or crazy, but I do have
a very specific plan for making the world a better place, and it's
that plan I was referring to when a mentioned a Genuine Solution.
It starts with a simple idea:
The key idea is to make it easy to find and maintain strong social
relationships and other parts of a good social environment.
I've written lots of stuff about personality testing, compatibility,
matching, and more mathematical stuff such as graph theory, but all
those are implementation details. It's available if you want it,
but for now, let's look at the bigger picture.
There's thee areas to look at:
1. the direct effect on individuals,
2. the social effects of better-connected individuals
3. network effects
Under direct effects I include the benefits of many social relationships:
1. good friends
2. a truly compatible spouse or sexual partner
3. a good job that you like doing, or a satisfying business of your own
4. well matched co-workers
5. a supervisor you respect and can get along with (if applicable)
6. subordinates your like and who work well for you (if applicable)
7. a respected mentor to help guide your life
8. someone who respects you and considers you a mentor
9. other relationships and miscellaneous people you just get along with
To me this sounds wonderful. How wonderful depends on what I mean by
"good", "like", "respect", and other slippery words. I have a scale
for describing the quality of such relationships, a logarithmic scale
like the Richter scale for earthquakes or the Beaufort scale for winds.
Briefly, this scale describes the average compatibility you would
expect to have if you were able select the best out of a certain
number of candidates. It uses base-10 logarithms, but for most
purposes you just need to count the zeros.
There are 3 zeros in 1000, so I describe the best 1 in 1000 as Level 3.
That's a common level of compatibility for ordinary friendships.
Level 6 would be the best 1 in 1,000,000 and would describe a very
unusual level of compatibility. Of course you could not actually
evaluate a million candidates, but it still makes sense as a way of
specifying a level of compatibility.
Since this is a logarithmic scale, Level 6 is not just twice as
compatible as Level 3, just as an earthquake measuring 6 on the
Richter scale, is not just twice as severe as one measuring 3 on the
same scale. How could we describe Level 6 compatibility? I don't
know. Perhaps meeting such a person would shake up your life like the
corresponding earthquake.
I believe that very careful use of well-designed questionaires and
other ways of evaluating personality, education, beliefs, and so on,
together with good mathematical software for matching, could allow all
of us to have near-perfect, Level-6, 1-in-a-million, compatibility for
ALL of the social relationships listed above, and more.
Perhaps you could just back up and read that last sentence again.
Think about it. What would it mean for you, or the people you know?
What would that mean for society?
As I said above, it sounds wonderful to me. It's something that even
the rich and famous don't have. Given a choice I'd take those strong
relationships over being rich and famous any day. Wouldn't you?
Well that covers the direct effect on individuals, now to the social
effects of better-connected individuals. Briefly, people who have
such strong connections will not be poor and they won't be criminals.
The ability to match people to the 1-in-a-million job, means finding
jobs for everybody who is not extremely handicapped. If you do don't
think that's possible, I'd be happy to post another message about it,
but it does make sense. The least employable amongst those physically
and mentally capable of working may have trouble finding a job, but
if they could examine a million job opportunities, they'd get one.
If everyone capable of working can find a find a job, most of them
finding very good jobs, then how can there be poverty?
Crime is easy to dispose of as well -- people happily married with
good jobs and lots of friends don't commit crimes very often. People
having a wise mentor, with someone who looks up to them as a mentor
are even less likely to commit crimes.
There are many more social effects of better-connected individuals,
such as a reduction in ethnic, religious, and tribal conflict, making
war much less likely, but I should move on to network effects.
A society at peace, with happy well-connected individuals, no poverty
and no crime sounds pretty good to me. Why ask for more? Well, there
is still politics and the allocation of resources.
Even in a world such as I have described so far, there will be
questions for politics and government to deal with. Fewer questions,
because of the reduction in poverty and crime, and maybe someday
we could reduce the role of government, but in the meanwhile there
will be decisions to make, money to spend, an environment to protect,
and a legal system to manage.
Because of that, there will be ideas and opinions to propagate, and
people will seek to acquire influence or get your vote. Right now
the politicians, their friends, and the very rich have power or
influence, while most of us are limited to casting a vote every few
years. A modem with a baud rate of 56,000 still feels slow, but one
vote in several years is a baud rate of about 0.00000002 or 2 bits in
about 10 million seconds.
That's not really good enough, is it? Even if you are involved in
party politics and do campaign work in elections, you still don't have
much input on anything. That's where "network effects" come in.
I sometimes think of this as "true democracy". Though I don't propose
to do away with voting, which must remain an essential safeguard, true
democracy would be when each person has as much influence over the
affairs of the world as the best friends of presidents and prime
ministers.
Suppose you have an idea you care about or an opinion you want others
to understand. What SHOULD happen is this: you tell your friends,
they pass it on to their other friends, who do the same, and before
you know it the whole world knows about your idea or opinion.
That's what should happen, and it is certainly possible. There are
well-documented cases of news being passed around the world by
word of mouth, but it doesn't seem to happen very often. What's
wrong? Why doesn't this work?
What I'm describing here is often called the 'social network', or
sometimes the 'grapevine' or 'grassroots'. 'Grapevine' is often used
for the spreading of gossip, perhaps malicious gossip, while
'grassroots' is often used to describe undercurrents of pollitical
opinion and activity amongst ordinary people.
How well it works depends on how well people are connected to it,
and in part that depends on how much your friends care about your
views. Truly compatible people will not only like you, they will also
care about your views, and are likely to repeat them to their other
friends.
What about you and your friends -- are you sure they are repeating
what you tell them to their other friends? If you can honestly answer
"yes" to that question, and your friends can do the same, then I'd
expect your ideas and opinions to spread rapidly and have significant
influence.
But it also depends on overall connectivity -- being part of a tight
clique of mutually compatible people does not get your ideas out to
the rest of the social network. You need to be connected to people
who are themselves tied in to the whole social network. This adds a
whole new dimension to compatibility, which must now include some
evaluation of people's network connections.
One way of increasing the overall connectivity of the net as a whole
is to have each person try hard to fill a number of distinct social
slots with distinct people. A person who has a best-friend, a spouse,
a mentor, an apprentice (mentee), and so on will be better connected
than one who has fewer relationships or uses the same person to fill
two or more slots.
Network effects are important but hard to understand. A lot of hard
mathematics including graph theory, topology, and combinatorics is
involved, and it's just not something to tackle in a message on
a mailing list like this one.
One interesting conclusion from examining the mathematics is that the
limiting factor is probably the amount of computation required.
Matching people to one best spouse, or to one best friend is hard, but
can be done. Matching people to both, is much, much harder. Some of
these matching problems are NPcomplete, i.e. impossibly hard, and can
only be approximated. Good approximations are possible, so it is not
something to defeat this project, but it very interesting to see just
where the limitations with come from.
I think human society as a whole may someday be able to do much of
this matching on it's own, without so much computer-assistance. We do
have the ability to process information and indeed the human social
network has more processing capacity than all our computers, and could
handle the workload better. We're not organized enough for that, yet,
but it is interesting to think about.
Sorry for the long message. From my point of view it is much too
brief, since it squeezes many years of work into a small package.
dpw
Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
http://www.SocialTechnology.org/index.html
