"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

By Twine or By Time?

I ran across an interesting answer in an interview about Twine:

[Nova Spivack] I think the above solution would work for this too. Basically you are asking for a new view of the content – not “by twine” or “by time” but “by popularity” or “by relevance to me”.

Notice the question being posed. What he is asking is, why don't you like the view our "intelligence" provided, why do you insist on these existing, simplistic views like by time or popularity?

The last is odd. "Relevance to me" is the primary criteria for all information I want to receive. Even if I don't yet know it is relevant, such as when a person I follow in Twitter shares something I've never seen before and would never have found on my own. Do you understand? Even that is relevant to me. Everything I want is relevant to me.

I understand what they mean though. They mean serendipity. Like overhearing a snatch of conversation in Twitter by seeing posts by friends of your followers, but who you do not follow. But it still is relevant to me, you're just increasing the chaos in my information feed. Perhaps what we need is a "volume control" on chaos in information filtering systems.

Moreover, I suspect that humans being humans, really want to order information in the ways they are familiar with, the way their brain was designed to process information through evolutionary psychology (hmm, this is a new kind of "design" process, contradictory to the meaning of design, but seems appropriate to say design, designed by evolution). The upshot of this is people still want to order things by time or popularity. What other measures are there than the one's we've known?

Authorship: When we buy a book because the author's name is on the spine or cover in 96pt type. We are buying authority.

Sharing. When we "hear it through the grapevine" from our friends. Another high trust information source.

Some finding aids are a form of recommendation, as when we used to go to the reference desk librarian and ask for a book on a subject. This is a kind of sharing.

Look at the role trust plays in gathering and accepting information. Yet, we trust the smartness of crowds (or at least the smartness of cliques) at Wikipedia. I use it all the time and find the information is always a good starting point, usually reliable for technical information.

With trust comes the opportunity for abuse of power. The power of authority to stifle innovation and knowledge, to be used for sustaining false views (think of how the view of the Amazon civilization by anthropologist maintained for a hundred years turned out to be completely wrong and opposite to reality, despite the application of the "scientific method" and mountains of "evidence" all chosen, selected by a reductionist process, which only knows what it measures, can only measure what it sees).

Information Evolves and Other Stuff

I've learned to avoid precategorizing anything in my bookmarks.

I don't make a category unless it is necessary, unless I am using it. For example, I need to bookmark Amazon web services, so I create an Amazon Web Services folder, but I don't create a Web folder, with a Web Services folder inside, which I then put the AWS folder in. I don't have any other web services bookmarks yet in Google Chrome so I leave this for later. It just creates more folder depth to dig through before it's needed.

I also try to avoid adding a bookmark just for reference. That just leads to clutter, where I can't find the bookmarks I use on a daily basis, because when you categorize information according to its classification or how it relates to other information, you lose how it relates to you, to useage. For example, if in browsing the web I find a half dozen interesting resources on manual focus lenses, but for cameras I don't use, the bookmarks will obscure the resources I use for manual focus lenses for cameras I do use. What I do now is add bookmarks only when I use the content or need the content now, not for reference or anticipating future use, placing them in the categorized heirarchy. The others I place in Uncategorized (what a wonderful idea, that Uncategorized anti-category!) awaiting the day they become useful and can be categorized, or I place them in a special heirachy called Reference. I don't know if a parallel heirarchy will work but it does keep them out of my way.

I hate digging through deep categories. Yet, for proper categorization to find things later, when you've forgotten where they are, they need deep categories. If I have have five different web services providers, each one needs its own folder and there will be clutter if I just create them all at the same level. So I need to create a Web Services folder, which then adds another annoying, slowing, confusing layer to finding what I want and to my thinking. I want Amazon Web Services when I want it, not digging through Web, Web Services to get to it. What if I use it every day? I have to dig each time.

This brings up another issue: information structures evolve.

One of the problems library scientists create is through this need for pre-creation of categories. They must predict every category that will be needed ahead of time. I was once told I needed to create "name authority records" for every photographer in a database I envisioned of 19th century photographers, before a database collecting names from old card photographs could be built. At that rate, the database would never be built and besides the whole purpose of the project was to collect the names so we could see who was doing what and look for patterns. If we had an authoritative name for each one, we wouldn't be doing the research.

Don't engineer. Evolve. Evolve. Evolve.

We don't need architects and engineers, we need some new job description with a new name, evolvineer or something, for the person who creates a framework for information evolution (maybe like the game Spore?). Perhaps databases like multivariate or Lotus Notes will help get us there.

Simplicity

I found an interesting comment suggesting Lego blocks as an example of how simplicity could make software better. The poster argues there are "no complicated things" in the universe, but that things often merely seem complicated, an illusion our perception of the phenomena, and that if we just look closely enough (reduce it to parts---reductionism) a simple, linear, non-paradoxical design emerges. "Just look closer" the argument goes and you will see the simple, discrete, isolated building blocks of the seemingly complex system.

This is the reductionist argument.

The poster says this of Lego:

Let's take LEGO. Do you need to test LEGO package? Ofcoz, not. Do you need to test EACH (of hundreds) piece? No.
You have:
1. Global design.
2. Common interface to connect bricks (piece) to each other.
3. Pieces specification.

The problem with this analysis is it ignores that in real complex systems, wholes are sometimes parts and parts are sometimes wholes. Object oriented programming, tries to encapsulate each piece of information or action in a single "Lego block" isolated from all other software components, connected through standard interfaces like the pegs on a Lego piece. It is wrong to apply a mechanistic solution like that of the Lego blocks to information. Software is essentially information, and pieces of information can relate to each other in paradoxical ways, just as numbers and theorems in mathematics can. It's difficult for a Lego block to be a part and a whole, although each block is a whole that can be a part, but there is less chance for paradox and feedback in the Lego block system than say in the atmosphere or the soil.

In the soil, we have a physical system, but the "parts" that are interacting are not "real" but emergent, such as "fertility" that cannot be located in any one place. Thoughts in the brain cannot be located at anyone one place or time either.

One of the major problems I see with the building block approach to software, the object oriented approach, is that it tries to sever the very feedback loops that make a complex system interesting and useful. It fights against complexity until it creates more confusion or rigidity than it is sometimes worth. There is an entire field of study in computer science centered around the "object relational mismatch," which is just a fancy term for the reality that applications are constructed using inflexible objects and relational database systems store information in ways that can be retrieved paradoxically.

In a relational database, parts can be wholes and wholes can be parts, yet there is no system I know of that can capture this kind of complexity, no application or computing framework that can take advantage of the capacity for paradox and feedback in the database. No, the application must have its rigid, isolated objects, where an address book entry is always an address book entry and its parts are its own business and cannot be part of another entity.

In a database, some entities do not even exist until a question is asked. A new unnamed entity is created by the answer to a question the designers of the database never considered and could not foresee. Very likely "expert system" approaches will one day resolve this problem, applications being developed using coding techniques that are capable of handling paradoxical relationships.

So, I do not believe enforced simplicity and borrowing design principles from mechanistic systems like Lego blocks are effective. Complexity exists, we can't put our heads in the sand, plug our ears and continue pretending it doesn't exist, some day the object oriented paradigm will crash and burn and some new one that takes complexity into consideration will emerge.

Even Things Happen

I think we are at a moment like the discovery of irrational numbers, which were rejected by the Greeks as incomprehensible. It seemed crazy to believe in negative or irrational numbers, but once mathematics was past this reluctance, these kinds of numbers were accepted into the concept of number.

It is important to note the Greeks had an idea of number, which did not admit such things as negative or irrational numbers. Yet, in time, these concepts of number would come to be accepted by mathematicians and taught in modern elementary schools.

We are at the moment in science, where it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. We are so close to science as a reductionist process we fail to recognize there are other processes that can lead to scientific understanding. To most people, reductionism is science.

But we are beginning to discover another approach to understanding complex systems in the natural world, which goes beyond reductionism. Science is starting to recognize the reductionist approach fails to explain all aspects of reality. This new science of the "irrational" and complex, recognizes that things are much more occurrences than they are things. An occurrence is something that happens over time.

Even a stone plucked form a stream, held in the palm of the hand, science tells us is less solid than it appears. At the smallest levels a stone is nothing more than infinitesimally small particles, flitting in and out of existence from the "vacuum state." Even a stone is a kind of occurrence.

Science has been like the glass half full. With the discovery of the physics of chaotic systems and complexity theory, it can be a full glass. Equipped with the new science of the complex we can see nature is not a clockwork, that things are ephemeral an connected, but not just interconnected like the parts of a machine, but intertwined paradoxically, in feedback loops, or parts that are wholes and wholes that are parts.

We like to think of as things as things we can take apart, but they are actually occurrences. It will take a while for people to get used to this idea, just as it took a very long time for new concepts of number to become the stuff of elementary school mathematics.

If you find it difficult to see things as occurrences, think of how a food can be more than the sum of its parts, because the sum of its parts consists of its interactions with other parts and wholes in its environment, which means that a food is more an occurrence than a thing.

We must recognize the physical thing we study is inseparable from an occurrence, that even things happen.