Carma, and Interview Meme Continued

[thorfinn]

I want Carma to exist

I have this idea, that we should build in enough tech into vehicles, so the driver can yell: "argh, points off for " *glares in direction of idiot car* "them!" whenever they see someone doing something stupid on the roads. Then, it's a SMOP to transmit recent video of that vehicle to central DB... Cop enough of these downchecks from different people, and your license to drive gets revoked. You could even have, "oo, points up for " *looks in direction of vehicle doing nice things like let letting people in* "them", too.

Carma, basically. :-) Rewards for good Carma, Penalties for bad Carma... Even better, if your Carma goes negative, you get demoted to smaller and smaller vehicle classes (all the way down to pedestrian only), and as your Carma goes positive, you get allowed to be promoted to larger vehicle classes.

So, you start out being allowed to drive a "small car", or maybe even only a small motorcycle, and only once you collect lots of positive Carma do you get "promoted" to larger vehicles, bigger motorcyles, etc.

It'd be neat. :-) The tech's not quite there yet, but give it a decade or so, and I think we'll have enough device convergence to be able to do it.

---

Interview of thorfinn by ianhess

1. Leave a comment here, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond with five questions.
3. You update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers (and ideally reply here with a URL to the post in your journal).
4. You include this explanation.
5. You ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Questions by Ian Hess:

1. What qualities in a martial art student would cause you to cease teaching them?
2. Would you support legalized dueling, provided that both participants signed a standardized boilerplate waiver/contract as to the terms and outcome?
3. Is an armed (or perhaps martially skilled) society indeed a polite society?
4. What sort of music are you into these days?
5. I tend to rate parties I goto by a debauchery scale, with 1 being a church mixer with chaperones, and 10 being a good weekend in ancient Rome. What debauchery rating, or range of, do you prefer your partying to be within?

Answers from thorfinn:

1. What qualities in a martial art student would cause you to cease teaching them?
   
   Hrm. Primarily, if I felt that they were likely to use their skills in a "first strike" context, I would be unwilling to teach them. Note that what I mean by that is not just "landing the first hit"... I'd like any student of mine to be landing the first actual strike in a real combat situation. It's more a question of provocation and who actually started taking physical action first. OTOH, I have yet to meet anyone who is likely to want to "strike first" who's willing to try learning from me... Tai Chi's mental model doesn't really support that context at all well, which makes it very hard to learn if you have a "first strike" mentality.
   
   The most likely thing that would cause me to cease (as opposed to never starting to teach them in the first place) is actually a cessation of dedicated interest from the student. I'm not the sort of person that is pushy about imparting martial arts knowledge... I'm not interested in teaching anyone that isn't pretty dedicated in wanting to learn. It's one of the reasons I don't really have a class at the moment (a bigger reason is the lack of available time from my end). People with that level of desire to learn and willingness to schedule it in are actually pretty rare, and there are usually more accessible teachers for such people than I.
   
   
2. Would you support legalized dueling, provided that both participants signed a standardized boilerplate waiver/contract as to the terms and outcome?
   
   Hrm. Probably not. I'm not sure it actually solves anything, and the context-problem is immense. Both participants are fundamentally part of various human social groups, and those social groups will have an interest in the outcome... A waiver/contract does nothing to solve the problems resulting from the fallout that might occur in the attached social groups. Revenge dueling, etc, etc... Plus, you potentially buy into the entire space of "assassination by professional duelist" that was so popular during the Renaissance anywhere that had legal duelling for specific sanctioned reasons. For what reason would you participate in a duel? There must presumably be social pressures available to force someone to duel, even against their own will...
   
   
3. Is an armed (or perhaps martially skilled) society indeed a polite society?
   
   The relation is mostly orthogonal, I think. I think that politeness has a lot more to do with more fundamental cultural memetics, than simply whether or not the members of a particular culture have weaponry and/or martial training. Also, there's "martial training" and "martial training". Any fool can learn to use a gun. Mostly any fool can learn to use a sword, too, and most any fool can be trained in a hard martial art. It just takes a bit (a couple weeks solid of doing nothing else) of hardcore reflex building, and voila, you can use a weapon, or fight bare handed, sufficiently to beat the crap out of anyone that hasn't been through the same basic training (or a lot of actual fighting).
   
   That's not at all the same as, say, doing five years of dedicated study of Aikido, or learning from a real Fencing Master, or something of that ilk, where a vast proportion of the training is not about the mechanics, but about the headspace in which one must operate that mechanics. And that headspace isn't something that can be just magically legislated for, or even easily encouraged...
   
   
4. What sort of music are you into these days?
   
   Mostly classical choral symphony stuff. My desire to follow modern music died somewhere in the mid nineties as, with the breakup of Clouds, I've found that not enough modern music sits in the Complexity space that I like. I like music that has simple basic core structures, which result in a lot of emergent complexity, but not so much complexity that the result resembles total chaos. In fact, I mostly like anything that has that nature.
   
   I find that a lot of classical choral symphonys fit that space, whilst not much modern music does, or at least, not enough modern music, in proportion of Complex vs other, to make it worth my time sorting through the crap to find the gems. So, I stick to attending MUCS on Wednesdays, and that mostly satisfies the musical chunk of my brain.
   
   
5. I tend to rate parties I goto by a debauchery scale, with 1 being a church mixer with chaperones, and 10 being a good weekend in ancient Rome. What debauchery rating, or range of, do you prefer your partying to be within?
   
   There's a sliding scale, proportional to the closeness and trust levels of the fellow partygoers. The higher my trust and closeness to the group as a whole, the closer to 10 I like it to be, and the lower my overall trust and closeness, the closer to 1 I like it to be. I don't have a specific always preferred value, as I like my experiences to range variously across the spectrum, not be tied to any one point within it.
   
   ... Hrm. On further reflection, I think that I have a spectrum of preferred-value, where each time I attend a party, a "dent" in the spectrum appears at the point-value for that party, dragging down the values in the "region" around that point, and where the values across the entire spectrum increase over time.
   
   My current preference spectrum is dented reasonably heavily in the 2-7 space, leaving a fairly high "unsatisfied" peak in the 9-10 space.
   
   

Comments

[qamar.livejournal.com]

Have you ever considered a career in a) science fiction? or b)sociology/psychology?

Fantastic post. The karma idea is excellent and strangely forseeable. The answer to the social question perfect. I like the way your brain works. Do you have a times table that you sometimes repeat in your head to relax? I find saying the 7 times table awesome, it's just so lacking in identifiable pattern. Perhaps you have a different math preference? When you walk from point A to point B, do you try to walk the shortest distance for efficiency? For example, going diagonally down a street, taking the hypotenuse, rather than the excess of two sides? Are there any other social choices that you quantify in order to make decisions?

I think you've already asked me questions. But, I'm always a sucker if you had any more.

[thorfinn]

Considered careers in SF and Soc/Psych? Yes, I have, and have decided against it, because, to a very significant extent, my chosen career (Software Architect) combines most of the features in SF Writing and Sociology/Psychology that I'm interested in. Software Architecture is much more of an exercise in human communication than people realise. Programming, especially on a large scale, is not really much of an exercise in telling the computer what to do, as it is a significant exercise in dividing up the problem and communicating that division effectively between the humans that are working on the problem. And writing software has quite a number of parallels to writing novels... See my True Names article for a tiny taste of my ideas in that space.

And... Doing timestable in head, nope. But... I do do the no stepping on cracks thang, with the addition that I try to achieve a step-rhythm... Especially in areas where the tile-pattern is just that little bit too short or too long for my stride, I tend to do step, step, longstep, step, step, longstep... And I don't like the "longstep" to fall on the same leg all the time, and I try to keep an "evenness" to the recent usage pattern of both legs. Not always, but if I don't have something else to pay attention to (like an engaged discussion with the people I'm walking with), then I do this sort of thing as a brain slopsucker.

And I'll trim corners, yes, but I balance the choice to do so with the road traffic pattern, so if there's a lot of traffic, I won't trim... As for social choices, err, yes, there are several. For example, I am very much a mirror moodpath. In a given social situation, I will almost certainly be displaying and having the average mood (note, mood, not emotion - mood is longer term and more underlying, whilst emotion is more short term and surface) of the group around me, scaled by closeness (both physical proximity and historical relational count as scaling factors). That's not a specifically conscious activity, but most of my actions aren't specifically consciously taken.

I do frequently go up to a metaconscious level in order to "hack" my action preferences, and that's also where I do reasonably extensive self-analysis in order to check those action-preferences, but I don't stay in metaconscious mode all the time.

I'm probably more willing than the average human to trust my "subconscious" as a result of this extensive use of metaconscious self-hackery, so I am quite willing to leave a lot of systems operating on "subconscious". The funniest examples of this tend to be when I wind up carrying some odd small object (eg, a paperclip) around in my hands, and then realise that I've been carrying said small object around for hours, and have done things like eat food, read books, and fiddle with other objects whilst doing so.

This relates a lot to the stuff you've been talking about recently regarding intuitions. My "intuitions" are definitely my trained subconscious speaking to me. I can usually "descend" into the details of an "intuition" if I want to (and I sometimes do so in retrospect, or if queried), but I almost invariably act on an "intuition" before bothering to descend into the details of it.

[thorfinn]

Hrm. More questions. Okies.

1. Tell the nice viewers out there about something neat in the world of Science (pronounced Sky-uns!)...
   
2. Tell the nice viewers out there about something neat in the space of Mystical Stuff (pronounced in the Voice Of James Earl Jones, FXed with reverb and echo)...
   
3. Tell us about a game or game concept that intrigues you, and why?
   
4. Creative writing time... One paragraph, starting with, "It was a dark and stormy night when I first saw the fish." Feel free to modify punctuation and or capitalisation of initial sentence if desired.
   
5. Do you have a favourite piece of clothing? If so, why is it favoured? If not, then why not?
   

[chaos-crafter.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting a similar thing for specific infringements.
The idea is the equivalent of a high-speed red-light camera that can be mounted discretely in a car. press the button and it takes 3 pics at 0.2 sec apart (or some other short interval.)
It would have very precise clock, and record the time to the microsecond on each image. Then the film module gets sent in to the police for processing, and both the driver of the car taking the photo, and any cars photographed can be analysed for speed violations, and traffic light abuses (my pet peeve)
Of course traffic light signal times would need to be known precisely too, but it uses more readily available tech.

[hermia8.livejournal.com]

you should speak to peter eckersley, he came up with his own little political social system based on the concept of having two kinds of tradable currencies, one akin to our money, and the other called karma :) will talk to you about this when everything at work is not broken and at least one of our bosses is here :)

Have you read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"?

[subtle-eye.livejournal.com]

It's a novella by Cory Doctorow. Entertaining. He talks about "Whuffie" -- the only currency that makes sense in a society where nanotechnology and "brain backups" have destroyed conventional concepts of mortality and economics. Of course reputation management and economic systems based around them are a hot topic in online community research -- bringing them into meatspace is more challenging. Perhaps Brin's "Transparent Society" will be the vector?

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

The karma thing reminds me of a website idea I had a while back. Login, enter someone's registration number and give them a rating on a particular occasion ("Reg: NCC-170, Location: Corner of Punt/Bridge Roads, Event: ran down a little old lady, Score: 0/5.")
Database is accessible to the authorities ("Hey, that stolen car we've been looking for did a hit and run two states away!") and there's a daily Saints and Sinners list posted.
Never took it very far, for fear of legal repercussions...

[thorfinn]

Don't'cha mean Reg: NCC-1701, Location: Somewhere in Space, Event: Shot down innocent Klingon Cruiser in the name of Peace, Score: 3/5
?

[jeshyr]

Bastid, you hiveminded me :)

thomascat: "mew"


Regards,

Ricky&

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

I was wondering who'd get that awful joke of mine. :)
But I'm a stickler for details, and I thought you can't have seven character numberplates in this country.
The question is - do you think this service would offer the Karmic pressure you're thinking of? I don't know if people generally would care that much, although personally I know the thought of someone, somewhere accusing me of bad driving (especially if I could prove them wrong) would get to me - I'd just have to go check occasionally. Maybe because I'm kinda sensitive about my driving, though.
This ties into a lot of Reputation Systems stuff unsworn and I've been negotiating with another system he and I are considering, but that's in a more political context.

[thorfinn]

You're correct, you can't have 7 characters. I figure for the sake of a joke, I'm happy to munge some rules. Especially if I break the context and say "somewhere in space" rather than earth...

As for the Karmic pressure, not enough of the country is "online" yet. And it's too inconvenient, and too easy to defraud. "Road impoliteness" is generally something people rant about in the moment, but then forget about later. Actually noting down a license plate... Waaay too many braincycles to actually parse one of those off a moving vehicle, especially when you're driving.

That's why it's got to be "assist technology", and it's why we're not there yet.