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

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Questions by Ian Hess:

What qualities in a martial art student would cause you to cease teaching them?
Would you support legalized dueling, provided that both participants signed a standardized boilerplate waiver/contract as to the terms and outcome?
Is an armed (or perhaps martially skilled) society indeed a polite society?
What sort of music are you into these days?
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:

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.
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...
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...
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.
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.