DACS & The Decline of Wikipedia
Dana Edwards:
" The Decline of Wikipedia "
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
Mark Larkento:
" ‘The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.’ “
” These are the growing pains of any institution that achieves prominence.
It will be interesting to see if billionaires rush to a form of rescue."
" Any successful distributed organization will also face these issues."
Dana:
" Distributed orgs can a scale because they aren’t supported by volunteers."
" When you’re supported by volunteers then only the people who have the time and money to build the organization up as a hobby will be able to contribute regularly. Wikipedia favors a certain kind of contributor because everyone else has bills to pay."
Mark:
" What supports distributed organizations?"
Dana:
" Mark Larkento market forces. A distributed organization with an organic or emergent evolutionary design will be able to earn a profit from it’s environment in some form by providing value to participants."
"So in the case of a Wikipedia there could be micropayments for new pages of high quality content and then as the pages get older and content becomes lower quality it scales all the way down to free. "
“This means you’d get free content of lower quality where there might be a delay and then you’d have the absolute latest breakthrough knowledge afforded by micropayments.”
“So for example if you’re researching a certain topic and Wikipedia is an evolutionary DApp then you could tell the DApp your interests and it could give you a feed according to your research interests for a reasonable small fee. This way you’ll have to pay for the real feed and for quality.”
“But if you don’t want to pay then it would be just like Wikipedia. Perhaps you could sell a bit of harddrive or computation to the DApp to get access to content on the DApp if you do not have any tokens for the micropayments. This means to access it you would have to help mirror and host it or you pay $.”
“If you contribute to the DApp by populating it with content you also would get access tokens. So by building the encyclopedia you earn access to future iterations of it. That would encourage everyone to contribute knowledge to it so they can afford access to the highest quality knowledge on it.”
Mark:
" The marketplace is ruthless, what happens to your DApp when the market moves?"
Dana:
" DApp is adaptable and capable of changing it’s parameters over time. What happens to an adaptive system in a changing environment? The adaptive system adapts to the changes and we call it evolving."
“These are engineering problems which have been solved already by nature. Simply take the “best” solutions which nature has found and use that.”
“For example mammals eat and tend to store fat so that when there is a change in the environment which reduces the food supply the mammals don’t immediately starve to death. Some mammals even hibernate to survive.”
“DApp could do something similar. It can profit and store it’s profit in a rainy day fund. It then could go into a state of hibernation when the market is slow where it continuously reduces incentive payouts to participants except for the most critical activities.”
Mark:
" And when the shortage lasts longer than what’s been stored, even for hibernation? Death?"
" Death is one of nature’s solutions."
Dana:
" Mark Larkento that is correct. No organization should be too big to fail and if it’s not longer valued then why would people interact with it? And if people don’t interact with it then it will run out of resources and die."
“But if people interact with it then it will eat the resources people give it and grow. I’m not promoting “too big to fail” and think that if somehow society doesn’t want knowledge from a DApp then the DApp can be replaced by a newer better model offering the same knowledge as a service.”
“If people decide they don’t want any more knowledge ever then people won’t contribute, won’t give the DApp attention, won’t “feed the DApp” and it will eventually die or go into suspended animation where it simply will hibernate until it stops running.”
Mark:
" What drives the creation of new DApps?"
Dana:
" Mark Larkento greed, boredom, idealism, curiosity, what drives Zerostate members to find Zerostate interesting? Probably something similar."
“At the same time you can have DApps which fund the creation of other DApps. It’s not really possible to predict every scenario in advance and not a good idea to take the top down engineering perspective.”
"No one knows all the possible outcomes. It’s like no one really knows what would happen once the WWW was built and the first websites were being built. DApps are like the first websites on a new kind of web. "
“Why did “nerds” start building websites?”
Mark:
" Boredom, curiosity, status, profit, & ideals."
" When a DApp dies, do the remaining members die with it?"
Dana:
" My own self defined task at this time is to spread certain ideas and try to help design DAVS. This is not something I can do alone and also if certain ideas are not spread then most people will not fully grasp the chain of possibilities."
“So if we try to think of engineering emergent or evolutionary organizations then we have to go with an entirely different model (mentally) of how we think about things. I’m starting to think “decentralized autonomous corporation” is a bit limited because there isn’t a such thing as a corporation in nature.”
“The closest thing to a corporation in nature would be something like a man made virus or bacteria with the only objective being to grow.”
“I think corporations by their current design are mechanistic. That is why in the video I put out you can see a difference between organic and mechanistic. Mechanistic organizations don’t adapt so well but the reason they are used often is because in the military you have a similar top down chain of command with very mechanistic organizations.”
“But for self organizing systems you want something more organic. Military organizations don’t have to be efficient because they live off taxes and blood. Organic evolutionary designed DApp’s survive off voluntary participation without any coercion which means they have to be beautiful, attractive, and adaptable because they are decentralized.”
“An organic evolutionary organization would adapt to anything the environment throws at it. An organic evolutionary architecture would be like the Internet only more of a self organizing mesh network. It would be self organizing because it would attract by incentive patterns instead of coercion patterns.”
Mark:
" Quite clarifying, Ty."
Dana Edwards:
“Human “members” are like living components in the evolving architecture. The human components are called “individual” agents. These agents are part of a multi-agent system of human and machine components in the network. Human beings (individual agents) have to eat so they must be given payment for participation. Machines (software agents) have to eat so they must be given payment for participation.”
"Software agents or “bots” have to eat the resource required for them to continue running. So you can pay a bot in something like Safecoin or Bitcoin and the bot could turn that into the resources required to keep it running whether it be harddrive space in the cloud, electricity, computation or whatever. "
“If the DApp which the individual agents and software agents are interacting with is no longer interesting then both the humans and bots will go to the next beautiful DApp. Think of it like how bees go from different flowers, the bees wouldn’t die just because one flower happens to die. If every flower died then you might have a problem but I don’t think that is a problem we are going to face because in our case this is all virtual and the bee metaphor only applies in the virtual domain.”
“This could change in the distant future if we have some sort of cyber-physical systems which bring all of this into the physical world but at that point if there are bots interacting we DApps we humans could own shares in the bots. By owning shares in the bots the bots would be our avatars or in “digital assistants”. In any case we don’t have a connection between the death of the DApp which is more like a platform or “decentralized autonomous corporation” and the death of the participants which are the actual value producers.”
“Do you see scenarios where this could be otherwise? I’m sure if you explore every possible fear about AI and technology you’ll find something unnerving but since we aren’t in control of that we can only focus on helping to bring about the Good outcomes that Google’s CEO talks about.”
Dana Edwards:
“Mark Larkento While I have a preference for DAVS to have a very adaptable and evolve-able design I’m making my case for that here in the proper channel.”
"The reason now should be clear why I prefer that design. For the future you can quote my reason and intention being that because we cannot predict what will happen in the future with much accuracy and we want to avoid negative outcomes we have to build into our design the ability to quickly and continuously adapt to change. "
“The more adaptable an organism is to it’s environment the more likely it is to survive according to the law of adaptive systems (life). So following that if we make DAVS very adaptable it can make up for the fact that we don’t have a clue what the future holds technologically or politically.”
Dana Edwards:
“DApps not DACs. DApps are probably a better and more accurate term because corporations are artificial and Wikipedia isn’t a corporation.”
Josh Palmer:Also, it’s worth noting that a large amount of open source software that is heavily used is in an even more parlous state. Recent examples that have crossed my radar being OpenSSL and PGP."
Dana Edwards:
" Josh Palmer opportunistic encryption should replace PGP. The user shouldn’t have to care about encryption or even know about it. It should simply happen in the background opportunistically if you ask me."
“When users are asked to care about stuff they don’t understand then they don’t want it. What the user cares about could be obtained by asking during the install process and then maybe software could cater to that?”
“The only thing I know right now is that users want control over their data/information. They don’t want to give their thoughts and memories away to complete strangers without any compensation for it. So maybe by making it a sort of like “your data is worth $10, would you like to authorize the transfer of it to entity X” would be good?”
“I guess we will find out if the attention economy works but from the popularity of stuff like Snapchat it seems people want to at least have more control over their experiences. OpenSSL seems completely flawed and I don’t know if it can be saved to be honest.”
Dana Edwards:
" Josh Palmer I mentioned at some point to the SAFE Network team that they should look into DTN. If I were to try to do a mesh network I would think DTN would be how to do it with the encryption behind a layer below where users could care about it."
"So IPsec and or opportunistic encryption of all communications end to end. I will admit I haven’t focused a lot on this so I don’t have anything specific in mind but I think SAFE Network and Ethereum teams are working on difference pieces of the puzzle. I think we could benefit from a forum which is decentralized which also allows us to have pseudo-anonymity or real world identities. "
“Facebook gets the identity part right but that is about the only thing Facebook seems to have right. Facebook doesn’t give any sort of privacy to communications nor do they restrict who they sell the data too. So while it might make some sense if they give the data to law enforcement in a terrorist investigation as compliance it’s the marketers and others they sell to which cause the most problems because we don’t get compensated for those sales.”
“I think by 2016 some of this will be solved. Keep your eye on Whisper and SAFE Network.”
Dana Edwards:
“Josh Palmer There are politics surrounding encryption though so we cannot think encryption is going to give us security. In fact if you encrypt your communications it could give you insecurity because law enforcement and other agencies could target you.”
"My opinion is that we have to develop some way to govern and police ourselves so that we can have privacy with responsibility. Perhaps voluntary accountability of some sort or perhaps done through a smart contract with a third party. "
“Banning encryption seems extreme like using a hammer when surgery is needed. Instead of banning encryption we could just develop technologies to put reputation and identity on decentralized networks in such a way that the participants are pseudo-anonymous to each other but if an investigation happens they can prove their innocence. The third party organization could hold our identities and that third party organization could be decentralized itself. The third party could be a network of friends we select to know our online identities or it could be a decentralized identity corporation.”
"So for example Alice and Bob communicate privately but are not a threat. Gordon is ls looking for the threat. Alice and Bob could trust a decentralized third party (possibly of their peers) who we will call Ron with their identities but be anonymous to each other. Gordon would simply have to take his warrant to Ron to find the identity of Alice or Bob. "
“This would protect Alice and Bob from Eve and Mallory. It would also allow for some process to identify them if they want to allow for it. I think providing that option to people will give people a way to protect themselves from the situation of being falsely accused of being involved in stuff by giving them a way to prove non-involvement.”
"Otherwise anyone using encryption will be vulnerable to being falsely accused of any crime or terrorism because no one can see what they are doing. "
Dana Edwards:
“So just as PGP has a web of trust, something similar could work for identity management. You could pick people you trust to know your virtual identities. Those virtual identities are now connected to you through them and digitally signed by some organization which is sort of like a jury of your peers which approves you as a real person and your identity.”
“If something bad happens then the peer jury could vote to release your information to whomever you want, the press, legal authorities, whomever you define. This could all be done in a smart contract where the smart contract would simply release whatever you want to whomever is on a certain list if certain selected jury/judges vote in favor of releasing it. This means you would trust your peers to decide what to do.”
“This means if your trusted peer group which you select decides not to release your info to the authorities it will not be released. If they determine it should be released to the authorities then it will be released, and it’s possible you could release it to the media if the press is your preferred authority.”
“Doing it like that and you can have as much encryption as you want and still have as much transparency as you want. It’s not absolute and if you say everything must be encrypted then people can get hurt and tortured over trivial stuff. Additionally even if you did encrypt everything it’s likely not going to have a very high success rate because any bug in the implementation and the whole scheme could be broken by a side channel.”
“So instead what you want is access control instead of absolute secrecy. Absolute secrecy isn’t practical for civilians. Access control on the other hand might piss authorities off but there could be no warrentless access and if a particular authority is one you believe to be corrupt you can deny them access.”
Bryce Lynch:
“The edit wars and personal abuse that often follows them deter a lot of us from trying more than a handful of edits. Ultimately it’s just not worth fighting the cabals that run groups of pages.”
Mark Larkento:
" The Art of War.
Authority = Most Effective Cabal."
Mark Larkento:
" The Art of War.
Authority = Most Effective Cabal."
Mark Larkento:
" Hopefully that observation ^^^ didn’t ‘kill’ this conversation.
There are many lessons to discuss from examining the past, present, and future of Wikipedia as a highly successful prototype DApp."
Mark Larkento:
"We thought it was the beginning of an ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’, but now? Plus,
‘Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads.’
Bryce Lynch:
" No, you’re absolutely correct. Authority comes from being recognized as the most effective cabal in a group of active entities. ‘Power perceived is power achieved.’ "
Bryce Lynch:
" As for Dapps, I’ve had a sensor net watching this project for over a year now… "
Dana Edwards:
" The answer is to not have only one version of a page. There can be many different less than mainstream versions but only one neutral version should survive as the neutral version."
"Of course politics and ideology get in the way of neutrality for most humans which can make knowledge representation more difficult than it has to be. On the other hand some topics are inherently controversial so they should instead try to capture all sides of the controversy on the wiki.
“Bryce Lynch”
"Another project to watch is this one: http://canonizer.com/ "
Dana Edwards:
" “Canonizer.com is a consensus building system enabling people to build consensus where none has been possible before. It is a wiki system that solves the critical problems suffered by Wikipedia. It solves edit wars by providing contributors the ability to create and join camps and it provides a measure of information reliability by providing relative measures of expert consensus. Unlike other information sources, such as peer reviewed documents, where there is far too much information for any individual to fully comprehend (We just blew past 20K documents in the field of consciousness) this open survey system provides real time concise and quantitative descriptions of the current and emerging leading theories. Theories that have been falsified by new scientific evidence are being instantly measured to the degree experts are abandoning those theories for newer better ones. The non repetitive, continually ratcheting up process significantly accelerates and amplifies the education and wisdom of the entire crowd.”
“Many people jump to the false conclusion that the Goal of Canonizer.com is to measure ‘truth’ via popular consensus. In fact, the goal is just the opposite. Crowds tend to behave in ignorant herding behavior, not unlike sheep. Various ‘camps’ and religions have a strong desire and interest in anything that promotes what they believe. They are highly motivated to dismiss or ignore anything that goes against their beliefs. The goal of Canonizer.com is to enable the crowd more rapidly recognize when this is happening, making it easier for them to measure for the quality of a good new theory they may want to pay attention to, even if it is counter to their currently preferred beliefs. The bottom line being our goal is not to measure truth via popularity, but to enable emerging minority theories to be more rapidly herd above any such biased bleating of any herd.
Leading minority experts can first find each other, and then build a concisely defined consensus in a consistent language by pushing lesser important disagreeable issues that inevitably emerge and are traditionally focused on, out of the way into lower sub camps. This allows a consensus to be negotiated and built around and the focus to stay on the most important actionable issues. Since anyone can contribute (even high school students have become educated by making significant contributions) and everyone can choose (selecting a canonizer algorithm) who they think are the experts, it enables the emerging experts to have a concise and quantitative measure of what the primitive popular crowd still believes, comparable to what the emerging experts believe, so they can know, concisely and quantitatively, what kind of evidence is working and what isn’t, with a focus on discovering what evidence would be required to convert more.”
“When an expert publishes an important paper, possibly containing arguments that convince only the author, they need to know who and how many people agree, how many don’t, and why. In most all sources today, there tends to be infinitely repetitive and painful yes / no assertions on all sides, on lesser important issues, all making everyone afraid of such topics, preventing good communication. This situation with no clear concise descriptions of the best scientific theories, leads everyone to believe there is or may not be any expert consensus. In this environment the still mistaken crowd tends to easily drown out any emerging minority experts.”
“With Canonizer.com diversity is valued and drives the system forward, rather than destroying it. Supporters of camps can object to any proposed changes they don’t agree with, filtering can then be done by the reader who can select the kind of experts and canonization algorithm they choose to prioritize things. In this way, knowing concisely and quantitatively what everyone currently believes, how the expert opinion still differs from the popular opinion, can eliminate all these communication prevention issues and fears - even making still ‘religious’ issues quite enjoyable for all. Such can finally enable emerging expert minorities to make progress at being heard above the bleating noise of the crowd at a measurably accelerating rate.”
“As a demonstration, the currently leading “Theories of Mind and Consciousness” survey topic is now a collaboratively negotiated, concise, quantitative state of the art representation of the working hypotheses of now approaching 50 experts and hobbyists. Building consensus in such fields is impossible. Even attempts to agree on definitions, such as consciousness, can’t be done. This survey project is building more consensus than has ever been possible. It already includes, at various levels of participation, diverse experts such as, Steven Lehar, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and a growing number of others. It is already indicating a surprising amount (34 out of 46) of consensus. Nothing like this has ever been possible from a crowed this diverse. Of course in order to make this map more comprehensive, requires the survey participation of all people including you, even if that is to say you are in a “we don’t know yet” camp. Our goal is to track all this in real time as ever more scientific evidence eventually falsifies and forces most all experts into the one camp representing the one best theory.”
“That which you can measure, improves and converts.
Knowing, concisely and quantitatively, everyone else who wants what you do, and what is still standing in your way, is the hardest part. Once you know enough people that want the same thing you do, it will just happen.”
Dana Edwards:
" We should use Canonizer ourselves or adapt it to our internal needs. This way we can produce some useful knowledge without the political bickering getting in our way. We would simply have to divide the experts into different camps. Perhaps over time one camp will win or lose."
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