Unicorns and Television : A dichotomy of personalities.

I will describe here two types of people. I will do it with two examples.
( My prose is influenced by Patrick's Rothfuss books which I have been reading lately.)

Example 1 :

Consider that one is asked whether he believes that electromagnetism exists, the theory that explains , among others , how electricity works.

Type A would say that , of course , electromagnetism is correct :
"Every day, I watch television, and television needs electricity to work.
If we didn't know how electricity worked, we wouldn't be able to have a functioning television.

Type B would say that I will have to think about it.
He would read the theory and will try to verify that the theory is self-consistent. Then he would check whether there were experimental data that are consistent with the theory, then after a week he would say :
"Under similar conditions to those that it was experimentally tested , the theory is predictive."

Of course, type B is infuriating , he avoided saying the decent thing, that the theory is true. Not only that, type B lost a month studying for something that was obvious. And that is only one theory. Society is build on hundreds of thousands of theories. Imagine wanting to heat your food in the microwave, but you do not do it because you do not know how it works .


Example 2:

Consider that one is told that unicorns exist and fairies use them to travel long distances, especially when dragons are nearby, because dragons are afraid of their magical horn. Then he is given a twelve book  treatise full of mathematics and experimental data.

Type A would immediately start laughing, being amazed at the level of naivete that the questioner is exhibiting.
"Noone has seen a unicorn, everybody knows that they do not exist."

Type B would say that he is not sure this is true. He would get the twelve books and start reading them. As before, first there would be a logical analysis, then a review of the experimental data, the dissections of dead fairies that where found on the Amazon forest and the bones of Dragons that were found in the Alps.
Type B would then say what he said in the previous example,
"According to the data, you are right, unicorns do exist."

Type A is infuriating, he is arrogant as hell. Because it is common knowledge that they do not exist, any other theory is plainly stupid.
The interesting thing with example 2 is that the next week, a dragon came near their village and ate type A. Type B had learned the calling sound for unicorns and managed to find one that helped him escape.

Replacing the Web : The importance of social context to information.

While creating a language to encode and compute p2p social structures, I was thinking that parallel to those digital social structures, the Web would remain the same, used to store and retrieve information.
I am starting to believe that this is wrong. We need to encode the social contexts/structures around information. For now, they are either implicit or entirely missing.

Information is created by a social structure and it is used in other social contexts. Thus information has a social function. It is the input to other social processes.

If information provides a service to society or to some group of people, making this relation explicit also results in creating a feedback loop where those groups finance the creation of that information.

As you can see, information is not different from any other production process. A social structure produces a product, and that product is consumed by a specific group, which , if production was democratic, finances and guides production with participatory social structures.

Currently, information , on many occasions, lacks a social purpose and noone takes responsibility for the accuracy of that information. In the future I envision, information has a purpose and someone is responsible for it, for ex. to update it to make it more accurate or clear.

In need of a generic fail-safe organization.

For every solution to a problem , we have assumptions about the state of the environment with which we interact. Those assumptions can stop being correct. What do we do when that happens?

  Let us further assume that the problem is a societal one, and the solution is a social organization. If we define rules under which this social organization functions and we require the environment to respect some restrictions, then when it doesn't, we end up with no social organization that can solve the issue.
  If the organization was mediated with software , then that software will be thrown away, and new forms of organization need to be developed from ground zero. Writing specialized software is time-consuming, thus practically, for a long period of time, the organization will need to use non-digital methods to preserve its structure. This, for many reasons, is both impractical and unacceptable.

  The things get even more difficult when we understand that social organizations depend on each other. If one is not able to perform its role due to a change in the environment, all other dependent social organizations will collapse as well. Thus, sometimes, we can end up with catastrophic failures.

  How can a system be able to adapt to such environmental perturbations? Here , I mean adaptation under conditions it was not designed for.

  In my opinion, we need to define a generic type of organization that can act as a fail-safe mode, it will try to fulfill the imminent problems and at the same time it will create the discussion space for the creation of the new organizational forms that will replace the failed ones.

  What characteristics should this generic organization have? This is a question I need to answer.