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Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving

For a variety of personal reasons - deaths in the family and a European upbringing - Thanksgiving is a holiday during which I prefer to go spend time at the ocean and avoid large groups. Hence I am a little removed from the very real tensions surrounding the holiday. I am to some degree persuaded by Robert Jensen's arguments in Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving, but I tend to think that the tension between the traditional autumnal abundance celebration and a desperately needed "day of atonement" should not be resolved in favor of one or the other. I would love to find a way in which giving thanks and making amends can work side by side. That's how life really is, after all. Posted: 11/26/07; 10:53:43 PM #

Programming Collective Intelligence

The more I reflect on Toby Segaran's book on Programming Collective Intelligence, the more strongly I want to recommend it to those who pursue a long term, system oriented vision of civil society. When you think about civil society, democracy, economics, and other structural expressions of social will, the more you realize that a large part of what we are all trying to do is figure out ways of turning a mass of individuals into an intelligent group. That's what Amazon's product recommendation system tries to do. And that's what voting tries to do. Sometimes the masses are stupider than the individuals and sometimes they are wiser. What determines the difference is a combination of the nature of the problem to be addressed, the scales involved, and the structures (or programs) used to go from individual action to group action. Every method described in the book - from decision trees to genetic algorithms - is a source of inspiration for anyone working to figure out how to empower groups of people. Don't let the very modest amount of math in the book stop you from taking your time with each gem and seeing how it could connect to your work. Posted: 11/26/07; 10:47:52 PM #