[extropy-chat] Conquering the world with a POV wiki (was re: Time Magazine's Person of the Year)

Tue Dec 26 04:28:57 UTC 2006

Lee Corbin,

<<<< 

Brent writes   (Hi Brent!  It's been a while since I've seen

you on the list---welcome back and all.)

>>>> 

Thanks!  Yes, I’ve been hiding for the last year or so working on,
incorporating, developing, filing for patents and so on with what I’m
thinking of calling the “canonizer”.

You may have already guessed, yes I intend it to be a wiki with the goal of
handling (i.e. canonizing) POV.  One that resolves many of the troubling
issues with wikipedia, and so much more (around the order of enabling
extropians to finally lead and save the world).  The more I think about
this, the more It is my POV that this will be the “next big thing” to vastly
surpass all next big things to date.  Once I got started on this this year,
every month or so I have been waking up my wife around 3:00 am as I jump out
of bed with uncontrollable manacle laughter rambling on about ever greater
things like how the canonizer will be able to duplicate Google’s context
“Google adds” but they won’t be able to duplicate the reputable “canonized
adds” with validating canonized satisfaction scores which all advertiser
will now have to pay the canonizer to get if they want any kind of
advertisement with any respect.

Obviously this is all only my POV, so take it all as such.  I would love to
know where all your POV is different!

The idea of creating something like this has been stewing around in my head
for over 10 years now but with my primitive thinking I just wasn’t able to
recognize a few of the possibilities till this year.  I’ve been expecting
someone else to create something like this all this time, but haven’t seen
anything like it yet.  When Jimmy Wales, with the help of Extropians like
Lee Crocker and others, created Wikipedia, I was happy to finally see
someone getting close – but I recognized instantly that there was going to
be terrible “edit wars” and a necessary general rejection of POV with such a
system.  And sure enough, despite Jimmy’s claims that “Disputes are
characterized in Wikipedia; they are not re-enacted." look at the history of
any controversial issue on Wikipedia and you see lots of people wasting
enormous amounts of time fighting “edit wars” and re-enacting the same old
same old over and over again – just as we all have been doing forever in our
meaningless and lonely one sided POV “debates”.  Sure, some progress is
slowly possible through extreme amounts of effort.  And we occasionally get
extreme disruptions in the “hurd” thinking with THE single POV on various
topics.  But the majority view (i.e. the view that has the most vocal and
active participants and ability to aggressively fight edit wars) is really
the only view that gets adequate representation.  Politicians so long for a
location to express their “POV”  Yet Politicians hate Wikipedia, precisely
because they are aware of all this, and it is so draining on their resources
in their futile attempts to fight all these wars and so on.  Many ultimately
just give up, figuring it isn’t worth the extreme effort with any POV in
wikipedia.

I started to finally realize the true power of a POV wiki towards the end of
2005 and during 2006 as my heart broke while I witnessed the shattering of
what the World Transhumanist Association is and could be as a significant
set of members split (or were forced) out over differing POV.  Some are
attempting to form a World Transhumanist Society and attempting to get
everyone to “abandon that (WTA) sinking ship before it goes down”.

A group of us Mormons, mostly here in SLC, Utah are trying to start up the
“Mormon Transhumanist Association” (see transifurism.org) with some amount
of success so far.  But boy, if you think plain old Extropians and
Transhumanists have organization shattering differing POV, try working with
a group of people like this!

Many others, like Dirk Bruere, have attempted to organize extropians and
transhumanists so that they can accomplish something useful together but
have also failed miserably, commenting: “I came to the conclusion long ago
that the only thing Transhumanists can agree on is Transhumanism.”  And all
this is to say nothing of the painful and destructive tiffs between
“extropians” and “transhumanists” and so on ad nausium.  Even on this
extropy list, we go over so many issues over and over again, never making
any quantifiable progress, so much so that many people leave in frustration.
Traditional Wikis don’t seem to be helping at all do they?

And what are we to take from the demoralizing and heart wrenching “Extropy
Institute is closing its doors and opening a window for a proactive
future.”????  I bet I’m not the only one that has cried a huge bucket of
tears over this!

This door and window saying obviously comes from the primitive idea that
“When God closes a door; some where he opens a window”.  How can any
Extropian use such a primitive, the world is getting harder and on its way
down, aphorism?   In my POV, when technology closes a door, one should start
looking around, because there is a lot more than a hard to get to “window”
that is inevitably just opening up.  I don’t know about you, but I see a lot
of potential supper powerful turbo rocket sleds and more just coming into
view as that door closes.  They are just sitting their waiting for the first
group of people that aren’t chained down by their primitive boxed in
thinking to recognize them, get on, take off, and make an ever more huge
profit while changing the world for the better!

I think Extropians and Transhumanists are (or should be) the leaders of
society.  They are the ones way out in front of everything, and definitely
not thinking like everyone else.  They recognize the problems with all the
herd or “flock” POV.  The problem is, the only way to accomplish anything,
and to “lead” everyone is to organize and work together.  Any person alone
can’t really accomplish much – though many individual Extropians like Max
More, and Raymond Kurzweil… have made Herculean accomplishments all by
themselves.  But we can’t all be this great on our own and in the past the
only really effective organization structure where people can work together
was a simple hierarchy.  And of course in any hierarchy there is only room
for one POV – and that is the POV of your superior.  All you can find at the
ultimate top is some supposed “God”?  And any Extropian can’t tolerate or
function within any such hierarchical structure, as a member of a “flock” or
whatever, even if they have the chance of being given ultimate power in the
top position.  They turn such down, and rightly so, as they recognize how
immoral, secretive, paranoid, and evil any such hierarchical organization is
or ultimately becomes right?

So, are we Extropians to be left on the sidelines as we scoff at the
terrible leaders perched atop of the world’s dominant hierarchical immoral
secretive fear mongering organizations as they blindly ridicule technology
and lead everyone to hell in a handbasket?  I think not.  I believe all that
Extropians need is the right kind of tools that bridles differing POV and
uses it to justly drive everyone forward in a very powerful way.  The
greater the diversity the better!  Leaderless or networked managed
organizations definitely aren’t as simple and easy as hierarchical ones –
but I think – given the right tools and sophisticated voting, grouping and
communicating systems, they will be able to blow hierarchical organizations
away and outperform them every time.  And I think the necessary
prerequisites to creating such tools are finally in place.  All that is
required is the right vision and a little bit of mashing up of things.  So
do any of you think we could do this like I do?

(IMNHO) watch out, all you secretive, immoral primitive hierarchical
leaders.  All your dastardly doings are passed.  For the canonizer with its
banner all bravely unfurled, is about to hurl down its little brother
empowered gauntlet to thee!

<<< 

So there will be sections that read, "While some

Extropians blah blah blah, others maintain that ...".

>>> 

Exactly, but how many extropians, and which extropians???  And can anyone
really do any kind of justice writing some other’s POV in a “sympathetic”
way?  Certainly not with any meaningful and important passion!  And how
often does the media (or wiki contributor?) give way to much attention to
some obscure and unjust POV and so on…  ad nausium in the name of getting
“both sides of the story”?  Getting any kind of qualitative measure of how
“justified” or accepted any POV is is near impossible today.  Especially if
you only want to know how accepted it is only by a set of people YOU chose
to respect and so on.  Everyone claims “global warming” is “accepted
science”.  But does anyone really know, quantitatively, just how “accepted”
and by who, it truly is???

All our primitive upbringing has conditioned all of us to only tolerate one
POV.  And THAT  is our only problem, in my POV.  Everyone seems to think
there can only be one true POV tolerated and all others deserve to be cast
down to hell or “abandoned before they sink.”  I say enough!  There is room
for everyone to get all that they want!  If we are all willing to work
TOGETHER for all of it I believe we will be able to achieve all of it.

I’ve got a very crude prototype of the canonizer running at
test.canonizer.com.  Please don’t expect too much, as this is what I am
developing on right now on a very small machine in my basement, and it is
often down or crashing as I develop things.  It doesn’t YET “canonize” any
of the POV, but it does have wiki functionality with the added ability to
handle POV structure on any topic.  I hope this is enough of a proof of
concept so some others can see the power I believe such a thing can have.

I soon hope to have the ability so that when a Mormon teenager goes to the
canonizer seeking information about a POV topic such as God, they will be
able to select a Mormon canonizer and find the state of the art of
exponentially growing information about what Mormons believe about God
filtered and sorted near the top according to their desires.  (Can you sense
the we’ll no longer be held back by a moribund prophet wearing scriptural
blinders tone in this?)  Of course they will be tempted to also change their
canonizer to an Atheist or Extropian one, right!  Isn’t that what we all
need right now instead of all the absurd splitting up and isolation /
abandonment by everyone?  I say the more POV the better!  Screw “sympathetic
POV”!  I want to see the good passionate stuff in a quantifiably measurable
way.  And I want all of it together in a just and equitable system that
drives us all forward instead of ripping us apart.

The primitive idea seems to be that some “God” or even worse some “Big
Brother” at the top of some hierarchy is going to get and do in everyone.
But is that really what the future holds?  What is it that really matters?
Is it only what some guy at the top wants?  Or is it what everyone at the
bottom wants that really matters?  I’m really liking the “little brother”
idea that seems so enmeshed in YouTube, the internet and all.

Does anyone know what all the teenagers and entrepreneurial 20 something
people in Iraqi want?  Should we care what all the ayatollahs and military
leaders at the top of the hierarchies want to impose on them? Why are they
the only ones anyone ever asks???  Has anyone ever tried to ask the
teenagers in Iraq in any usefully quantitative way what they want?

When you think about it, POV, and the accurate representation and
quantification of such is everything important today isn’t it?  As
everything else become a free commodity, knowing POV will become of infinite
value right?  Would anyone ever go to wikipedia to find out information
about any POV topic like God?  And when Robert Bradbury asks:  what is the
"best path from where we are now to where we might like to be?" or when
scientists are seeking to know quantitatively whether global warming is
truly accepted science or not.  When 10,000 very opinionated scientists want
to know which of any very expensive (such that we can only afford to do one
at a time) experiments we should do first and so on… Where can we go too
easily, rapidly, naturally and quantitatively find which way to go?

Who should those of us who aren’t as swift and smart as some of you follow
and how can we know and recognize the primitive ones leading us down yet
another rat whole as soon as possible as will be ever more required in
today’s ever more dramatically changing world?

What is the gospel according to you?

Everyone wants to know!

canonizer.com

I’m hoping some of you might be interested enough to help out with some POV
wiki development work.  I’m just some quixotic second rate programmer that
can’t really do anything on my own.  And I’d sure like to know all of your
POV on the power of a wiki that can justly and quantitatively handle all POV
and whether or not something like this could indeed turn things around and
maybe even “save the world”?

Brent Allsop

P.S.  I’m sorry this was such a long post.  As I am discovering there seems
to be no end to the power of all this stuff and I’ve only briefly touched on
some of what I’ve obviously only started to discover.  If you too find
yourself jumping out of bed with uncontrollable maniacal laughter about ever
more fantastic possibilities at 3:00 am once you start really thinking about
this like I have been.  Well, brothers and sisters, all I can say is welcome
to the heavenly future for all as we finally rapidly head into the
singularity!

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