Josh Haas's Web Log

I have a little side project right now, which is: use a brainwave monitoring device to make an automated meditation trainer.

I bought one of these:

NeuroSky Mindwave

It’s a Neurosky Mindwave — it sits on your forehead and reads your EEGs. Here are some really scary stock photos of people wearing it — I hope I don’t look like any of these guys!!

Anyway, it’s actually super comfortable to wear and, at least as far as I can tell, doesn’t give you creepy stock photo model staring syndrome.

The headset connects over bluetooth to either your laptop or your smartphone, and there are a number of apps you can buy that go along with it: games that you can control with your thoughts, various brain “training” apps, etc. My main interest is writing my own software for it, so although I experimented with some of the apps to see what’s out there and what’s possible, I’ve been mostly writing my own code in Python.

I’m interested in this from two angles: the technology itself, and applications to meditation. I’m interested in the technology because I think brain-computer interfaces are going to become a big deal in the next few decades, and there’s lots of exciting possibilities… if you can control computers directly with your mind, communicating them might become way more fluid than the relatively clumsy mediums of touch / typing / mice. And I’m interested in meditation; I’ve been practicing various forms of it off and on for the last eight years, and I think it’s a tremendously valuable tool for living a good and happy life. I might go more into why I care about meditation in a later post, but a really good resource for learning about it is Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was one of the pioneers of using meditation in an evidence-based clinical setting.

Here’s the theory behind my project:

• Meditation is a learnable skill that leads to specific outcomes (improved emotional control and mental clarity)
• Like all learnable skills, the way to mastery is practice-with-feedback
• Unlike most skills, it is hard for an expert to give feedback, since she can’t observe the pupil’s efforts directly
• Therefore, meditation is uniquely challenging to learn
• …and therefore, a mechanism that actually gives clear feedback could lead to a revolutionary increase of ease-of-learning!

So that’s the goal: make it orders-of-magnitude easier to become skilled at meditation. Right now, becoming good at meditation is quite hard; it takes a pretty big investment of willpower and time, there are a lot of dead ends, you have to be careful about what teachers you listen to, and you can go for years without really knowing if you’re making forward progress. I think this is sad, because I think meditation is a skill that would make the world profoundly better if more people had, so making it significantly easier to learn would be a big win!

Side note: I should acknowledge that I’m discussing meditation in a highly instrumental way — as a means for improving the quality of life / thinking. Arguably the entire practice of meditation is about not thinking instrumentally, but rather it being an end in itself. This is a larger discussion that I’ll save for some other time — suffice it to say that I know what I’m saying about the value of meditation might be construed by practitioners as totally missing the point… I agree and think the “end in itself” perspective is highly important to what meditation is, but for now let’s pretend that it’s valuable purely as a life-improvement tool.

Anyway, for my project to be successful, a few things have to be true:

1. Meditation needs to be detectable via EEG patterns
2. Those patterns need to be sufficiently course-grained that cheap consumer products like the Mindwave can pick them up
3. The easiest path to generating those patterns needs to be genuine meditation

There’s a lot of research confirming point 1 — I don’t think that’s controversial. After playing with the Mindwave for a week, I’m fairly sure point 2 is true as well. Point 3 is more of a question — point 3 gets to whether or not you can fool the feedback mechanism. To be useful, I don’t think the feedback has to be perfect, but it can’t be systematically biasing you to some kind of mental activity that’s not meditation. Point 3 I’m less sure about and I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell until the experiment continues for a while.

My python script monitors the level of meditation using the proprietary “meditation” metric developed by the Mindwave people. The Mindwave reports a raw feed of eight different brainwave frequencies, and two derivative metrics, meditation and concentration. I don’t know what the sauce is that goes into the meditation metric… I could probably reverse engineer it by tracking how it compares over time to the eight raw inputs, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

For now, I’ve decided to go with the “meditation” metric on the grounds that reproducing Mindwave’s work would take a lot of time, so I might as well use their work on isolating “meditation” as a starting point. If I start to feel like it’s not quite right as a metric (ie, subjectively, through repeated meditation sessions, I feel like it’s giving me bad feedback), I may revisit this decision. For now, I feel like the feedback is pretty good, but I’m out of practice meditating so I’m still at pretty shallow levels… the real test is once I’m getting into deeper meditations whether the feedback still feels useful or if it feels off-track.

The way my python script works is that it plays a tone if the measured level of meditation is above a certain threshold. The tone gets louder the further above the threshold you are. Each time you run the script, you have a goal for the number of seconds above the threshold, and a time limit to do it in. The session ends when you hit the time goal or the time limit, and if you hit the time goal, it increases all three numbers — the time goal, the threshold, and the time limit for next time. It starts easy — you have a six minute time limit to meditate at a 40/100 level for at least two minutes — and it’s geared so that after 60 successful sessions, you have a 60 minute time limit, a 90/100 threshold, and 45 minute time goal. Ie, I roughly want it to take about three months (assuming you do one session a day and achieve the goal two thirds of the time) to develop an extremely deep daily meditation habit — which seems aggressive but achievable.

I’ve tweaked the formula a bit over the last week, but I now think it’s stable enough that I’m resetting myself to the first session and working my way through it. So far I’m enjoying it — it’s much easier for me to meditate regularly with feedback than it is when I’m just going for a preset amount of time or listening to a guided meditation. The real test will be if I’m able to keep achieving the increasingly-difficult goals, and whether that achievement corresponds with increasingly deep meditations.

The source code is a little messy right now, but if there’s interest in it I can clean it up and put it on github. I’m currently building on top of https://github.com/BarkleyUS/mindwave-python to communicate with the headset. (Technically, the hardest part of this whole thing was figuring out how to generate the variable sound tones… that’s a blog post for another day!)

I’m very interested in feedback from other people who are familiar with this problem space — has anyone tried to do something similar? What’s worked / what hasn’t worked?

I find reading the comments of online articles, or things like Hacker News, like watching a car wreck; hard to look away from but painful. There’s a lot of technical ideas that have been tried for keeping comments okay, such as up / down voting, threading, reputation scores, etc. Some seem to work okay to varying degrees. Still, it’s hard to have a good conversation on the internet on sensitive / emotionally charged / political issues without things degenerating into ad hominem attacks and verbal abuse.

Technological solutions aside, I wonder if it’s possible to create quality communication on a thread-by-thread basis by re-introducing a lot of the social interactions that prevent in-person conversations from degenerating as rapidly? Like, what would happen if you responded to a really aggressive, name-calling comment with something like “Hi, I’m Josh, nice to meet you. I think you’re upset because… If I understand you correctly, your concern is…”.

I don’t really see this happen very often — even highly thoughtful comments tend to be written without any effort to address the person they are responding to at a personal level and make sure that they’re repeating and understanding the other person’s position. That’s in part because that kind of repetition is long-winded and slow, kind of the opposite of the internet comment medium which tends to be very short and too the point. But if rapid-fire exchanges lead to increasing hostility and lack of actual communication, maybe it’s worth deliberately being a little inefficient to try to slow things down.

The main examples of online communities that don’t break down are ones with a small group of regulars who all know each other. For instance, Fred Wilson’s blog A VC has a remarkably civil comment section, likely because it’s the same people over and over again. So my idea would be to try to create that kind of intimacy in broader forums, like on twitter (hard because of the character limit!) or on hacker news.

Anyway, not sure if I’ll do anything with this idea any time soon, since I tend not to comment that much anyway. Writing it down in case I want to revisit it someday…

Imagine a person sitting on a beach writing a book about the earth, for the benefit of any aliens who happen to come along. Let’s say she wants to be really thorough. Can’t take shortcuts with the earth, it’s very important! She picks up a grain of sand in front of her, and ponders it… what can she say about it? Well, maybe the place to start is with the atoms that make up this grain of sand…let’s see, there’s about 80 million… times a million… times a million of them.

She gives up and gets a new hobby.

Knowledge is the destruction of information. Reality is hideously complex, and humans have small squishy minds: trying to fit even the simplest thing into our heads — an insect, for instance — if we took it in uncompressed, would quickly max out our memory. Therefore for us to know anything about the world, we have to creatively throw information away, similar to how a jpeg image is a creative compression of raw camera data.

The way that compression works is through finding patterns. If you know that in general, cats like to drink milk, then you can make guesses about what a new kitty will do when presented with a saucer, without having to have first memorized the behaviors of every single one of the millions of cats alive today.

We rely on these patterns to survive and get around the world. If we didn’t seek out and learn patterns, every situation would be paralyzing in its complexity. We would spend all day sitting on the floor staring at the stain on the carpet.

Patterns are just approximations, though. There are cats who don’t like milk. There are pixels that don’t actually reflect the value interpolated from the jpeg. That’s the cost of using patterns — by compressing the world down to a level of complexity we can actually deal with, we throw out information that doesn’t fit into our compression scheme.

In other words, all knowledge is lies. Knowledge tells us about the world, but it also misleads us about the world. Often knowledge is a white lie: the reason we “know” things is because it helps us survive. But still: lie lie lie lie lie lie lie.

This has a very important consequence: there can be multiple, incompatible descriptions of the world that are both “true”. If you compress an image as a gif instead of a jpeg, you will get disagreement between the two compressions about what the value of a given pixel is. The gif might say it’s blue whereas the jpeg might say it’s aquamarine.

You can zoom in on that pixel and compare it to the original, and say that, no, look, the actual color is closer to blue. So in that sense the gif is “right” and the jpeg is “wrong”. But if you picked a different pixel, the jpeg might be closer, so you can’t conclude from that one pixel that the gif is the truth and the jpeg is a distortion. They’re both distortions, just in different ways.

Truth is both absolute and relative. It’s absolute in the sense that you can always zoom in on a particular pixel, a particular cat, a particular grain of sand. But it’s relative in the sense that humans can only “know” it via a compression scheme, and compression schemes are never right or wrong in an absolute sense.

Truth isn’t just relative, though. It’s relative to a context. The reason we know that cats like milk is because we want to feed Fluffy. If humans didn’t keep cats as pets, a description of the world that contained “cats like milk” would be a bad description — it would be as irrelevant as someone sitting on a beach and counting the atoms in a grain of sand.

In other words, all “knowledge” is relative to the values of the knower. What I “know”, what compression schemes make sense for me, depends on what I care about. If you find a little kid who is into trains, you will discover that there is a lot to know about trains!

Bruce Lee made famous the phrase “empty your cup“. It’s sort of a mystical-sounded martial arts story, but we can actually put what it means pretty precisely. When the Kung Fu master says “empty your cup”, the computer scientist would say:

“I am trying to explain to you a new compression scheme. However, you can’t understand it, because you are already compressing the raw data a different way than I am, and it is giving you different data points, which makes my compression scheme seems ‘wrong’ to you. So, stop compressing for a moment and take in your experience as raw data without trying to simplify it. If you do this, you will be able to see that my compression scheme also works as a description of this raw data, and in fact might be more useful to you than your scheme for learning this particular skill.”

The Kung Fu master is not saying that her way of looking at the world is “right” (or at least, not if she’s super-wise)! She is saying that given the context, which is learning how to throw a hard punch, her knowledge works better than your knowledge. And she is also saying that you can’t learn her knowledge unless you un-know — i.e., un-compress — what you know, because your knowledge is telling you lies that are obscuring the different set of lies that she wants to teach you. Empty your cup.

This gets us to the thing I’m really trying to talk about, which is the contemporary education system in America.

Historically there have been two goals of the education system which people don’t realize are actually in stark competition with each other. The first goal is “acquiring knowledge” and the second goal is “learning to think”.

Acquiring knowledge means learning the set of lies that are currently valued by society. The goal is to take the informal training that young people acquire from their families and communities, and polish it up. Sandpaper off any weird notions their parents might have that don’t quite fit with the mainstream. Fill in any embarrassing areas of ignorance. Get students up to speed with the latest, greatest lies that scientific, cultural and business leaders have been producing.

This kind of training is extremely valuable, and parents rightly pay a lot for it. Society functions based on an agreed-on set of common knowledge. That’s how a young graduate can walk into a job at a company and be useful and productive. That’s how politicians can sit in a room and come out with a set of policies that are acceptable to the community. Parents want their children to acquire knowledge because the people most fluent in society’s knowledge ace job interviews, succeed in business or politics, and attract spouses who are similarly talented. And this is great.

“Learning to think” is a little trickier. Allegedly, learning to think is the goal of a “liberal arts education”, although I’m not sure too many people involved in the process actually have a clear sense of what it really means. In my opinion, what it means to “learn to think” is to learn how to evaluate knowledge. It means to be able to take a statement about the world, and instead of taking it at face value, take it for the lie it is, and ask “is this lie useful? what context is this lie useful in? who is this lie useful for? what values does this lie embody? what experience is this lie compressing, and what are alternate ways of compressing this experience?”

This is a hard skill to learn, because to do this, one has to be willing to face up to the fact that one’s own knowledge is actually just an approximation. This is emotionally unsettling to do, and takes continual practice. It is much more relaxing to feel as if one understands reality, to be confident instead of questioning. Therefore there is very strong inertia against any program of learning how to think. Even if one thinks a little bit, and has an “insight” (having an “insight” means, making the jump from one compression scheme to a different one), the tendency is to then glom onto one’s new knowledge as “truth”, and to stop the process of thinking.

So learning to think is a hard, all-consuming skill. And this is why it is in competition with acquiring knowledge, because it’s very difficult to both learn a set of knowledge and simultaneously learn why one shouldn’t take that knowledge at face value.

Both acquiring knowledge and learning to think are important. A student who just acquires knowledge will be able to function well in existing frameworks, but will be ill-equipped to deal with situations where knowledge no longer fits reality. A student who just learns to think will be able to deal with new stuff, but they will be at a disadvantage in day-to-day life because they’re constantly figuring out what everyone around them can take for granted (they will get rejected from job interviews).

The relative importance of acquiring knowledge and learning to think depends on how stable society is. In a golden age, where a society is prosperous and confident, the existing patterns of compression embedded in social institutions are largely effective. What people “know” about the world is sufficient for them to control their environment, run an economy, deal with external and internal threats. In such a society, independent thought is valuable, but not so valuable — society already has a lot of valuable knowledge, and as a student it makes sense to put a lot of effort into absorbing it.

In contrast, a society is in flux when it’s patterns of compression are not effective. There is uncertainty about the future; threats to the social order; change and chaos. People don’t know yet how to deal with the new things that are going on. In such a world, it’s valuable to learn what society knows, in order to function effectively within it; but the most successful leaders are the people who learn how to come up with new knowledge, because new knowledge is what is needed.

We are in an unstable world. Our educational system is designed for a stable one. There is some emphasis on learning how to think, but in my experience, getting “A”s by and large involves being able to convince teachers that you have absorbed their knowledge, as opposed to demonstrating skill at questioning and un-learning knowledge. This is a generalization of course (another pattern, another lie), but I think it’s a useful generalization when thinking about the education system.

To me, this seems like a big problem. There is a lot of discussion about how to make education “better” in the sense of it being more broadly distributed — how do you get education to everyone in society, not just the privileged few, and how do you get it in a cost-effective way that doesn’t create massive piles of student debt. This is a very important question! The current system disenfranchises a lot of people. I’m worried, though, that with all the emphasis on making education more accessible, the question of “what is education” is getting overlooked. It would be good if society was better at distributing knowledge to everyone. It would be even better if it could teach everyone how to think.

Apparently a lot of people identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I tend to pick that from the standard religion drop-down box, since I feel like it describes me better than atheism or agnosticism.

However the problem with “spiritual” as a term is that it has connotations of fuzziness or vagueness. This creates a situation where religion on the one hand and atheism on the other hand both seem attractive because they offer the clarity of actually standing for something.

I think that the tradeoff of “spiritual” vs sharp, logical thinking is a false dilemma. You can question your beliefs and hold yourself to the highest level of intellectual rigor and come out with a worldview that seems “spiritual”.

I use “spiritual” because there isn’t a word that sums up how I see the universe. I think I’m not the only one who sees it this way, though, so maybe there should be a word. Anyway I’d like to describe how I see it, not that I’m sure that I’m right, but to show how you can stand for something even if what you stand for isn’t a religion and isn’t just a denial of religion.

My worldview is based on asking myself “why do I think this is true?” over and over again, until I’ve stripped away all the hearsay and rumors and unexamined ideas floating around in my head. As well as stripping ideas away, I add new ideas as I experience new things in life. This is a never-ending task; I don’t regard myself as done, and probably never will.

My basic belief about reality is that we live in a what-you-see is what-you-get universe. What is real is the world around us. Our minds and personalities are patterns in our perceivable reality — ie, they are patterns of movement in our brains, bodies, and environment. Death represents a fundamental change in those patterns, as does, to a lesser extent, brain injury, drinking alcohol, losing a leg, and moving to a new city.

However, I believe that our day-to-day experience does not do reality justice. Our conscious minds paint a caricature of reality. We are constantly forming thoughts to summarize and organize the flow of raw experience, and these thoughts, although necessary, are extremely limiting and low-fidelity.

It is a skill to learn to separate ourselves from our thoughts and to perceive reality more directly. It is precisely this skill that lets one person look and say “oh, a boring row of houses” and another person to paint a deeply moving painting of them. In fact, I think almost all worthwhile human endeavors involve developing skill at perceiving different aspects of reality, whether it’s understanding another person’s emotions, being able to discern subtle variations in music, or being able to let fresh hypotheses emerge in a scientific inquiry.

My hypothesis, based on some personal experience and some reports from other people, is that as a person gets more adept at detaching themselves from their thoughts, and more skillful at really experiencing the world around them, they generally tend to feel the following things:

A. The separation that the mind draws between “self” and “world” is mostly illusory — in reality an individual is a part of a complex, interacting pattern, and one’s individual survival isn’t that important.

B. Reality is beautiful and miraculous, and meaningful at face value.

My sense is that as you get better at experiencing reality directly, you tend to see the world this way. In other words, fear of death and fear of meaninglessness fade away the more clearly you perceive things, just as the world becomes more beautiful to you the more you see with the eyes of a painter or photographer.

Religious traditions become useful in that they often teach various paths to attaining this perception. For instance, the idea of “faith” as taught by Christianity, or “surrender” as taught by Islam, or the meditation techniques of Hinduism and Buddhism, are, in my opinion, all useful guides, even though I tend to reject most of the intellectual content of the world religions.

I think right action — action that comes from a deep perception of what you see as right, true, and beautiful in the world — is extremely important. To have perceptions of rightness / beauty is to want to act on them, and it works both ways: failure to act can inhibit the perceptions. Often, doing what you truly believe is right is terrifying, and a common response to that terror is to dampen your perception of what’s right, so that you don’t have to face the fear head-on. So I think many of the traditional moral virtues — courage, integrity, honesty, compassion — are intrinsically tied to seeing the world as meaningful.

Anyway, I characterize this viewpoint as “spiritual” because it rejects the idea that the world is meaningless just because the world can be described scientifically, and because it accepts that religions have something to offer. But it’s not a vague, feel-good sense of meaning; rather, it’s the specific claim that meaning is something that can be directly perceived in the world by increasing one’s perceptive skill, and that this skill can be developed through a number of well-defined techniques, including those developed by various religions.

I think it’s important that people who don’t buy into religion but who do want to talk about things like values and meaning and right and wrong have somewhere to stand. “spiritual but not religious” is a starting point… perhaps over time we’ll come up with better words.

One of the first serious essays I remember studying in my philosophy classes in school was called “The Normativity of Instrumental Reason”. I thought it was a cool phrase. It means, basically, where does reason — logic — get the power to make things right or wrong?

Instrumental reason is the kind of reason like, “I want A. A requires that I do B. So I should do B.” I want a nice apartment. Getting a nice apartment requires money. Investment bankers make a lot of money. Therefore, I should be an investment banker.

Here’s the money quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Phaedrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that—a new spiritual rationality—in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be “value free.” Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant.

Instrumental reason is dualist, subject-object thinking. I, Josh, want nice apartment, therefore I Josh get money to get nice apartment. The argument Zen and… makes is that drawing this line between me, the observer with goals, and the world, the object of my desires, is sick. It’s a diseased way of seeing the world. It leads to spiritual emptiness.

It’s a spiritually empty perspective because, where do values come from in the first place? How do we know what we want and don’t want? From the objective point of view, the rational agent must somehow evolve these desires herself, and then, by careful studying of natural laws, learn to manipulate her surroundings to bring them into being. Set goal. Achieve goal. Munch.

Other people, from this perspective, are also objects — they’re out there mixed in with the buildings and cars and other external manifestations we have to deal with. They’re animate clods of meat, sometimes useful and sometimes a hindrance for achieving our goals. Of course, then we look in the mirror, and we see that we’re also a clod of meat. And like other people are, sometimes we’re useful and sometimes we’re a hindrance to ourselves getting what we want.

And what do we want? Meat wants to protect itself. Meat wants to be safe, to stay alive, to consume other meats for sustenance and not be consumed itself.

Meat builds fortresses. Meat buys iPhones. Meat paves the roads and fights the diseases and reads the evening news and makes the world a safe, sterile place for meat to grow in. Meat is very, very smart.

The point Zen and… is making is that as smart as instrumental reason is, it’s a limited kind of smart, because it can’t evolve its goals. Where do values come from in the first place? How do we know what we want and don’t want? If we let our guards down, if we let some objectivity leak away and blur the lines between the actor and the acted-on, sometimes wants appear by themselves. By merging ourselves with the things around us we become concerned with their integrity. We start appreciating beauty, we start caring for people and places and things.

It’s a much messier process because it involves collapsing the wall between ends and means. When the means are the ends, or shape the ends, we’re driving without knowing where we’re going. We might have an idea, but the idea becomes changed in the execution of it, because that’s the point of having an idea in the first place.

Here’s a quote from today’s front page of TechCrunch:

Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now, Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android…

To me, this is a very ugly quote. I went to TechCrunch thinking I would find an example of an ugly quote there, and I found one very quickly. There are probably much uglier ones I could find if I put more time into looking for ugly things (which can actually be a form of beauty in and of itself).

We are making an economic transition from a world where the dictate of instrumental logic is to go into finance to a world where the dictate of instrumental logic is to go into technology. To me this is an interesting transition because technology culture overlaps with maker culture, and maker culture actually understands that “good” is a product of the process, not just the destination. However, I read quotes like the TechCrunch one above and it makes me sad, because it means the poison is in the tech world too.

From a non-dualistic point of view, the concept of making money becomes something that requires thought. What is money? It’s a social contract to give each other gifts of goods and services. It’s a debt that other people owe us. So “making money” means, getting the system to agree it’s indebted to us, to get it to agree that we should be a beneficiary of the nice things that the system produces.

From that vantage point, it seems strange to care about making money without caring about the system that makes the money worthwhile. This can be dramatically illustrated by looking at systems that stopped working, such as Weimar Germany during hyperinflation, or Rwanda during genocide. When an insane homeless person owes you a million dollars, that debt is not worth very much.

So when I hear talk in the startup world of “killing it”, “making it rain”, “big exits”, “valuations”, and all the other terminology of plunder, I feel like people must be thinking instrumentally, as opposed to holistically. From a practical standpoint, you can buy an awful lot of nice cars and apartments and dinners before the system becomes so insane and so homeless that it all dries up. But from an aesthetic, moral standpoint, how can you feel good about pursuing those things without simultaneously thinking about how to make the system a little less crazy, a little happier, a little wealthier? If you love someone, it would be odd behavior indeed to do them a favor, and then go around talking about how much they owe you now… but that’s what people on sites like TechCrunch do every day.

I feel like most questions in modern philosophy come down to the tension between these two hard-to-reconcile observations:

1. Consciousness seems to be a material phenomenon.

2. The material world seems to be a conscious phenomenon.

What I mean by the former is that consciousness comes from brains, and brains can be picked apart and dissected into the lower level physical concepts of chemistry and physics.  There is a lot of strong evidence that thinking is fundamentally a physical process; it doesn’t merely just “hang out” around the brain.  For instance, getting drunk… if thinking wasn’t physical, how could alcohol, a chemical, affect it?

We’ve learned a lot about how consciousness works via scientific inquiry.   We can cut open someone’s brain, tickle a nerve, and have them report sensations of warm or red or whatever.  We can watch a babies brain develop in utero, going from a couple unconnected neurons sending signals randomly to cohering into a full human mind.  We can talk about the evolution of consciousness in the context of natural selection and cultural change.

It’s very hard to argue against the statement that consciousness is a material phenomenon without willful denial of a lot of life experience.  Notions of the “soul” as somehow distinct from the body seem naive when every component of what we think of as soul — personality, logic, memory, emotion — are expressed through a time-bound series of mental reactions that can be disrupted or modified by physical stimuli.

However, it’s equally hard to argue against the second statement, that the material world seems to be a conscious phenomenon.  Absolutely everything we think we know about the world is because we have experienced it as sensory; we see things, we hear things, we touch things, we smell things.  As many people have pointed out, we could all be living in the Matrix, and we wouldn’t know the difference.

I would go as far as to say we don’t really know what the word “exists” means outside the concept of consciousness.  When I say the cup on the table exists, I mean that I can touch it and feel it, and if I close my eyes and look again, I’ve come to expect from past experience that it will still be there to touch and feel.  That’s why “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” persists as the exemplary meaningless philosophical question, because we have no access to whatever “underlying reality” there is that would permit us to definitively give a yes or no answer.  What possible scientific experiment would permit us to put that question to rest?

The current mainstream view these days in the academic and scientific communities seems to be an acceptance of 1 — that consciousness is physical — and a denial of 2 — that the physical world is conscious.  The story is that since the beginning of time, there have been these things (electrons, quarks, what have you) whizzing around in an empty universe, and that eventually they came together and evolved themselves into human beings.  In this story, consciousness isn’t structurally important to the nature of reality; it’s just one more phenomenon in a universe full of interesting phenomenon.

There’s an act of faith involved in this story, which is the belief in the reality of matter and energy outside of the presence of human observers.  The faith comes from the fact that when we do  experiments, nature behaves in a way that’s far more consistent and complex than limited human minds could conceive of on their own, which certainly suggests there is something out there outside of our own heads.

The act of faith doesn’t seem problematic to me.  There’s no reason to think that we’d be able to know for sure about reality, without taking something on faith, and faith in the existence of scientific law seems to justify itself by the almost magical accomplishments of science and engineering.

What does seem problematic is that it leaves a big unanswered question — where are we, the observer, in this story?  The scientific description of the universe as matter and energy interacting in a law-like manner explains everything that we perceive except for our perception of it.

One explanation I’ve heard is that the first-person perspective is “illusory”, in the sense that we trick ourselves into believing we’re conscious.  There’s a lot of scientific evidence that consciousness is a constructed phenomenon, a story that we tell ourselves after the fact.  You might say “I decided to pick up the cup”, but scans of your brain shows that your arm started moving before the thought entered your conscious awareness.

I have no doubt this is true, but it’s still not an explanation.  An “illusion” is a concept that presupposed a first-person observer who gets tricked by evidence that misleads her from the underlying reality.  But in this case, we’re saying that the existence of the first-person observer is itself the trick.  What does that even mean?  Who’s getting tricked?

It seems perverse to end up with a story that says that our primary evidence — I see, I feel, I hear — isn’t real, and instead reality is this totally unobservable thing that gives rise to our primary evidence.  I’m not sure how to express this objection rigorously, but there seems to be a fundamental incompleteness to any theory that discredits the evidence on which it is based.

So anyway, we have these two views of looking at the universe — first that there is this primary, unexplainable thing called consciousness, and the physical world can be described in terms of patterns as observed conscious phenomenon, and second that there is this primary, unexplainable thing called the material world, and consciousness can be described in terms of patterns that the world gives rise to.  Both seem true, and irreconcilable with each other.

I think the state of the problem right now is that we really just don’t know, and that a lot of writing on this subject is the attempt of papering over the not-knowing with stuff that sounds good.

There are interesting cultural divides related to this, as well — sympathy towards view 1 vs view 2 seems to be one of the big cleavage points in the American political landscape right now, with the secular on one side of the line and the religious on the other.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to a solution to this dilemma that tries to throw out view 1 or a solution that tries to throw out view 2.  My sense is that both views are grounded in something pretty fundamental about human experience, so arguing that one of them is just wrong and the other is right is going to lead to a broken philosophical system.

The third alternative is to argue that this way of framing the problem is incorrect.  This is another trend in thought which I think is more promising.  The basic thing is to say that the distinction between reality and experience — consciousness and the world — is what is illusory, the artificial creation of a subject-object dualist perspective.  Rather, it’s two different ways of describing the same unified thing, that being reality / consciousness / god / the universe.  This way of resolving the problem comes out of Eastern thought.  I’ve been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which one well-known attempt to address Western-framed questions through the lens of Eastern metaphysics.  My college thesis was in the same vein.

Although something seems more “right” to me about this third approach, I feel like writing in that space hasn’t really done a a good job answering what the relationship between consciousness as a physical phenomenon to consciousness as an experiential one really is.

We understand the physical side of consciousness much better now than the Zen monks did back when they were sitting around thinking non-dualistic thoughts back in the day.  We don’t have a complete story for how consciousness works, but we can now say some meaningful things about it: it’s a computational feedback process that involves forming representations of things in the world, including representations of itself.  This quality of self-representation seems to be the thing that makes consciousness so weirdly unlike most other physical phenomenon in the way it picks up and magnifies complexity, leading to things such as language, art, ability to build rocket ships, etc.

So if a monist metaphysics is true, I wouldn’t really expect to be able to give a written explanation that describes in objective terms how the whole thing works.  Rather, I would expect that the only way I could achieve a sense of understanding is to erase the distinction between myself as the person asking the question, and the phenomenon I’m trying to understand, thus forming an explanatory circuit with me in the middle of it.  That’s largely the purpose of meditation and similar spiritual practices — to get one’s mind to a state where you can actually experience understanding as opposed to being stuck in the rational, intellectualizing place where understanding is impossible.

The interesting question is whether there is degrees of understanding even in a place of non-seperation from the universe.  The way that spiritual traditions describe it, it’s kind of, you have the perspective, or you don’t.  But a lot of people entering that mind frame didn’t understand computer science, cognitive science, etc.  Can you actually practice cognitive science from a state of enlightenment?  What does such a science look like?  It would have to be inherently value-oriented instead of objective.  (That’s largely the point of Zen and the Art of Motercycle Maintenance  insofar as I understand it — that traditional, objective thinking misses the importance of having values in one’s relationship to the universe.  Where “values” basically come down to saying, this is good, I want things this way, i.e., understanding and wanting things to be a certain way as being intrinsically one process instead of the instrumental reasoning that’s more traditional in Western thought — i.e., 1. I want this, and 2. this is how the universe is, so 3. this is what I should do).

Okay, I’m starting to ramble here, so I’m cutting this post off for now.  I think that last paragraph is probably three blog posts or maybe a book before it even starts to make sense.

Right now, here is how it works.  Developer has an idea for an app.  App requires a server.  Developer rents a server, hosts that app.  Developer builds company around app.  Builds company because hosting is expensive and time consuming.  You have to worry about the app going down.   Sometimes the company takes off.  Sometimes the company fails.  Okay usually the company fails.  App dies.  Code is usually never heard from again.

Read the tweets of @Pinboard for deep insight into this life cycle.

Anyway, this is much sadness.  Because app equals company, app requires business model.  Business model is a damper on creativity.  It also generally mandates closed source, because hard to compete as a company without something proprietary.

Exception to this rule is desktop apps.  There are good open source desktop apps that evolve without a company.  Why?  Because you don’t need a server.  Developer can release code into wild, support for as long as she wants.  If code is loved, others will improve it.  Makes it easy to be a developer, you can do it in your free time.  So, linux exists, and all the apps that live on the linux desktop.

But no one wants desktop apps.  Desktop apps are terrible.  Apps should live on the internet, and be free.  Apps should be built in html5+css+javascript, which is the best toolkit for building GUIs ever invented (if you don’t believe me, build stuff in objective-c, .NET, and swing for a bit, and see how much you miss html — infinite nested boxes FTW!!!)  (if you still don’t believe me, make sure you’re using coffeescript and jquery to build your javascript).

So how about this.  Everyone has their own app server.  App server is super-easy to set up, don’t have to know anything about technology.  Tech people can host their own server, non-techy people can pay a techy company to host one for them.  Server lives at my-name-domain.com.  Server has a one-click-install page where you can download + upgrade apps.  Server offers simple API for apps to use to store data on the server, talk to other apps on the same server, talk to other apps on different servers, share system resources, etc.

Developers no longer responsible for hosting their own apps.  Developers can make apps open source, can fork each other’s apps at will.  One-click-install page could talk straight to GitHub.

Result: renaissance in high-quality open source web apps.  Easy to build and release and modify and improve, all open.

Result: more control for individuals.  You have your personal server with your favorite email app, your favorite blog app, your favorite status-update app, link-sharing app, file-sharing app, etc.  All your data is on your own server, you own it.  You can be as a paranoid or as permissive about privacy and security as you want.  Highly technical users can customize their individual app environments, and run personal code easily.  You don’t need ifttt if all your stuff is on the same box and the box is totally under your control.

Anyway, this is obviously an awesome future.  I will probably have to build it as a spin-off to Bubble once Bubble is more self-sufficient.  Unless someone wants to take it on right now!

A couple observations:

• The 1990s were a largely optimistic decade in terms of the economy and the sense that the world was going in a good direction. That optimism is largely replaced by pessimism. Everyone generally agrees that things are a mess, although a precise definition of what the mess is is controversial.
   
• The economy is undergoing a transition away from physical labor towards jobs that involve working with ideas. This is a disruptive transition, likely on par with the industrial revolution in terms of changing the life of the average worker, and at this point there is no general agreement on what society will look like coming out the other side.

Most people I think would more or less agree with this. What gets controversial is what to do about it.

There are two major schools of thought as regards to the right policy course to deal with these issues. The first major school is to get out of the way of the free markets and let the “invisible hand” of capitalism do its work. The second major school of thought is to temper the free markets via some combination of wealth redistribution and regulation.

(There are of course other ideas out there. One I think is important is a focus on creating educational systems that will help workers through the transition, which I think is possible common ground for the above two positions. Then there’s also more extreme forms of redistribution such as Marxist ideas that reject the free market altogether, but I think that’s largely been discredited since there are no real examples of successful Marxist economies).

I’m not a fan of either major school of thought. I see them as more closely related to each other than is generally perceived. Extremists on both sides call each other a lot of names and believe that if only the other side didn’t exist, everything would be okay. Howver, both the regulate-and-redistribute partisans and the free-market advocates have something important in common: they both see capitalism as the primary engine of wealth creation. Their difference is that some of them want to let that engine rev at max RPMs while the other side believes we’ll get better mileage if we take it back a few notches.

I think what we really need to help us through the transition to an information economy is a second engine. To use a dumb analogy, I feel like we’re flying in a 747 where only the left wing engine is turned on. What I want to talk about here is what the second engine might be, and how to press the ignition switch.

Before going there, though, let’s talk about what capitalism gets right. Capitalism has been wildly successful in terms of creating wealth. I think the majority of its success can be attributed to two of its attributes:

• Freedom and decentralization of control
• Following the grain of human nature

First, capitalist systems are decentralized; each individual is free to choose how they want to contribute to society. This is very efficient, since each individual is better informed about their own circumstances than, say, a central government. But more importantly, it means people are free to try out crazy ideas. No one tells you, “nope, you aren’t allowed to do that, you’re supposed to be laboring on the farm this month.” Since most really really good ideas start out sounding a little crazy, this is a radically important advantage.

Second, capitalism follows the grain of human nature instead of cutting against it. Capitalism doesn’t try to get people to do things they don’t want to do. Instead, it creates incentives so that people do want to do things beneficial to society (in theory, anyway). One of the deep conenctions to human psychology that capitalism takes advantage of is that people like scoring points and winning. By given people counters in the form of money, they get concrete, visceral feedback on whether they are “winning” or “losing” the capitalism game. As anyone who designs games knows, this kind of feedback is very important, and people voluntarily seek it out, especially when there’s an understanding that getting a high score is rewarded.

Because of these properties, capitalism is a very stable system; people voluntarily participate in it without having to be coerced or motivated. This is important, because it is easy to say “if everyone did X or Y, we’d all be better off”, but if not everyone in the world agrees with you (and they never do!), what you get is political gridlock, people shouting at each other, or violence, instead of results. Capitalism has managed to survive for hundreds of years of history precisely because it is not arrogant. It doesn’t tell anyone what to do, it just offers them incentives.

My belief is that capitalism is probably one of the best possible systems for a low-technology, resource-limited society to adopt to transform itself into a high technology, abundant society. I am coming to believe, however, that it is a terrible system for a high-technology, abundant society to continue transforming into a just, stable, and creatively-free society.

The basic problem is that in a low-technology world, value creation is closely tied to physical goods and hands-on services. In a high-technology world, value creation is the generation of ideas and information: a hit song, a software algorithm, a fertilizer formula.

Physical goods have the following properties that work well with capitalism:

 

• The cost to produce them approximates their value. Physical goods that are easier to produce are more plentiful and therefore less valuable; goods that are harder to produce are less plentiful are therefore more valuable. Cost and value can diverge, but they’re in the same general ballpark.
   
• Putting more effort into producing physical goods pays off fairly linearly in terms of additional value created. If you double the amount of time you spend making pots, the number of pots you have is more-or-less doubled. Likewise, as you do a better job at making them, the value of each pot increases, but while a good pot might sell for two times or even a hundred times more than a bad pot, it generally won’t be worth a million times more (Qing dynasty vases notwithstanding).
   
• If you give up a physical good, you don’t have it any more. This means that trading physical goods is generally a fair exchange, in that both parties lose something and both parties gain something.
   

These properties result in the traditional analogy of “free market competition”. This phrase gets used a lot, but let’s actually think about the visual metaphor. A “free market” connotes an open space where people can walk around as equals, buying and selling from each other. “Competition” connotes a sporting event, friendly rivalry where people try to best each other according to a given set of ground rules. In a low-tech world, this analogy is fairly on the mark. While there’s never truly been a “level playing field” in human society (i.e., it matters what family you get born into, what gender you are, etc.), in a low-tech world, capitalism does more or less tend to create an environment where the harder you work, the better you do.

This is not true in a high tech world. Technology changes the basic way value works:

• The cost to produce ideas / information does not approximate its value. Rather, a single person working by herself for a few weeks can write a song that gets broadcast to a billion people overnight. A small tweak in an agricultural system can produce millions more heads of corn.
   
• Therefore, spending additional effort producing ideas does not have a linear scaling effect on the value you create. Rather, value tends to fluctuate wildly depending on market circumstances. For instance, if you had the second-best social network idea, it’s worth a million times less than Facebook. A great dress design in the hands of an independent clothing designer might lead to $10,000 in revenue; that same design produced by H&M might be worth a few million.
   
• If you give up a piece of information, you still have it. If I copy my music collection and give it to you, I can still listen to all my music just as easily.
   

This creates an entirely different “market” dynamic. Unlike low-tech capitalism, high-tech capitalism is not a competition in the way the Olympics is. It is a competition the way that World War II was.

The winners in a high-tech economy are the people with the right vision at the right place at the right time. As technology advances, the value of labor decreases, because jobs that can be filled with interchangeable people are also the jobs most likely to be automated away. Outside of the service industry, there is ruthless pressure to move towards higher-and-higher skilled roles, as the lower skill-rungs keep on getting replaced by computers. Increasingly, the only successful people are going to be those who are un-interchangeable; the entrepreneurs, the artists, the idea-generators. In a country with 300 million people, it’s hard to imagine everyone succeeding on such a path.

Competition in a world like this is brutal and all-or-nothing. Slight differences in starting position can have exponential impacts. Hard work and effort can still pay off, but not equally for everyone.

There is an increasing sense that we live in an unfair society. The wealth gap between the richest and poorest has diverged from historical norms. People realize at an intuitive level that when a CEO of a successful company plays “capitalism”, they are playing a totally different game than when a sales clerk plays “capitalism”. A CEO is not a sales clerk who worked harder. The old “worked his way up from the mailroom” story is just not realistic in a high tech economy.

My concern is for what happens to people when they move from a world of polite, fair competition to total economic war. I don’t want to live in a world where the choice is either to just get by, and hope I can afford healthcare and rent, or play to win big. I want there to be a middle path, but it’s getting increasingly narrow. I’m playing the game myself — I started a technology company and I’m trying to make it successful — but I’m worried about what kind of a world technology and capitalism will create together. Amazon.com, a company that I admire in a lot of respects, is a classic example of this. This is what it’s like to live in the world they are building if you aren’t a technologist: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

I think that these concerns can be blunted, but not eliminated, in a capitalist system. We can smooth out the wealth disparity by increasing the amount of redistribution we do. We can regulate to make sure that people on the bottom of the system have at least a basically humane life. And we can increase the fairness via better systems of education, to lessen the impact of your starting point in life on your eventual outcome. However, as technology advances, I think the trend of big winners and big losers will only accelerate. Even if the winners give more and more of their earnings away, it still leads to a weird two-caste society where a small set of people drive the engine, and everyone else is along for the ride. That’s not a society I want to be a part of.

What I imagine instead is a society where we turn on a second engine of economic growth, one that more people can participate in. This second engine is economic collaboration, as differentiated from economic competition.

Collaboration, unlike competition, can work in an imbalanced setting. Even if you’re in a much stronger position than me, we might still both be better off working together than going on our own. In a competitive economy, the weak are irrelevant, whereas in a collaborative economy, “weakness” does not preclude participation. Relative power dynamics (e.g. ownership of capital) are not as important if the question is how can people best help each other.

Collaboration is inherently suited for an economy of ideas. Ideas tend to build off each other. The very properties that make them difficult to fit into capitalism are the same properties that make them work in a collaborative setting. The fact that you can give an idea away and still have it yourself is a disadvantage if you’re trying to sell it, but it’s an advantage if your goal is to share it. (The experience of the music industry watching their “analog dollars” turn into “digital pennies” is a good example of the clash between capitalism and technology).

So it is not a coincidence that one of the most successful examples of a collaboration economy is happening on the technological frontier. In the software industry, traditional capitalist organizations play a big role in driving forward growth, but increasingly, advances have come from the open source community, which operates based on collaboration. People help each other write code and give it away their code for free, and are compensated by the respect and esteem of their peers.

It is important to understand that this compensation is not a fuzzy, abstract thing. Rather, someone’s standing in the community can be evaluated very concretely, by looking at a couple of well-known websites. For instance, most people evaluating a software developer for a job will look at what projects they have contributed to on GitHub, and check what their reputation score is on the knowledge-exchange website Stack Overflow. These metrics translate into high-paying job offers (or in the case of this this recent Kickstarter project, directly into cash).

Although this collaboration economy is promising, right now it’s limited. It’s missing a key piece for it to fully come to life and play an equal role with capitalism in creating growth.

Let’s recall the two big things capitalism gets right: freedom / decentralization, and going with the grain of human nature. Collaboration economies are already nailing the first element. The open-source ecosystem is as free as a market can be; people have total discretion in their choice of with whom and on what to work. The best efforts tend to attract talent, since there’s no reputation to be gained working on something valueless. The invisible hand is effective and hard at work.

The second element, inherent motivation, is more of a problem. For a professional software developer, contributing to open source is a smart career move. But the reputational benefits of working on open source are limited to within the technology community. In contrast, doing work for pay helps you in society at large. The grocer down the street recognizes dollars; she doesn’t recognize github commits. So the selfish benefit of playing the collaboration game is limited. Most open-source developers still need a day job to pay the bills.

Another way of putting the problem is that today’s collaboration-based economies are domain-specific. You have to be a member of a specific community to transact on your reputation. This is analogous to the problem at the dawn of capitalism: if you had wood and wanted food, and your neighbor had food but wanted pottery, you needed to find someone who had pottery but wanted wood or you were out of luck.

The solution to this dilemma is currency, a common medium of exchange that, by mutual agreement, represents economic value. Getting to this mutual agreement was a gradual process; early currencies were things deemed valuable in their own right, like abalone shells or gold; later currencies were backed by an official promise to convert them into gold. Now, currencies are backed by the reputation of the issuer; people’s belief, for instance, in the ability of the US government to follow through on its obligations.

Currency is more than just a way of facilitating interactions, however. It’s also a scoreboard. I believe that capitalism goes beyond taking advantage of self-interest to actually defining self-interest; it changes the way people understand what “success” is. For good or ill, people seek external cues to measure their worth; currency, as measured by a number on a bank statement, or in a paycheck, or a position on a Forbes list, becomes the standard that people judge themselves by.

Unfortunately, in a technological world, the scoreboard is optimizing for the wrong thing. It’s optimizing for facility at acquiring property in often-zero-sum competition, which, while beneficial in terms of unlocking innovation, is also destructive to the people caught up in it, and unsustainable in a world where the difference between first place and second place can be billions of dollars.

I’m a pragmatist. Although I think people often act for values-driven, moral reasons, I don’t think a system is long-term sustainable unless people organically want to cooperate with it, both at their worst and at their best. Inorganic, top-down solutions don’t work and don’t last. So to me, the big question is, can we do for collaboration what currency did for competition?

The starting point is asking what the fundamental unit of value is in a collaboration economy. In a competitive economy, the answer is property ownership: currency evolved out of physical property. In contrast, in a collaborative economy, the fundamental unit of value is your relationships, or social capital. It’s not what you have, it’s who you have.

The archetype of property as stored value is cave-people preparing for the winter by stockpiling food and furs. The archetype of relationships as stored value is preparing by building strong friendships with people who will help you hunt and maintain a fire. Obviously, both are important; it’s dangerous to go into the winter either friendless or food-less.

A relationship’s value, in blunt, economic terms, is the willingness of the person to help you in a time in need. At the heart of good will for a friend is the idea “if you ever need me, I will be there for you.”

Following this train of thought leads to this idea:

What if there were a system of currency that represented goodwill? Where the basic unit was backed by the promise “if you need my help, I will help you?”

I imagine, to start with, just as dollars were backed with gold, that this new currency would be backed with the promise of monetary aid. If we call the currency “goodwill”, then we could say that 1 goodwill = an obligation to help out to the amount of 1 dollar. Unlike a loan, however, the expectation is that goodwill is generally not paid back (except under situations of need), but paid forward. Thus, I can give goodwill to you, and you can give it to me, without it canceling out. In cooperative relationships, unlike competitive ones, we’re both better off by being mutually indebted.

I see goodwill as being non-transferable (except maybe in special cases such as the death of the issuer); I give out my goodwill to you; you give your own goodwill to others. Unlike money, giving goodwill away does not make you have less of it; you can issue as much as you want. There is a cost, though, in that it creates an obligation on you to the other person, so there’s incentive not to give it away insincerely.

I see goodwill being electronic and public. Physical currency doesn’t work because when you give something physical away you don’t have it any more. As the economy turns digital, so should the currency. I see it as public, because a lot of the value in being given goodwill is that others can see that you have it. So I can imagine goodwill being represented on a website or app where you can see entries like “Hannah gave 10 goodwill to Emmanuel on Thurs at 1pm; Aaron gave 15 goodwill to Emmanuel on Thurs at 2pm…” and so on.

The goal of the new game, then, is to convince people to give you goodwill by bettering their lives. The more goodwill you get, the more convincing your goodwill is to others. This is just a basic human reality; being owed a favor by someone who a lot of people owe favors to means more than being owed a favor by someone who no one is indebted to. I can imagine an algorithm like Google’s PageRank showing a summary of your overall social capital. People who have a high score benefit, because others will be eager to earn their highly valuable goodwill (just as website owners want to be linked to by popular websites more than unpopular ones). Importantly, though, even if someone isn’t particularly rich in social capital, it is still better to have their goodwill than not to have it. Unlike in a competitive economy, where winning is closer to zero-sum, there’s room for people at the margins to meaningfully participate and work their way back into the game.

This dynamic is no different than already exists in society. People help each other out in order to build networks, and influential people benefit from the freely given help of the people around them. The difference is that with a goodwill currency, the information becomes public and transparent. For instance, helping out someone in San Francisco who works as a school teacher would count favorably towards your interactions with a bunch of firemen in New York, because it would show up on your public record. (Whereas today, if the firemen don’t know the teachers, your good deed goes unrewarded).

To put it another way, people today put in effort to accumulate property (financial capital) and relationships (social capital). Financial capital, however, has an important advantage, because financial capital is measurable and liquid, whereas social capital has no commonly agreed-on medium of communication. The idea is that by making social capital more measurable and liquid, we can shift the relative value of financial to social capital. And since social capital is inherently cooperative, whereas financial capital is inherently competitive, by making social capital more prominent, we can move the economy more towards cooperation.

I don’t see money going away, at least any time soon. But I do see ideas and information, relationships and connections, becoming increasingly valuable relative to goods and services. Our current economic model is straining under this reality. The technology world is plagued by contention over “intellectual property”, which is a legal abstraction that castrates ideas to make them behave more like traditional physical property. These limitations, although understandable in a world where money is the only thing you can trade ideas for, are toxic to economic development. And as competition in the idea-space increasingly becomes winner-take-all, more and more people are becoming economically disenfranchised altogether.

Mitigating these societal strains will undoubtedly take a variety of forms. I’m worried, however, that the existing set of solutions doesn’t contain any measures that address the heart of the problem, which is that competitive capitalism isn’t the right engine of economic growth to handle technology. My hope and hypothesis is that by creating a medium for social capital, we can create a society-wide cooperative economy, leading towards a more just and more prosperous world.

I am not a policy radical. On questions such as “Should government be bigger or smaller”, I believe the answer is “it depends.”

What I am is a process radical. I believe the process of government should be radically improved to be more transparent and dialogue-driven.

I don’t feel represented by the Democratic or Republican platform, because I don’t feel that either party is committed to radically improving the process of government. I also don’t feel represented by third parties such as the Libertarian or Green or Tea party. They tend to be committed ideologically to extreme policy decisions, whereas I think the real world is complex and messy and doesn’t lend itself to one-size-fits-all answers.

I want a party that represents the process radicals, the people who are open-minded about what the right policy decision is, but want to make sure the process of making the decision is both effective and democratic.

During the recent campaign, President Obama did something amazing. He went onto reddit, an internet news and discussion site, and answered direct questions from the American people for thirty minutes. (People voted on the best questions, which rose to the top).

I think this kind of thing should happen every single day, not for thirty minutes of a multi-month campaign. I want a President who sees his job as communicating with the American people. That doesn’t mean always agreeing with them: sometimes it means persuading and educating, and sometimes it means listening.

Instead, what I see is a shield wall of press secretaries, journalists vying for access, and political propaganda that only occasionally comes down to allow a moment of genuine connection.

Communication means treating people with respect, and hoping to learn something from them even when you disagree. I find that the dialogue promoted by the major parties is the exact opposite of that. It’s acceptable in America to refer to people you disagree with as “crazy”, “evil”, or “stupid”, as long as no one who holds the opposing view is actually in the room with you.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at the center of every major constituency, including the Tea Party and The Occupy Wall Street movement (to pick two groups on opposing extremes), there is a core of good, intelligent, passionate human beings whose beliefs make total logical sense to them given their life experiences. I think failing to acknowledge that truth makes political progress impossible, and the contempt that many “reasonable” people have for members of these groups is infinitely more poisonous to political discourse than any specific policy agenda any of those groups advocate.

Therefore I am not interested in traditional categories of political affiliation. I have beliefs I feel strongly about, of course, but I would vote for someone who disagreed with me on some of those beliefs if she disagreed respectfully, intelligently, and with the willingness to find a solution that I could live with even if it isn’t the one I would pick myself.

So here’s the platform of the Transparency Party:
 

1. Regular, unfiltered interaction between political leaders and their constituencies. This should be in mediums that are accessible to as many people as possible, and with the opportunity for people to ask the hard questions and hold their leaders accountable. Obama going on reddit should be the norm, not the exception.
2. Absolute honesty with the American people. It is unacceptable for politicians to lie to the people who hold them accountable, just as it’s unacceptable for an employee to lie to her boss or a CEO to lie to the board. Politicians should have the right to say “I’m not going to answer that question, because…”, but the excuses need to be compelling and legitimate, and have a clearly defined expiration date.
3. Commitment to treating the political opposition as human beings. This goes beyond “bi-partisanship”, which implies that there are two opposing sides that are reluctantly negotiating with each other. It means fighting to develop a real working relationship where people brainstorm ideas rather than negotiate compromises.
4. No compromises on basic human rights. If people can’t participate because they don’t have the political or economic freedom to do so, then it doesn’t matter how democratic the political process is.
5. Simplicity and clarity in legislation. This doesn’t mean dumbing things down; it means fighting to get rid of unnecessary complexity. This makes it possible to focus on where the complexity really is necessary, and get it right.
6. Pragmatic, empirically oriented decision-making. Small, experimental programs that can then be scaled if they’re successful are preferable to big, sweeping, all-or-nothing initiatives. How a policy is implemented and executed is just as important as what the policy is.
7. Use of technology to achieve the above goals. We’re a far bigger, far more fragmented society than we were a hundred years ago, but we also have far more powerful communication tools. Government should be using the full power of the internet to connect with, educate, and learn from its citizens.

I just wrote probably the most ridiculous, and sort of awesome, code of my life to date. 10 points if you can figure out what it does and what the point of it is (and 20 points if you find a bug!)

The code exports two functions, u.bind and u.let (which is syntactic sugar for a special case of u.bind). Here’s an example / test-case of using them:

class Thing
    constructor: ->
        @x = 0
        setInterval =>
            @x += 1
            @get_x_multiplied_by.update_all()
        , 1000
   
    get_x_multiplied_by: u.bind (y) -> @x * y

a = new Thing()

u.let -> document.title = a.get_x_multiplied_by 7

And here’s the code that defines u.bind and u.let:

#u = module.exports
u = {} #for in-browser testing

u.UUID = -> (Date.now()) + 'x' + Math.round(Math.random() *1e18)

_running_bound = null

magic_number = u.UUID()

smish = (thing) ->
    if thing != null and (typeof thing) == 'object'
        if not thing[magic_number]
            thing[magic_number] = u.UUID()
        return thing[magic_number]
    else
        return (typeof thing) + thing

smush = (args...) -> 
    return (smish arg for arg in args).join('')

run_bound = (bound, fn, args) ->
    hash_key = smush args..., this
    if _running_bound
        if not bound.depends_on_me[hash_key]
            bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] = []
        if _running_bound not in bound.depends_on_me[hash_key]
            bound.depends_on_me[hash_key].push _running_bound
            
    old_running_bound = _running_bound
    _running_bound = {bound: bound, args: args, old_this: this}
    
    if bound.results_cache[hash_key] == undefined
        bound.results_cache[hash_key] = fn.apply this, args
        bound.args_cache[hash_key] = {args: args, old_this: this}
    
    _running_bound = old_running_bound
    
    return bound.results_cache[hash_key]
    

u.bind = (fn) ->
    bound = (args...) ->
        val = run_bound.call this, bound, fn, args
        return val
    
    bound.depends_on_me = {}
    bound.results_cache = {}
    bound.args_cache = {}
    
    bound.update = (args...) ->
        hash_key = smush args..., this
        delete bound.results_cache[hash_key]
        delete bound.args_cache[hash_key]
        bound.apply this, args
        
        depends = bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] ? []
        bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] = []
        for depend in depends
            depend.bound.update.apply depend.old_this, depend.args
            
    
    bound.update_all = ->
        for key, {args, old_this} of bound.args_cache
            bound.update.apply old_this, args
    
    return bound


u.let = (fn) ->
    bound = u.bind fn
    bound()

If you paste the code followed by the test case in the “try coffeescript” window of coffeescript.org, you can see it in action (watch the webpage title).