Pointform Summary
|
|
Pointform Summary |
|
|
Perhaps the best thing to do at this point is just to say what I have to say, as concisely as I can, regardless of the fact that it is really addressed to the intersection of the two cultures and such people scarcely exist. Here then is what I have to say, briefly summarized. Full explanations to follow.
1. It is reasonable to treat society as a network of individuals connected by friendship and other social relationships.
2. This approach to society can be more than just a metaphor -- it can have real consequences.
3. It is possible and strongly advisable to evaluate the connections of the social network and to investigate both local and global properties of it.
3. Very ordinary human problems such as finding a job, finding a home, finding a mate, and finding friends all depend upon the ability to make good connections, and thus on ability of the social network to supply useful information about possible connections.
4. It is possible to use mathematical methods to create tools for social network optimization which can be used by individuals without any knowledge of the underlying mathematics.
5. Most social problems can be seen as optimization problems which are similar to problems mathematicians and computer scientists know how to solve.
6. The fundamental task in any optimization problem is defining what shall count as optimum -- creating a precise definition of what is good and what is bad.
7. Once that hard part is done, the rest of the problem is simply a matter of computation, although the amount of computing power and time may be impossibly large in some cases.
8. Defining what is optimum remains the most fundamental step, and is very much like the requirements analysis stage of systems engineering.
9. Indeed I think systems engineering (and perhaps engineering in general) is very much like optimization.
10. Optimization problems are of many different kinds, some very much more difficult than others.
11. Of these, the most difficult, but also the most important are combinatorial optimization problems, which arise when discrete choices are involved.
12. Optimization of the social network to make sure everybody is well-connected to compatible spouses, employers, and friends is clearly a combinatorial optimization problem.
13. Existing algoriths for combinatorial optimization can be adapted for use within society in a non-coercive way by treating the fundamental task as the provision of suggestions which "prune the search trees", leaving each individual free to make his or her own decisions, but narrowing the space of possible solutions.
14. It is most important to carefully construct criteria for evaluating when social situations are closer to or further from optimum.
15. The most fundamental criterion for social optimization is whatever the individual people involved in any social situation say it is, but this can be globalized by careful estimation and confirmation of the effect of changes on individual human lives.
16. Although not appropriate or acceptable to many, a fundamental technique for estimating optimal connections involves the collection and evaluation of psychological, aptitudinal, educational and other test scores.
17. Whether or not test scores are actually used in this process, the space of possible test results can be used to define social relationships.
18. Although individual people can override this, the most general goal for optimization is probably to embed each person in a virtual network of close, compatible human relationships so as to maximize communication and cooperation between them.
19. This is a recursive process in which newly connected people can help each other make some of the decisions which are necessary to choose among the suggested possibible connections.
20. Diverse views on equality, individualism, freedom, and social integration can simultaneously be accommodated within the social network, which will most probably contain regions organized differently to support the differing ideals of the individuals in that region.
21. The change from the badly organized society of today to a future society which everyone can agree is much closer to optimum can be effected by a sensitive non-coercive program of social technology which will encourage appropriate connections and reconnections between people, but will do so will well-defined safeguards to ensure privacy and confidentiality.
22. Privacy can be ensured by encryption schemes, especially by double public-key cryptography in which both parties in any exchange of information must use specially designed protocols.
New: Social Technology through Diagrams
New: Social Techs novel online
The main Social Technology page.
Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained
Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology
Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.
Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:
Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.
Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.
Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.
Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.
I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.
Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.
By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.
As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.
In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.
I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.
This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.
Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology
Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, Douglas Pardoe Wilson
I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.