... How the Power of Diversity Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
    The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
    Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."

An aspect of that is also that humans are adapted to argue together in small groups and find creative solutions together:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
http://lifehacker.com/can-rati...

Of course, then to keep a group of such people motivated, they need autonomy, challenge/mastery, and purpose, like Dan Pink outlines here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

And until we get a basic income for all, at least enough money to live a decent life in our society so money is essentially off the table as it has reached the point of diminishing returns for people who like their work:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

I don't seem to have "Rogue Bolo" in my sci-fi book collection, but the cover on Amazon looks familiar. I think I might have given it away one Halloween decades ago living in Princeton, NJ when I gave the option of getting books instead of candy to some trick-or-treaters (several teens there seemed to prefer the books).

Your point on a Bolo singularity makes me think about the Asimov universe, and how his robots there eventually interpreted the three laws in a way "The Zeroth Law" that gave them lots of independence, and that saw themselves as in a way more "human" than humans, and also caused them to start intervening in history behind the scenes. There is no set of laws or constitution that ultimately does not need some intelligent judge to interpret the meaning or spirit of the words in a present day context, and once some intelligent entity (including an AI) starts creatively interpreting "rules" including "metarules" about how rules can be changed, who knows where it will end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Inspired by your post, I've been looking through my Bolo books. I started rereading "Ploughshare" by Todd Johnson in "Bolos: Book 1: Honor of the Regiment" where "Das Afrika Corps" and other Mark XVI C Bolos act a bit odd due to a spilled milkshake by the "Director's son" in the "White Room" psychotronics lab and the use of "DK-41" cleaning fluid to fix that mess up. Another case of the unexpected...

I liked "Bolo Rising" novel which has a Bolo Mark XXXIII series HCT called Hector. That is an interesting novel of a Bolo regaining its operational capacity after being infiltrated and locked down by alien technology. There is another XXXIII in "Bolo Strike". But while those mega-Bolo stories are interesting in their own sort of over-the-top way (maybe your point about "the other guy"), I like the diversity in the short stories in "Honor of the Regiment" by a variety of authors covering the whole history of different Bolos of various capabilities and their unfolding increasing sentience and self-directedness. What does "Honor" or "Service" means over time and shading into a meta-level? For example, are whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, or Kiriakou honorable and engaged in service and fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution? Or are they traitors? Complex questions... Perhaps "Rogue Bolo" goes deeper into such issues? As a lesser example, "Bolo Brigade" explores the issue of a conflict between "rules of engagement" and a Bolo's desire to get its job done. Conflicts between priorities are not something that only humans will face...

It is not clear where the singularity of emerging AI and technologically-expanded-or-narrowed humans and so on will all lead in reality -- especially with Bolo vs. Beserker as an option. I forget the plot of "Bolo Strike" as I look at my Bolo books, but the blurb on the back says "as Bolo faces human-Bolo hybrid in a cataclysmic showdown". So there are other ways automated systems can cause change, either their own independence or by empowering some few independent humans. As I essentially say near the end of the 2000 post to the Unrev-II Engelbart Bootstrap mailing list, corporations are like vast machine intelligence at his point. And like the present day, what is the real difference to most people if the Earth is laid waste, the seas polluted, the mountains leveled, the oceans strip-mined, and most of the people kept down in their aspirations for a decent life by "aliens from outer space" or by some 1% of vampire-like human-machine-hybrid-organizational "aliens" who have become specialized in "extracting wealth" by privatizing gains and socializing costs (including the cost to the worker of unpleasant work environments)? Even without human-Bolo hybrids, there can be vast technological/bureaucratic enterprises that make use of humans as parts much the same as the "!*!*!" of "Bolo Rising" tried to do in their quest of "efficiency" -- "efficiency" to what end and to whose benefit? So much of sci-fi is a way that people can reflect of concerns of the day, but at a safer intellectual distance.

Anyway, reminds me I should try playing with my kid this old Metagame I have around somewhere and have not played in decades and was inspired by the Bolo series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Well, 3D printing is a lot like magic cauldrons, so we may both be right in the end. :-)

Of course, magic cauldrons are not without their downsides: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Yeah, I've seen surveys that say humanity in the West can more easily imagine nuclear war or other destruction of everything we care about instead of significant social change... None-the-less, as Howard Zinn wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

BTW, to fix a typo, one sentence should be: "While I like Iain Bank's Culture Novels, I wonder why the [AIs] there, both human-level and way-beyond-human-level take so much effort to take care of humans and cater to them."

... simulated cannibalistic robot killers in the 1980s on a Symbolics running ZetaLisp. I gave a couple conference talks about it, plus one at NC State (where I wrote the simulation) that I think even may have influenced Marshall Brain. I had created a simulation of self-replicating robots that reconstructed themselves to an ideal from spare parts in their simulated environment (something proposed first by von Neumann, but I may have been the first to make such a simulation). The idea was that a robot that was essentially half of an "ideal" robot would make its other half by adding parts to itself, then split in two by cutting some links, and then do it again. The very first one assembled its other half, cut the links to divide itself, and then proceeded (unexpectedly to me) to then start cutting apart its offspring for parts to do it again. I had to add a sense of "smell" so robots would set the smell of parts they used and then not try to take parts that smelled the same. I also mention that simulation here:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

Decades later, I still got a bit freaked out when our chickens would sometimes eat their own eggs...

My point though is that completely unintentionally, these devices I designed to create ended up destroying things -- even their own offspring. It was a big lesson for me, and has informed my work and learning in various directions ever since. Things you build can act in totally unexpected ways. And since creation involves changing the universe, any change also involves to some extent destroying something that is already there.

James P. Hogan in his 1982 book "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" which I had read earlier should have been a warning. In it he makes clear how any AI could gain a survival instinct and then could perceive things like power fluctuations as threats -- even if there was not intent on the part of the original programmers for that to happen.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought" assigned as reading in college also should have been another warning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

It's been sad to watch the progression of real killer autonomous robots since the 1980s... Here is just one example, and the exciting, upbeat music in the video shows the political and social problem more than anything:
"Samsung robotic sentry (South Korea, live ammo)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Just because we can do something does not mean we should...

I was impressed that this recent Indian Bollywood film about an AI-powered robot took such a nuanced view of the problems. A bit violent for me, but otherwise an excellent and thought provoking film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Enthiran is a 2010 Indian Tamil science fiction techno thriller, co-written and directed by Shankar.The film features Rajinikanth in dual roles, as a scientist and an andro humanoid robot, alongside Aishwarya Rai while Danny Denzongpa, Santhanam, Karunas, Kalabhavan Mani, Devadarshini, and Cochin Haneefa play supporting roles. The film's story revolves around the scientist's struggle to control his creation, the android robot whose software was upgraded to give it the ability to comprehend and generate human emotions. The plan backfires as the robot falls in love with the scientist's fiancee and is further manipulated to bring destruction to the world when it lands in the hands of a rival scientist."

But yes, the Beserker Series is another signpost in that direction -- perhaps countered a bit by the Bolo series by Keith Laumer? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

But I tend to think that, for reasons like I wrote, and Hogan wrote, and Winner wrote, we will never be able to keep all AIs on a short leash. While I like Iain Bank's Culture Novels, I wonder why the Is there, both human-level and way-beyond-human-level take so much effort to take care of humans and cater to them. Having been in an Ecology and Evolution grad program since those robot days, there are just lots of things one can expect of any living system.... And the initial Rossum's Universal Robots stories that gave us the term "Robot" was about essentially a slave uprising. I don't have a problem imagining we can make flexible machines that help us. But there is likely some fuzzy line (and I don't know where it is exactly) where systems that start to act intelligent or sentient begin to deserve rights -- both for their own sake and for ours, since while slavery degrades and warps the slave, it also ends up degrading and warping the master as well in other ways. If we build advanced AIs, the outcome may well be better if we intend them as "Mind Children" like Hans Moravec writes about (and whose lab I hung out in at CMU for a time in the 1980s when he was writing it) -- or at least companions and friends (if also helpmates working together with us for our mutual benefit) more like the robots became in the movie "Silent Running".

A funny robot movie we watched the other day that again gets at some deep themes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

See "The Skills of Xanadu", as text: http://books.google.com/books?...
and as audio: https://archive.org/details/pr...

Around 2001 or 2002, while working at at IBM Research I went to a talk by Ted Nelson there, and I asked him about the story given the similar name. He said that the story had inspired him (at least partially) to do his work, and thanked me for telling him the name of the story, saying he had been looking for that story for a long time. While I did not say so, his reply about looking for the story surprised me given that there are probably not many stories with Xanadu in the title so a library search would have found it I would think.. Ted Nelson records everything around him on a tape recorder (or at least did then), so that interaction should be on one of his tapes...

The 1956 story by Theodore Sturgeon is am amazing work that features a world networked by wireless mobile wearable computing supporting freely shared knowledge and skills through a sort of global internet-like concept. Some of that knowledge was about advanced nanotech-based manufacturing. The system powered an economy reflecting ideas like Bob Black writes about in "The Abolition of Work", where much work had become play coordinated through this global network. The story has inspired other people as well, both me from when I read it (and forgot it mostly for a long time, except for the surprise ending), and also a Master Inventor at IBM I worked with who got inspired by the nanotech aspects of that story when he was young. Even almost sixty years later, that story still has things we can learn from about a vision of a new type of society (including with enhanced intrinsic&mutual security) made possible through advanced computing.

A core theme is an interplay between meshwork and hierarchy, reminiscent of Manuel De Landa's writings:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/man...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."

See also, for other "old" ideas we could still benefit from thinking about:
"The Web That Wasn't"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007
    For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside.
    The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system. We'll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past.
    Speaker: Alex Wright
Alex Wright is an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Previously, Alex has led projects for The Long Now Foundation, California Digital Library, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, Rollyo and Sun Microsystems, among others. He maintains a personal Web site at http://www.alexwright.org/"

For example, here is what people were doing in 1910:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"The Mundaneum was an institution created in 1910, following an initiative begun in 1895 by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, as part of their work on documentation science. It aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification. Otlet and La Fontaine organized an International Conference of International Associations which was the origin of the Union of International Associations (UIA). ... Otlet regarded the project as the centerpiece of a new 'world city' -- a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents. Some consider it a forerunner of the Internet (or, perhaps more appropriately, of systematic knowledge projects such as Wikipedia and WolframAlpha) and Otlet himself had dreams that one day, somehow, all the information he collected could be accessed by people from the comfort of their own homes."

If everyone stuck all their cash and other non-cash funds into their mattresses, it is basic mainstream economics that we would have a huge financial depression from lack of currency for exchange. So, why do mainstream economists have trouble understanding that the same thing happens if take all that money and instead stuff it into computers in the digital equivalent of a casino frequented mostly by the wealthiest (the stock market, derivatives, currency speculation, etc.), where the money spends all its time in transactions have little relation to the real goods and services that most people spend all their money on?

My take on that was from an idea I first saw a glimmering of in "Money As Debt II":
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.co...
"Today the largest volume of money by far is changing hands in what is best described as the gambling economy... the foreign exchange market, the derivatives market and the rest of the financial instruments being played by banks and investment funds for as much profit as possible. For example, the volume of trade on the world's foreign exchange markets, in just one week, exceeds the total volume of world trade in real goods and services during an entire year. This money is in continuous play by speculators looking to make windfall profits on currency fluctuations. It exists... but only in the gambling economy."

Your tax on transactions could help with reducing the FIRE-sector casino economy by discouraging so much trading, but it does not get at the root of things like wealth concentration, since wealthy people could still just park money in cash or gold or real estate. A progressive income tax going up to 90%+ like we had in the USA decades ago, with the revenue redistributed as a basic income might help with wealth concentration. So might a wealth tax (but that is harder). Modest inflation also discourages hording money by forcing wealthy people to spend money, invest it, or lose it.

Other alternatives to keep things going despite an absence of cash for the real economy due to it being stuffed into computers include more LETS systems (alternative currency that promotes community), making what little currency there is in the real economy move faster, expanding the gift economy, improved subsistence production, and better government planning using current tax dollars.

So much of our wealth today is the product of generations of hard work by so many people including those creating inventions and other new ideas building on previous ideas, and in that sense is effectively a common inheritance. C.H. Douglas talked about with "Social Credit":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

"Computers don't have a long history of serving humans yet."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Or the recent Slashdot article on robots being used to rip apart mosquitoes...
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Or previously, slugs:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
""SlugBot is no ordinary robot. SlugBot hunts down slugs, and is powered by fermenting the slugs' corpses, producing biogas fuel. "

See also, for a different robotic dystopia from helping too much and "protecting" too much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Life seems livvd between fire and ice, between order and chaos.

Computers and software have been through several generations over the last 70 years (and more). The failures we still see IMHO have more to do with our social systems (including legal frameworks) than with the possibilities of hardware or software. The same is perhaps true of nuclear power -- Fukushima happened more for social reasons than technical ones..

Well said! Now if we could only get people also to apply the same ideas to fixing up programming languages and libraries (e..g Swift vs. C/D/Java/JavaScript/Smalltalk/etc.) instead of inventing new ones that just have different gaps and different bugs...

Overheard at lunch there around 2000 (paraphrase): "We hire the most competitive candidates from the most competitive top three schools and then we wonder why they have trouble cooperating and getting along..."

I hope the policy has changed since... It also seemed like they were passing over a lot of interesting people and thus limiting their cognitive diversity.

See also Scott E. Page book "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/Differen...

Google probably suffers to a lesser extent from a similar problem as I suggest here:
http://developers.slashdot.org...

https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."

And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
    Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
    A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
    And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""

Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org...
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists.
    While young people were grouped together and instructed/trained/initiated into adult life in the very earliest human civilizations, the story of state schooling best begins with Plato (427-347 BC), who really laid much of the philosophical and pedagogical framework for schools as we know them in the West. Plato believed that education and schools were the most important function of the state, and that school spending should equal that of the military.
    Precisely because schools were so important in Plato's conception of the ideal state, he was adamant that education not be left to private interests, who could not be trusted to keep the good of the whole in mind. He was also clear that once the system was in place, no change could occur, schools had to maintain strict ideological continuity:
    Those who keep watch over our common wealth must take the greatest care not to overlook the least infraction of the rule against any innovation upon the established system of education.[1]
    In The Republic Plato asserted that the state should take responsibility for training children from the age of three and that each citizen could be guided by the system towards an ideal conception of justice and into the social class and occupation best suited for him. Education had to be universalized so that all citizens[2] could be effectively screened and placed. In this Plato was emphatic that it was the state's job to support and control schools and to make them compulsory. There was no question in Plato's mind that schools should be designed by the state to support the state."

The USA early on had a different sort of state -- a democratic republic empowered by large numbers of independent small business people, mostly self-reliant farmers, most growing up in big families and part of strong local communities. It took about a century of compulsory schooling starting around the late 1800s to bring it down, including by destroying family life and community life. Now we have mostly forgotten what those people had (see Jane Jacobs on "Dark Times Ahead" and forgetting). Is that really what we want for our children and ourselves? We have iPhones and the web; they had economic self-reliance as well as community. How can we have the best of both worlds? Hint: it is probably not through more compulsory schooling.

Thanks for pointing this out (article submitter here). People make points in other comments about MetaFilter's business strategy, varied content, or grousing about the moderation. Your comment instead emphasizes the positive about how how MetaFIlter is one of the longest running online communities and it is trying to sustain itself. One comment I saw on MetaFilter compared these donations to the end of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
http://metatalk.metafilter.com...

I've never been a MetaFilter member. Nor have I paid much attention to it anytime recently other than seeing stories on it now and then found by whatever random process. But a couple months ago I added it to my list of interesting news sites. Every day it has some interesting and generally pleasant (non-trollish) discussions linked to on the main page as the best of the discussions. I can see the value in that and the work that goes into it. As I wrote to someone just before hearing this news, Slashdot is like the discussions I had in college around the computer center and the engineering buildings; MetaFilter is like the more randomly varied discussions I had in the dorm hallways, dining halls, and maybe the social science buildings.

Having recently "discovered" this jewel that reminds me of the better part of what the internet was in the late 1990s, it is sad to see it struggling. Slashdot is a community I have long enjoyed and participated in, and itself may itself be facing some of the same general issues. It's a bit surprising to me to see in some of the comment here a lack of acknowledgement of the parallels. Why do they think "Beta" is being pushed? People may say MetaFilter is not "original" content like a news articles. Nonetheless, I feel discussions about new articles are themselves important content. I read Slashdot not so much for the articles but for the discussions which often point out how the articles are wrong or misleading, or add lots of details to the articles, or put the articles into a broader context. Discussion has its own value, both for participants and for lurkers. I don't know if it is true, but I did find interesting the speculative comment by someone that the fall in traffic could reflect that maybe Google does not want competition with its own Google+?

Another story has a link to a video where Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, explains the size of the site and the moderation infrastructure and its history:
http://newstorystudio.com/why-...
http://vimeo.com/21043675

Matt sounds like someone who really cares about his community, sort of like a town mayor (and a founder who never "sold off" from the early internet days, unlike Slashdot getting sold off to various new owners). Guestimating from their staff size and their revenue loss and member base (on the order of 10,000 active members), it must be take at least US$20K - US$40K a month to keep that community humming along for staffing costs (mostly for moderation I would think)? Or guessing on the order of about US$2 to US$5 per active member per month? Computers and bandwidth for hosting used to cost something significant, but nowadays for a text-mostly site I would not think those matter much?

It seems to me that the financing of all this has been for the past few years mostly that people not in the community (non-posters) drive by via Google and generate ad revenue, and that revenue then supports the community. The people who actively participate in the community must be a much smaller percentage of views. It looks like with MetaFilter, the people who funded the community were not the people who actually inhabited the social process of it.

That reminds me a bit of where I live in the Adirondack Park. Much of the money coming into the community is from summer tourists or summer residents when the population swells 5X or so during the summer. But these tourists and summer residents are not usually people who make up the volunteer firefighters, the emergency ambulance squad, the boards of various non-profits, or the store owners and most of the other workers. These are all groups the summer visitors rely on though. My local community would be a financial basket case fairly soon if, like with MetaFilter, the "summer people" stopped coming. And yet there are various social distinctions and resentments all around related to social class, rich/poor divides, political views, and so on. The two groups eye each other warily because they have different interests and outlooks. (The local social dynamics are even more complex than that, including retirees sometimes moving full-time to the area after being summer residents, so this is a simplification.)

People can say that MetaFilter is just another discussion site, but that misses the point. MetaFilter is another community of people, the same way that small towns that dot the US landscape are communities. There is a lot of value to the people in the community that the community exists for them and that it persists. The community relationships and history are in that sense unique to the people involved. But like my physical community, MetaFilter is in trouble if the "summer people" stop coming -- unless it can figure out a different strategy for funding itself, or getting the basic moderation tasks done by volunteers, or if it scales back services painfully (which it just did, hopefully not to the point where people move to the big cities of Facebook or Google+ though). I've seen several internet communities fade away during the past decade. It generally has been a painful experience for many. Slashdot itself has has struggles with this, and the new controversial push to "Beta" to increase ad revenues is part of that struggle.

Slashdot has a very different model of moderation and "free speech" than MetaFilter, which has its pros and cons. I'd expect it might be cheaper to operate Slashdot than MetaFilter in that sense? To work from the "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exhanged, Planned, Theft" perspective I've written about, it seems that MetaFilter's moderators (paid staff) work in the "exchange" economy, whereas Slashdot's moderators (site members) mostly work in the "gift" economy. That is a big difference in scalability. There are certainly many moderated mailing lists out there, so volunteer moderation is nothing new. But Slashdot came up with a workable system for the web (including meta-moderation) and more importantly got the community to actually use it well. It is not clear if some new community could succeed the same way because Slashdot got its critical mass of people by being in the right place in the right time in the early years of the web.

Still, any large community of humans like a small town tends to have things like taxes (for a "planned" economy enforced ultimately at the Sherrif's gunpoint), elected or affirmed governance who spends those taxes on democratically planned projects, and some paid staff to do routine-but-essential work like road repair & garbage collection & animal control & so on (and for some towns, policing if not done by the county or state). Slashdot has a budget no doubt (not sure what it is or what it goes towards). Both MetaFilter and Slashdot are small towns in that sense (thousands of participants). They are both small towns that have survived for over a decade across big shifts in the internet, which means they are something special as far as being healthy communities (even with problems). It is not unreasonable for such small towns to need to fund themselves somehow. But the question is how? Or, will they just be replaced by something else as no longer being economically viable?

And if so, what will replace such communities? Paul Jones has his #noemail campaign to move to social media. But if not email, as I pointed out to him early on, so many other social media options people actually chose seem to entail moving to big providers like Facebook or Google and a loss of local control and local archives. I suggested we need a decentralized social semantic desktop if we were to move beyond email. His blog on "noemail":
http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog...

But in any case, communities are not software, nor are they the artifacts of communities (like archived discussion posts). Clay Shirky writes about how hard it is to write software for communities here:
http://www.shirky.com/writings...
"Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse."

My wife has worked towards some other FOSS social software (Rakontu), and I have my ideas about a FOSS "Pointrel/Twirlip Social Semantic Desktop & Public Intelligence Platform". So, I've been thinking about what it takes nowadays to make an economic success of such ventures. Discussion about MetaFilter and the web has been illuminating in that regard. I'm glad to see the MetaFilter community trying to sustain itself somehow. I can hope the Slashdot community could do the same if it had to.

Because what is the alternative to essentially voluntary communities with some degree of self-determination with control over their own software and content? There was a time in the USA when there were lots of small corner stores like cafes and bookstores and barber shops and five-and-dime stores which acted as community centers as well as what they sold. Then came shopping malls (Facebook and Google+?) and these small stores mostly went under or at least lost so much traffic their community value diminished. But the big malls full of national chains (or now Walmart everywhere) do not fulfill the same extra social functions the small stores did (including just running into neighbors going into or out of local stores and chatting with them).

And further, the big stores, being large zones of private property, became protest-free areas, because being surrounded by big parking lots they were very different than small stores with public sidewalks in front of them. Several comments to this article are by people who are afraid to put various content on their web sites for fear of losing Adsense accounts and related revenue or who felt they had to take down such content in response to email from Google. What would they do if the complaints from Google Adsense became about political content on their site or links to political sites? If we want a "free" web, paradoxically do we have to pay for it (either in money or volunteer time or perhaps even in taxes)?

Show me some citations for your accusations? Fuhrman's main book "Eat to Live" is one of the most scientifically-grounded books on nutrition, with thousands of references to substantiate his points with evidence. That said, I don't agree 100% with everything he recommends (see below) in part because of the nature of the limits of what you can find in the scientific literature, as well as the difficulty of making sense of conflicting studies. There is also the fact that most nutritional studies start with a fundamentally sick and detoxified Western population (however good their basic vitals are) and so it may be hard to draw broad conclusions about what would be best for people eating very diferently to begin with. The future is individualized medicine based on genetics and the intestinal microbiome and also lifestyle and history, but we are not there yet. So, it is possible to question some broad recommendations he makes -- which is also shows the limit of writing books on a complex topic like human health for a general audience.

For examples of where I disagree some with Furhman, for many people (although not those at strong risk of hemorrhagic stroke), Fuhrman's advice on severely limiting salt intake may be questionable IMHO (versus just mainly avoiding processed foods and their salt load which makes them palatable). We need salt for brain function and stomach acid. While too much salt will create problems especially for some specific people, it is hard to know what the acceptable limit is in individual people, which also depends on how much potassium they eat and other aspects of their health. Most people probably should eat less salt, but how much less is an area of contention and there are some conflicting studies.

Furhman may also be a bit low on his vitamin D recommendations. He did base his recommendation on a scientific study related to vitamin D and mortality, but I feel there are other aspects to that beyond what he cited.

Maybe my biggest concern is that Furhman may not clearly enough state the importance of iodine and his recommendations are based on the US RDA for that which may be 10X too low (see Brownstein). The problem is that if you follow Fuhrman's advice to eliminate dairy (a good source of iodine since cows concentrate it from grass) without also adding sea vegetables or an iodine supplement to your diet (or iodized salt, see above), it seems to me you may become iodine deficient. This is especially true if you eat foods from one part of the world given many agricultural lands especially in Europe are iodine deficient. It is also true because we are exposed to so much bromine in Western countries which is an iodine antagonist, suggesting we need more iodine to compensate for that. The issue of iodine is one of emphasis about getting enough iodine given his other advice would reduce it and he suggests a low target to begin with. For example, here he does suggest iodine supplements, but not to emphasizing it to the degree he should IMHO given all the other aspects of his approach:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

In general, Fuhrman's advice to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables is also difficult to follow for most people living in a Western culture including due to cost of vegetables and fruits given US agricultural subsidies for grains and animal products. Also, eating such things out-of-season poses environmental and social costs for transport and supporting big farms in foreign countries which may not be well-regulated or engage in fair-trade.

Less-demanding (but less rewarding) whole-grain-heavy advice by John McDougall or Andrew Weil may be easier to follow and in the end thus achieve better overall results in our society for many who have trouble following Fuhrman's approach. Fuhrman originally trained as a world-class athlete (figure skating), so he seems to expect a lot of self-motivation and self-control in others -- as well as perhaps the financial resources to afford the best health.

But those are mostly relatively minor quibbles compared to the big picture Fuhrman outlines of "health being equal to micronutrients divided by calories". If someone want to heal from an injury, including a brain injury, you need the right nutritional building blocks to do so (mainly found in whole foods), and you need to avoid the wrong building blocks (like many food additives).

Personally, I have no connection to Fuhrman beyond having benefited from his writings and having bought some of his products. As above, I question a few things about his advice. I even complained to his related company about some organic bean pasta he sells which is sourced in China because I question the integrity of foods from China even when organic, and his site did not label the origin. I threw a pack of them out the day I got them and saw they were from China. I liked some other of his products I tried though, like the flavored vinegars, the salad dressings, the soups, and the date-nut popums (all fairly expensive though, so I'm not a recurrent purchaser). I like what he is trying to do with his vitamin supplements (like avoiding folic acid in them) which are designed for people eating more vegetables and fruits and such (and do have iodine, if perhaps too little). I feel it can be a fair criticism of Fuhrman that his increasing commercial activities in selling products create a conflict-of-interest; but remember that he seems to have started selling all these products only after writing his first books in the area, and the products are aligned with his previous advice. Still, it would probably be fair to say that at this point in his career, Fuhrman is invested in a perspective and set of advice and related products, and it would be hard for him to change with new information. I still hope he emphasizes iodine more in the future though.

But the fact that some of Furhman's advice (or some of his products) can reasonably be criticized in specific situations is far different than being a "quack". Perhaps the biggest issue is that many real "quacks" have MDs after their names and pull in tons of money per year while ignoring alternatives; as Furhman says (which no doubt upsets many who make money from such things):
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. ... The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions."

I have seen that "coralling" happen to multiple people I know. It even just happened with President Bush (just to show how difficult it is to get good advice)"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"The controversy surrounding the proper treatment of stable heart disease was highlighted by former President George W. Bushâ(TM)s decision to have a stent placed, even though he had not had a heart attack and was not experiencing angina (chest pain caused by restricted blood flow to the heart). During an annual exam, his stress test showed an abnormality; then an angiography showed a blockage, and President Bush and his physicians decided to proceed with stenting. Of course, we donâ(TM)t know all the details of President Bushâ(TM)s condition, but the situation brings to light an important issue in healthcare in the U.S.: having a stent placed in the absence of symptoms is common in the U.S., but is it good medicine or malpractice?"

My own father died of a heart attack about six months after having a stent placed. I now know thanks to Fuhrman and others that stents don't fix the underlying process of arteries getting obstructed by plaque. The clogging will just happen again to the stented arteries. And stents in the heart also won't prevent other arteries getting clogged like in the brain and leading to ischemic stroke, plus overall poorer health due to less oxygen getting into the body's cells (including in the brain) due to thick arterial walls. If we had now of Furhman's advice instead back then, my father might still be alive today a dozen years later. Instead some heart doctors made a bunch of money off of my father's heart condition, caused him to suffer a needless operation and then gave him a false sense of security. A similar thing happened to a sister a couple years later -- expensive painful heart surgery which did not address the underlying nutritional cause, followed somewhat afterwards by death. If you want to talk "quackery", isn't that what most cardiologists do these days?

The cancer industry has similar problems where no alternatives are discussed to expensive invasive treatments. These are treatments where the doctor recommending them (or any "second opinion" doctor in the same industry) has a big financial stake in the patient obtaining the prescribed treatment. And where the results are very uncertain and not worth it for many patients compared to alternatives. And where patients are not informed clearly of nutritional alternatives. Cancer though is a bit different because it is best avoided by good nutrition and good lifestyle; it is iffy to cure it by any means once it is widely established, although there are alternatives one can explore which are focused on boosting the immune system.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Regarding the original comment on recovery from brain injury and nutrition, a big problem with the western diet especially for brain development is that the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids is so different from what we are adapted to consume in the past. See for example:
"The importance of the ratio of omega-6/omega-3 essential fatty acids."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"Several sources of information suggest that human beings evolved on a diet with a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 essential fatty acids (EFA) of approximately 1 whereas in Western diets the ratio is 15/1-16.7/1. Western diets are deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, and have excessive amounts of omega-6 fatty acids compared with the diet on which human beings evolved and their genetic patterns were established. Excessive amounts of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and a very high omega-6/omega-3 ratio, as is found in today's Western diets, promote the pathogenesis of many diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, whereas increased levels of omega-3 PUFA (a low omega-6/omega-3 ratio) exert suppressive effects. In the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease, a ratio of 4/1 was associated with a 70% decrease in total mortality. A ratio of 2.5/1 reduced rectal cell proliferation in patients with colorectal cancer, whereas a ratio of 4/1 with the same amount of omega-3 PUFA had no effect. The lower omega-6/omega-3 ratio in women with breast cancer was associated with decreased risk. A ratio of 2-3/1 suppressed inflammation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and a ratio of 5/1 had a beneficial effect on patients with asthma, whereas a ratio of 10/1 had adverse consequences. These studies indicate that the optimal ratio may vary with the disease under consideration. This is consistent with the fact that chronic diseases are multigenic and multifactorial. Therefore, it is quite possible that the therapeutic dose of omega-3 fatty acids will depend on the degree of severity of disease resulting from the genetic predisposition. A lower ratio of omega-6/omega-3 fatty acids is more desirable in reducing the risk of many of the chronic diseases of high prevalence in Western societies, as well as in the developing countries, that are being exported to the rest of the world."

So, they probably don't see snakes often except on TV watching Crocodile Dundee: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...