Re: . 2.7 Million Morons

On 2 Dec 2003 15:10:57 -0800, Steve Harris  [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:
> 
> Ed, I'm talking about something a tad more specific than just renaming
> every action you take in society as "information processing."  I'm
> after all the wasted mind-power that goes along with doing very
> specific social tasks, which is basically wheel-spinning. For example,
> consider the popularity of murder-mysteries. But why murder mysteries?
> Why not physics mysteries, or astronomy mysteries, or math mysteries?
> My mother reads murder mysteries like popcorn, and so do a lot of
> other folks. What gives?
> 
> Well, if you see murder mystery as engaging the part of the brain that
> evolutionarily is required to do a certain amount social blame-fixing
> or justice-finding every day, like breathing, it all becomes
> understandable. Particularly as regards my mother [<g> Hi, mom]. As
> does a lot of what passes for entertainment today. We're all obviously
> starved for something, and it isn't only the opportunity to view
> violence. That's just men. Women, isolated in their less and less
> communal lives, are obviously starved for the opportunity to figure
> out and fix general social merit.

This is what sim games are for!  There is no reason I should spend hours
setting up a stupid little fake city, except that some part of my brain
isn't otherwise getting its organizational fix.
 
> Ken would like a market for the product of such processing, rather as
> we had in the old days when everybody in the small town or tribe knew
> everybody else's buisiness. And your "reputation" was the equivalent
> coinage or currency output of the sum product off all this. You had a
> certain social reputation, and it was basically a separate social bank
> account, just like an economic one. But it definitely wasn't
> completely interchangable. People bought their way into society
> occasionally, and even bought elections, but there were some things
> money just couldn't buy. Patrick J. Kennedy was very pissed off about
> this over his life (Nevermind Harvard-- think of him in England, yuk,
> yuk). And I predict that his son JFK, had he lived, would have lived
> to learn a few lessons in the matter also. Things like this were
> catching up to him toward the end, and he only beat them in life by
> ducking into history early.

<snip>

There are a few small new ways in which people's actions gain them a
numerical rating.  Frex, Ebay, where the only way to get a good rating is
to actually do what you claim you're going to do.  Also, there's Slashdot,
where (if I understand correctly) posters are rated by how interesting
they are, and you can set up your session so you only see posts by people
of a certain interest threshold.

Charles Stross has extrapolated these out into science fiction stories
where people have a personal rating, which indicates how
famous/influential/good/cool they presently are.  Kind of like if an
ego-search for each person was done on Google, and the results were
weighted and put in a world-wide list, updated minute-by-minute.


-- 
- Laurel   *  *  *   http://amberdine.com