6 ms·

Pack Hunters of the Silicon Savannas

89 points by edward 10y ago

zelias 10y ago
Well, that ending was unexpected, though certainly foreshadowed appropriately.
mwcampbell 10y ago
> I've been running somewhat sadistic live experiments over the last years. The results show that loosely-organized groups of "average" people will systematically beat tightly-coupled teams of "brilliant" people, when solving the same problems, on the same playing field. We have done twin studies: take the same software DNA, fork it, and raise in two opposed environments. The outcome is dramatically clear. The crowd beats the genius. Not just once either. It happens over and over. I'd like to know more about this. Has he written about these experiments elsewhere?
- PieterH 10y ago
  The specific case was the fork of ZeroMQ in 2011 to create Crossroads.io, in which the two dominant contributors took the project and created a head-on competitor. They used their own preferred process. The ZeroMQ project switched to a community-driven process (C4). Crossroads died after a short while. It then spawned Nanomsg, which tried again to beat the ZeroMQ community in this game. Again it failed. That spawned several dark forks, none of which has had any traction. I wrote about this in http://hintjens.com/blog:112 http://hintjens.com/blog:112. I didn't provoke the fork, really, yet when it happened, it seemed like a perfect experiment. Same DNA, two different environments.
  - mwcampbell 10y ago
    I think the sample size may be too small to draw any general conclusions.
    - PieterH 10y ago
      This is absolutely true, and why it can only aspire to science at this stage. Many factors were involved, such as network effects.
- Applejinx 10y ago
  I think that's a very plausible conclusion. I've been working up something along the same lines (further justifying the underlying concept). The mechanism you're using is essentially the genetic algorithm, and that depends on being fed an extensive diet of 'not brilliant' people to throw semi-complete and individually failing ideas into the mix until you get a lucky combination. It is indeed science, just maybe not the science you expected :)
- armitron 10y ago
  This is obviously entirely false if one takes "genius" to mean someone who does things a non-genius would not be able to do. There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for. Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a genius comes along that the leap actually happens." I could not agree more with this. Alan Kay also outlines an extremely similar point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc (Normal considered harmful). Programming is an artistic/creative process. The crowd will never beat genius in this game since the "vision" of the crowd will be diluted by each participating individual. The obvious exception here lies in crowds that are ruled by geniuses with an iron fist (thus not really committees), something which can only strengthen my point. Examples that support this from the past 30 years in technology are countless. We even have sayings about software designed-by-committee. The point Hintjens is trying to make with ZeroMQ is flawed because he equates the evolution of an idea that has already manifested to the inception of the idea itself.
  - PieterH 10y ago
    You're simply shifting the goal posts to try to keep others from scoring. There is no "idea". There are hundreds of thousands of small incremental steps.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Apparently, there was a story about Murray Gell-Mann, where his graduate students realized that he didn't think of things they couldn't, he only got there faster. So while exploring a new line of research, they brainstormed for an hour without Gell-Mann, then had their new insights thought out ahead of time. So they then reenacted the brainstorming session with him, such that they could blurt out all of the new insights just before he could speak. (Usually, it worked the other way around.) He was left wondering if he was losing his touch. I had a grad school professor who was like this. He was constantly speaking the thought, just as you were completing it in your head.
nedsma 10y ago
"Are things better now? For most of us, life is easy. We are fed and pampered, kept healthy and alive. We left our planet with our new owners, and never looked back. Perhaps wild humans still roam there. Disease, conflict, poverty, hunger, waste: these are historical concepts, unknown to us moderns. Does the immortality compensate for utter loss of self-determination? Did the Borg(s) save us from ourselves, or did they break the branch of human history? When they bred the predator out of us, did they raise us up, or condemn us to evolutionary death? It is unknowable." In the Matrix movie there was an interesting moment when Cypher grew tired of all real world struggle and wanted to return into his cocoon, take the blue pill back and to enjoy relative comfort in the illusory world of the Matrix. Self-determination, obviously, didn't work for him.
chatmasta 10y ago
If you like this line of thinking, you will appreciate the recent book "The Seventh Sense" which looks at the upcoming world from the perspective of network science. I'm about halfway through and highly recommend it.
msane 10y ago
removed, apologies
- metaphorm 10y ago
  thats some serious mud-slinging. would you care to at least explain why you think that?
  - msane 10y ago
    I regret posting this and will delete it. it is not meant to be mud slinging. I care for him. I dont know him personally. Though i have interacted with him on lists and he is charming and knowledgeable and generous with his time. I just think he went a little bonkers at some point. Read the book and come to your own conclusion.
- PieterH 10y ago
  Hit a little close to home, did it? :)
  - msane 10y ago
    i think it does for everyone. life is messy and there are few innocents. we should strive to do the right thing, but branding everyone who disagrees or has done injury as a "psychopath" is not on that path. there were a lot of cool and honest insights which people dont usually speak about which i enjoyed, thank you. and there are many people who are dangerous who should be treated carefully. but i came away questioning the state of the author.
    - PieterH 10y ago
      Speaking as the author, there were certainly moments when I questioned my own state. That is part of the path, it seems. And indeed, most of us do harm at some point, yet are absolutely not psychopaths.
      - 10y ago
mnemonicsloth 10y ago
tldr: malware evolves into superintelligence. I'm afraid evolution doesn't work like that. Here's a good book (some math): https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382 https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equat... The long and the short of it is that software can't evolve because too much of its genome space is lethal, and the non-lethal parts are non-contiguous, so the quasispecies decoheres -- if it survives at all -- instead of climbing to the top of the fitness landscape.
- ridgeguy 10y ago
  I'd also suggest a book by Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. [1] Not software explicitly, but patterns of behavior, which is pretty close. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
  - gopalv 10y ago
    The "Tit for Tat" in the Axelrod experiment winning out is probably the clearest example of a global-winning strategy that's still susceptible to a single-hit psychopath (worse, multiple hits by a sociopath). The core idea is that lots of nice strategies working with each other can beat the ingenious evil ones, is a really positive spin on the usual Prisoner's Dilemma's "defect first" model.
- phreeza 10y ago
  This is true for classical machine instructions, but what if future software looks more like a huge neural network with a small driver attached?
  - pnathan 10y ago
    Modern artificial neural networks aren't designed like that; they are pattern recognizer/generator systems. Further, it is understood that Turing machines and neural networks are computationally equivalent. So it doesn't advance the question to reframe it into a different computational substrate.
ajani 10y ago
As much as I enjoy fictional, armchair partial-cosmology, this evolution-based explanation of every aspect of humans - intelligence, social behaviour etc, is just so unimaginative. Couldn't evolution itself evolve to a point where it diverges from the conventional structures held to compose evolution? Besides, if self evolved as a response to cheating, we must explain cheating outside of the concept of self. Why would you cheat if you are not separate as an individual?
- joshmarlow 10y ago
  "Couldn't evolution itself evolve to a point where it diverges from the conventional structures held to compose evolution?" In theory, that's what intelligence/civilization is doing isn't it? We're replacing one optimization process (natural selection/mutation/etc) with a new one (forethought/planning/etc). When we talk about genetic engineering, or AI, or anything like that, we're talking about replacing evolution with intelligent design. We're evolution++.

89 points by edward 10y ago

Well, that ending was unexpected, though certainly foreshadowed appropriately.

> I've been running somewhat sadistic live experiments over the last years. The results show that loosely-organized groups of "average" people will systematically beat tightly-coupled teams of "brilliant" people, when solving the same problems, on the same playing field. We have done twin studies: take the same software DNA, fork it, and raise in two opposed environments. The outcome is dramatically clear. The crowd beats the genius. Not just once either. It happens over and over. I'd like to know more about this. Has he written about these experiments elsewhere?

PieterH 10y ago
The specific case was the fork of ZeroMQ in 2011 to create Crossroads.io, in which the two dominant contributors took the project and created a head-on competitor. They used their own preferred process. The ZeroMQ project switched to a community-driven process (C4). Crossroads died after a short while. It then spawned Nanomsg, which tried again to beat the ZeroMQ community in this game. Again it failed. That spawned several dark forks, none of which has had any traction. I wrote about this in http://hintjens.com/blog:112 http://hintjens.com/blog:112. I didn't provoke the fork, really, yet when it happened, it seemed like a perfect experiment. Same DNA, two different environments.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  I think the sample size may be too small to draw any general conclusions.
  - PieterH 10y ago
    This is absolutely true, and why it can only aspire to science at this stage. Many factors were involved, such as network effects.
Applejinx 10y ago
I think that's a very plausible conclusion. I've been working up something along the same lines (further justifying the underlying concept). The mechanism you're using is essentially the genetic algorithm, and that depends on being fed an extensive diet of 'not brilliant' people to throw semi-complete and individually failing ideas into the mix until you get a lucky combination. It is indeed science, just maybe not the science you expected :)
armitron 10y ago
This is obviously entirely false if one takes "genius" to mean someone who does things a non-genius would not be able to do. There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for. Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a genius comes along that the leap actually happens." I could not agree more with this. Alan Kay also outlines an extremely similar point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc (Normal considered harmful). Programming is an artistic/creative process. The crowd will never beat genius in this game since the "vision" of the crowd will be diluted by each participating individual. The obvious exception here lies in crowds that are ruled by geniuses with an iron fist (thus not really committees), something which can only strengthen my point. Examples that support this from the past 30 years in technology are countless. We even have sayings about software designed-by-committee. The point Hintjens is trying to make with ZeroMQ is flawed because he equates the evolution of an idea that has already manifested to the inception of the idea itself.
- PieterH 10y ago
  You're simply shifting the goal posts to try to keep others from scoring. There is no "idea". There are hundreds of thousands of small incremental steps.
stcredzero 10y ago
Apparently, there was a story about Murray Gell-Mann, where his graduate students realized that he didn't think of things they couldn't, he only got there faster. So while exploring a new line of research, they brainstormed for an hour without Gell-Mann, then had their new insights thought out ahead of time. So they then reenacted the brainstorming session with him, such that they could blurt out all of the new insights just before he could speak. (Usually, it worked the other way around.) He was left wondering if he was losing his touch. I had a grad school professor who was like this. He was constantly speaking the thought, just as you were completing it in your head.

nedsma 10y ago

"Are things better now? For most of us, life is easy. We are fed and pampered, kept healthy and alive. We left our planet with our new owners, and never looked back. Perhaps wild humans still roam there. Disease, conflict, poverty, hunger, waste: these are historical concepts, unknown to us moderns. Does the immortality compensate for utter loss of self-determination? Did the Borg(s) save us from ourselves, or did they break the branch of human history? When they bred the predator out of us, did they raise us up, or condemn us to evolutionary death? It is unknowable." In the Matrix movie there was an interesting moment when Cypher grew tired of all real world struggle and wanted to return into his cocoon, take the blue pill back and to enjoy relative comfort in the illusory world of the Matrix. Self-determination, obviously, didn't work for him.

chatmasta 10y ago

If you like this line of thinking, you will appreciate the recent book "The Seventh Sense" which looks at the upcoming world from the perspective of network science. I'm about halfway through and highly recommend it.

msane 10y ago

removed, apologies

metaphorm 10y ago
thats some serious mud-slinging. would you care to at least explain why you think that?
- msane 10y ago
  I regret posting this and will delete it. it is not meant to be mud slinging. I care for him. I dont know him personally. Though i have interacted with him on lists and he is charming and knowledgeable and generous with his time. I just think he went a little bonkers at some point. Read the book and come to your own conclusion.
PieterH 10y ago
Hit a little close to home, did it? :)
- msane 10y ago
  i think it does for everyone. life is messy and there are few innocents. we should strive to do the right thing, but branding everyone who disagrees or has done injury as a "psychopath" is not on that path. there were a lot of cool and honest insights which people dont usually speak about which i enjoyed, thank you. and there are many people who are dangerous who should be treated carefully. but i came away questioning the state of the author.
  - PieterH 10y ago
    Speaking as the author, there were certainly moments when I questioned my own state. That is part of the path, it seems. And indeed, most of us do harm at some point, yet are absolutely not psychopaths.
    - 10y ago

mnemonicsloth 10y ago

tldr: malware evolves into superintelligence. I'm afraid evolution doesn't work like that. Here's a good book (some math): https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382 https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equat... The long and the short of it is that software can't evolve because too much of its genome space is lethal, and the non-lethal parts are non-contiguous, so the quasispecies decoheres -- if it survives at all -- instead of climbing to the top of the fitness landscape.

ridgeguy 10y ago
I'd also suggest a book by Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. [1] Not software explicitly, but patterns of behavior, which is pretty close. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
- gopalv 10y ago
  The "Tit for Tat" in the Axelrod experiment winning out is probably the clearest example of a global-winning strategy that's still susceptible to a single-hit psychopath (worse, multiple hits by a sociopath). The core idea is that lots of nice strategies working with each other can beat the ingenious evil ones, is a really positive spin on the usual Prisoner's Dilemma's "defect first" model.
phreeza 10y ago
This is true for classical machine instructions, but what if future software looks more like a huge neural network with a small driver attached?
- pnathan 10y ago
  Modern artificial neural networks aren't designed like that; they are pattern recognizer/generator systems. Further, it is understood that Turing machines and neural networks are computationally equivalent. So it doesn't advance the question to reframe it into a different computational substrate.

ajani 10y ago

As much as I enjoy fictional, armchair partial-cosmology, this evolution-based explanation of every aspect of humans - intelligence, social behaviour etc, is just so unimaginative. Couldn't evolution itself evolve to a point where it diverges from the conventional structures held to compose evolution? Besides, if self evolved as a response to cheating, we must explain cheating outside of the concept of self. Why would you cheat if you are not separate as an individual?

joshmarlow 10y ago
"Couldn't evolution itself evolve to a point where it diverges from the conventional structures held to compose evolution?" In theory, that's what intelligence/civilization is doing isn't it? We're replacing one optimization process (natural selection/mutation/etc) with a new one (forethought/planning/etc). When we talk about genetic engineering, or AI, or anything like that, we're talking about replacing evolution with intelligent design. We're evolution++.