I decided to make a quick update to the last blog. Two months is a long time in SL and a lot has happened since. The most important event has been the creation of a new Philosophy Island (PI), a whole sim dedicated to discussions and debating. PI sim was originally created by Lokifluff, but now it is administered by a council of it's residents, who have rented maybe 70 % of the area and and an elected "senate" which oversees the common areas and the activities there. I don't remember the slurl address, but you can find PI easily by typing Philosophy island in the SL map search.
Philosophy Island's common area has camp fire (much like in PH) for ongoing discussions, and there are also lots of scheduled and moderated presentations and speeches. The scheduled events have covered a very wide range of topics, such as Wittgenstein's views on dualism, moral realism, the usefulness of meme hypothesis, Rawl's theory of justice or even the benefits and threats of natiolism and patriotism. Go check the weekly program of events. It can be acquired close to the PI campfire, located roughly at the center of the island.
It will be interesting to see how the activities in PI will develop. Namely one of the big challenges in anonymous discussion forums has been the moderation policy. I have been planning to write an essay about my experiences about hanging in various philosophy discussion forums in the internet and SL since summer 2000 (10 years this summer!). I have noticed that all anonymous philosophy/politics/religion forums tend to undergo a similar kind of evolution from the initial enthusiasm and idealism after the founding of the forum to flame wars and when the interesting discussions bring traffic, to the unavoidable attacks of malicious trolls, spammers and abusive griefers. Then follow the neverending metadisucssion and whining about moderation policy (or the lack of it) and finally the decay of the forum to a boring socializing chat forum, where any attempt to discuss philosophy will be considered as snobbery... It's funny how all the unmoderated or "lightly" moderated forums tend to follow the same phases of evolution. It would seem that the life span of an unmoderated or lightly moderated philo discussion forum is about 2-3 years from the initial enthusiasm, where people spend a lot of time in preparing their contributions to make a serious and interesting discussion to a silly chat room, where the average length of replies is 3-4 words.
Of course the forums with a very tight moderation keep griefers away and the discussions stay focused on the topics that the forum was founded for, but it tends to happen at the cost of livelyhood or the playfulness of the atmostphere. And a tight moderation will definetely consume a lot of resources for the administrator of the site. So in some ways the "heaviness" of moderation will be a choice between quantity of traffic and quality of discussions. Some moderation is usually always needed, because if the atmosphere is let to be too abusive and rotten for too long time, it will lead to all the serious contributors (who I think are the interesting ones) to abandon the forum for good.
Some people are concerned that any moderation whatsoever would restrict the freedom of expression and somehow hinder innovation. That is a of course a valid concern....yet according to my experience from over 10 years in several (officially politically neutral) forums, I cannot say that I had ever encountered a moderation decision where the decision had been based on the political or philosophical content of the opinions that someone has expressed. The moderation decisions have practically always been caused by spamming, verbal abuse or personal attacks that do not relate to the discussions. In practise, the true restricitions to people's freedom to have a conversation with each other have been caused by self centered spammers or hostile trolls.
I do think though that sometimes the moderators have not been fully up to their task. People are very sensitive about the equal treatment and the consistency of the moderation policy. I have seen cases, where a moderator might have favored some type of humor over something else, or given some people special privileges for example in a way that someone's abusive behavior has been overlooked because the person has been a regular for so long, or she/he is moderator's friend. Sometimes there has been even cases where it has looked as if the moderator had wanted to create drama on purpose...A manipulative moderator, yikes!
Usually all the moderators have been appointed by the administrator of the forum, (in SL, by the owner of the sim). However in Philosophy Island the common discussion areas are governed by a senate, which is elected by the members of the PI group, so that the governance would be a representative democracy, with elections every 3 month. It will be interesting to see, how this system will affect the evolution of the discussions and atmosphere! Will the PI common area general discussions follow the same path of evolution than the forums I have seen before, or does the democracy bring different dynamics.
In summary, my experience is that although a clear moderation policy is crucial for a discussion forum to be a hospitable place for people to hang, it almost doesn't matter what type of a moderation there will be, as long as it's logical and consisten. I would even say that when it comes to the freedom of expression, moderation policy has been factually almost a non-issue. Out of all the metadiscussion about moderation, that I have encountered, perhaps 98 % has been nothing but clueless whining and creating drama out of nothing just to annoy the other forum regulars. Not that the remaining 2% hadn't been real issues, but endless whining about moderation has spoiled the atmosphere in so many forums and caused mass escape of everyone who actually wants to discuss about something of substance.
Discussion forums are not about moderation policies, but rather about the people who want spend their time there and the expectations of the administrator: what are the topics she hopes the people would be talking about; is the forum meant for discussion about philosophy, science, knitting, food recipes or mercedes-benz spare parts, or is the purpose of the forum to create a lively theater for drama, abuse noobs and innocent bypassers or facilitate social chit chat...the moderation policy can then be chosen accordingly. Freedom of expression is hardly limited in any case, since the internet is still full of forums where to express any serious opinion whatsoever under a pseudonym. Or with an established SL identity that can be used also out of SL (like in my case). And if the moderation policy of any of the myriad existing forums is still not to one's liking, it's always possible to setup a new one in 5 minutes!
However, now there are true and serious threats to the freedom of expression in SL! Please do take a look at this blog http://whenitchanged.blogspot.com/2010/01/privacy-is-my-right-message-to-linden.html Lauren Jones has been able to point out the hazards of Linden Labs and facebook co-operation better than I could ever have been able.
If we are to be ripped away our anonymity and the possibility to create avatar identities, separate from our "meatspace avatars", it means that our meatspace dependencies will start to affect our ability to express experimental thoughts, innovative ideas not to mention making provocations in search of the hidden truths. If you have seen the trouble to read this writing all the way down here, please do check out Lauren's blog, it's really important for anyone who takes an SL identity even slightly seriously!!!
QS
PS: Lauren is talking about an SL persona that is promoting the full integration of RL and SL personas, with an obvious goal to make money...
Any PI regular reading this: Doesn't this sound a bit familiar ? =)
Q
onsdag 3 februari 2010
måndag 30 november 2009
Philo and Economics activites in SL during spring 2010
Hi!
I have been spending a great deal of my SL time in Philosophy House (PH) camp fire. Usually the discussion there is just general chit chat, sometimes not too interesting at all, but every now and then a good philosophy topic comes up and then the conversation can be engaging. But the main attraction of PH has been that there is always people, pretty much 24/7. A problem from a discussion point of view is that the chat format tends to limit how much "room" there is in the local chat window to justify your arguments. If you are not a really fast typist, the topic often tends to fade away, before you have time to get all your ideas visible - or like in my case, I come up with the all the best replies only too late, after the topic has changed already =). Of course at the same time, that is the appeal of chatting as well: The fast pace of interaction, makes it feel like a real life conversation except the strength with the text format can temporarily support several parallel threads going on at the same time.
So now there are a couple of web forums associated to PH or the crowd that comes there regularly. The idea is to offer a forum for a more slow paced discussion. Brinn Bedlam started a "traditional" internet discussion forum for PH in http://www.thephilosophyhouse.com where the idea is to allow people to write longer posts. Many of the PH regulars, that I recognize, seem to have made posts there already.
I have been planning to go even further and start an internet journal for longer article-like essays, like the some of the posts I have had in this blog. The PH journal is not officially public yet, but you can take a sneak preview at http://phjournal.ning.com. In order for PH Journal to be a real philosophical journal, there is an editorial policy. Even though there are no strict guidelines for format, the expectation is that the citations would be referenced and arguments justified. If you take a look, I'd be grateful for all feedback how you think it looks like through the phjournal mail.
I have also been active in pursuing the investigation of "Quantum theory of Economics" (QTE) in SL workshop and I have had some amazing contributors this year. During the workshop it turned out rather soon, that the idea wasn't quite so radical than I had thought in my blog in March =) It appears that there are quite many research groups working with more or less similar kind of ideas already. However applying quantum formalism to macroscopic interactions is still a very fresh approach and the field is very open for all new mathematical and formally sound theories. A new workshop around QTE, business interactions and microeconomics will now start within Tothica SL group (see for example http://www.tothicasl.net). The idea is to discuss qualitatively microeconomics and specifically how business comes into being as a result of human interactions and external circumstances (QTE apporach) and how that creates economy in general. The workshop will also have a Ning forum at http://qteconomics.ning.com, where I will gradually copy all the material from the previous QTE workshop in SL. The moderated discussions will be held in the Library of Clemson University Dev sim. For notices of exact location and time of the workshop's SL session, join the Tothica group. They have great Philo discussions and other meetings, too...and costs nothing to join!
Hope to see you not just inworld but also at all the new and fancy associated web 2.0 Ning forums!
Merry approaching christmas season
Quin
I have been spending a great deal of my SL time in Philosophy House (PH) camp fire. Usually the discussion there is just general chit chat, sometimes not too interesting at all, but every now and then a good philosophy topic comes up and then the conversation can be engaging. But the main attraction of PH has been that there is always people, pretty much 24/7. A problem from a discussion point of view is that the chat format tends to limit how much "room" there is in the local chat window to justify your arguments. If you are not a really fast typist, the topic often tends to fade away, before you have time to get all your ideas visible - or like in my case, I come up with the all the best replies only too late, after the topic has changed already =). Of course at the same time, that is the appeal of chatting as well: The fast pace of interaction, makes it feel like a real life conversation except the strength with the text format can temporarily support several parallel threads going on at the same time.
So now there are a couple of web forums associated to PH or the crowd that comes there regularly. The idea is to offer a forum for a more slow paced discussion. Brinn Bedlam started a "traditional" internet discussion forum for PH in http://www.thephilosophyhouse.com where the idea is to allow people to write longer posts. Many of the PH regulars, that I recognize, seem to have made posts there already.
I have been planning to go even further and start an internet journal for longer article-like essays, like the some of the posts I have had in this blog. The PH journal is not officially public yet, but you can take a sneak preview at http://phjournal.ning.com. In order for PH Journal to be a real philosophical journal, there is an editorial policy. Even though there are no strict guidelines for format, the expectation is that the citations would be referenced and arguments justified. If you take a look, I'd be grateful for all feedback how you think it looks like through the phjournal mail.
I have also been active in pursuing the investigation of "Quantum theory of Economics" (QTE) in SL workshop and I have had some amazing contributors this year. During the workshop it turned out rather soon, that the idea wasn't quite so radical than I had thought in my blog in March =) It appears that there are quite many research groups working with more or less similar kind of ideas already. However applying quantum formalism to macroscopic interactions is still a very fresh approach and the field is very open for all new mathematical and formally sound theories. A new workshop around QTE, business interactions and microeconomics will now start within Tothica SL group (see for example http://www.tothicasl.net). The idea is to discuss qualitatively microeconomics and specifically how business comes into being as a result of human interactions and external circumstances (QTE apporach) and how that creates economy in general. The workshop will also have a Ning forum at http://qteconomics.ning.com, where I will gradually copy all the material from the previous QTE workshop in SL. The moderated discussions will be held in the Library of Clemson University Dev sim. For notices of exact location and time of the workshop's SL session, join the Tothica group. They have great Philo discussions and other meetings, too...and costs nothing to join!
Hope to see you not just inworld but also at all the new and fancy associated web 2.0 Ning forums!
Merry approaching christmas season
Quin
torsdag 1 oktober 2009
From Political Correctness to Quantum Gender
In her book "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" [1] Karen Barad discusses how it is physically impossible to separate matter from meaning in practise. She is working towards a theory which she calls agential realism. It is based on the idea that the meanings the conscious agents making the observation have in their mind are conceptually inseparable from the object they are investigating. She says that this would be a generalization of the classical Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She quotes Niels Bohr and says: Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that “concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement” [Bohr]. That is theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. [1].
To me it seems that Barad’s ideas would somehow touch on something about the connection between matter and discourse that the existentialists and postmodernists have tried to intuitively grasp have for the last 50 decades. But unlike postmodernists in the average, Barad actually knows what she is talking about when she refers to mathematics and QM. Using the agential realism approach she discusses how we could analyze ethics, metaphysics, “topologies of power” and other branches of applied philosophy. Most concrete she gets when she applies agental realistic analysis to “technoscientific practises” and gender roles. In my (not very) humble opinion that analysis raises her in to the front row of contemporary feminist theorists. She also naturally continues from the observations of Judith Butler since I think Barad’s treatment kind of paves a QM theoretical background to Butler’s realization that even sexes, not just gender roles, are fundamentally pejorative: Sexes are in practise created by actions and interactions rather than being a preassigned property of humans.
At this point I need to remind that of course Butler, too, is not denying the existence of biological sexes, but she is making an argument that fundamentally sexes come into being through our actions and interactions. Butler does not want to separate gender roles and sexes in a same way that the traditional 2nd and 3rd generation of feministic theory [2] has usually done, since she is making a convincing argument that there is no reason to do it. And as a bonus it becomes much easier to construct a credible “queer theory”, because after all the lesbians and gays seem to fall into the middle in all classical feminist theories. I am not really an expert on queer theories….but Butler is! If Butler interests you, you must read “Gender trouble” [3]
Now in my previous blog I was making an argument that the progress of equality development has stopped in many fields in western countries, despite the legislation everywhere in west should in principle support it by now. Yet there are many unresolved issues. In many - if not even the most - of disciplines in science and business women (or sometimes men) are underrepresented, in OECD countries women get paid only 70-80 % of what men do in average and very often the fitting of everyday family live and work career is seeing as the problem for women only!!! My claim was that this can be seen as a failure for feministic movement and that it could be because the contemporary feministic theory does yet not give all the building blocks to make further progress from where we are now. Of course there are movements that try to free themselves from the obvious limiting dogmas of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism and call themselves post feministic, but I do not see any whatsoever reason to give up feminism and go post feministic quite yet – we are definetely not there yet! I would rather promote investigating new approaches based on Barad’s and Butler’s ideas. And I have already a cool term to describe this study: Quantum Gender.
So what would it mean in practise? With the title “from political correctness to quantum gender” I meant we need to move on from just being politically correct to something more. Because the legislative means used to achieve the goals of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism are not enough to break the glass ceilings that still hinder people to obtain the same opportunities in work life and society regardless what type of sex organs they have been born with.
If we take Barad’s quantum physical approach, Quantum Gender would mean that our gender (and sex too like Butler suggests) becomes into existence only as a consequence of and with the meaning that an active agent observing the sex gives to it. In work life and professional world it should entail a principle that if we are looking people to perform specific functions, we should not define people in advance based on what irrelevant properties (sex organs, skin color, ethnic background etc) they might have, but only what a person is expected to do. If we assign people irrelevant properties in advance, it affects also the outcome of our judgement. Now that is of course common sense and that’s’ what the equal opportunity legislation in western world tries to achieve anyway, but in practise it’s not enough as we have seen. In the previous blog I gave examples how people still treat exactly similar job applications differently depending whether the applicant’s name is male or female. So I fear the glass ceilings will not get broken by the legislative actions alone.
I suspect that there are very few jobs anymore in the post-industrialized world where biological sex really has any relevance. In fact hardly any work (if any other than being a prostitute) requires specific sex organs to do the job. It may even be sex organs might have relevance only in activities what they are good for, namely reproduction and sexual recreational pleasure. So with the Quantum Gender approach our sex should not come into being at all when we define ourselves as professionals. Of course that has been the goal for feminism at all times, but since the feministic theory has been so far based on the dichotomies, sex has still been a predefined property of individuals. It means that feminism so far has been saying: Let’s be Politically Correct (statement PC)
PC: We are men and women – but hey, it is forbidden treat us such when it doesn’t count
Whereas the Quantum Gender proposal (statement QG) would be more like
QG: We are people - and when we want to think about having sex, let’s observe our sexes then
I think QG approach would make a more easy path to break the glass ceilings in the long run. Firstly I hear a lot of the people complain about political correctness. I think it is because some feel the PC statement is fundamentally saying “We have sexes, but let’s not think about it” and it becomes a bit like saying “Don’t think about a pink elephant” - and of course you end up doing just that. My observation is that for the more simple minded people the PC statement seems to be stressful ;-) Secondly QG should be good also in sense that it should free ourselves from gender role expectations as careerists, household keepers, parental roles…(and anywhere outside bed room activities =) If we assume that there are no sexes, where they don’t count, there should not be any pressure on expectations either. But in order to get there the QG idea should be part of our culture.
Changing culture towards QG makes sense in my opinion. Us humans are self aware intelligent creatures and we have adapted our culture many times to support the life conditions we have lived in. Today we don’t live in caves any longer and in modern information society advancing equality should benefit both the common good and individual happiness by allowing us to use our abilities and properties in ways that are relevant to what we want to do. Not by labelling us in advance according to our sex organs.
Of course I am not saying that legislation everywhere in the western world or OECD countries is fully compliant to move to QG yet. Particularly in terms of maternity leave compensation there is still a lot to do in many countries, although I think EU is in average more progressive than US at the moment. However, I think QG could be the next step…but how to get there?
I don’t have any program how we could move from PC to QG yet. I do not suggest that governements should start tuning their legislations right this instance just because I wrote this blog =)…. But I would rather challenge people to start thinking of the next generation of feministic movement by investigating Barad and Butler seriously, thinking about what differenc QG could make, research what the implementation of Barak’s and Butler’s ideas would mean in practise and how this implementation could be done with concrete actions.
I know also that when I am saying that 3rd gen feminism is promoting PC, I am not giving enough credit to all contemporary feministic studies. There are of course a lot of woman studies scholars that are basically saying essentially the same thing as I outline here as a QG principle. However, oftentimes they reject being called feminists, and that I don’t agree with. I think as long as we are not people first and men and women only where it counts…there is no reason to give up feministic movements. And we are not there yet.
I see the equality train slowing down in the west and I fear it is in a jeopardy of stopping altogether before reaching the station unless it is fuelled with new ideas.
[1] Barad, Karen “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning”, Duke Unoversity Press
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism
[3] Butler, Judith “Gender Trouble”, Routledge, 1989
-----
Phew…it has been a really busy fall. I haven’t had much time do blogging even though the world is no less full of topics to rant about than before =). Cheers to anyone dropping by here!
To me it seems that Barad’s ideas would somehow touch on something about the connection between matter and discourse that the existentialists and postmodernists have tried to intuitively grasp have for the last 50 decades. But unlike postmodernists in the average, Barad actually knows what she is talking about when she refers to mathematics and QM. Using the agential realism approach she discusses how we could analyze ethics, metaphysics, “topologies of power” and other branches of applied philosophy. Most concrete she gets when she applies agental realistic analysis to “technoscientific practises” and gender roles. In my (not very) humble opinion that analysis raises her in to the front row of contemporary feminist theorists. She also naturally continues from the observations of Judith Butler since I think Barad’s treatment kind of paves a QM theoretical background to Butler’s realization that even sexes, not just gender roles, are fundamentally pejorative: Sexes are in practise created by actions and interactions rather than being a preassigned property of humans.
At this point I need to remind that of course Butler, too, is not denying the existence of biological sexes, but she is making an argument that fundamentally sexes come into being through our actions and interactions. Butler does not want to separate gender roles and sexes in a same way that the traditional 2nd and 3rd generation of feministic theory [2] has usually done, since she is making a convincing argument that there is no reason to do it. And as a bonus it becomes much easier to construct a credible “queer theory”, because after all the lesbians and gays seem to fall into the middle in all classical feminist theories. I am not really an expert on queer theories….but Butler is! If Butler interests you, you must read “Gender trouble” [3]
Now in my previous blog I was making an argument that the progress of equality development has stopped in many fields in western countries, despite the legislation everywhere in west should in principle support it by now. Yet there are many unresolved issues. In many - if not even the most - of disciplines in science and business women (or sometimes men) are underrepresented, in OECD countries women get paid only 70-80 % of what men do in average and very often the fitting of everyday family live and work career is seeing as the problem for women only!!! My claim was that this can be seen as a failure for feministic movement and that it could be because the contemporary feministic theory does yet not give all the building blocks to make further progress from where we are now. Of course there are movements that try to free themselves from the obvious limiting dogmas of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism and call themselves post feministic, but I do not see any whatsoever reason to give up feminism and go post feministic quite yet – we are definetely not there yet! I would rather promote investigating new approaches based on Barad’s and Butler’s ideas. And I have already a cool term to describe this study: Quantum Gender.
So what would it mean in practise? With the title “from political correctness to quantum gender” I meant we need to move on from just being politically correct to something more. Because the legislative means used to achieve the goals of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism are not enough to break the glass ceilings that still hinder people to obtain the same opportunities in work life and society regardless what type of sex organs they have been born with.
If we take Barad’s quantum physical approach, Quantum Gender would mean that our gender (and sex too like Butler suggests) becomes into existence only as a consequence of and with the meaning that an active agent observing the sex gives to it. In work life and professional world it should entail a principle that if we are looking people to perform specific functions, we should not define people in advance based on what irrelevant properties (sex organs, skin color, ethnic background etc) they might have, but only what a person is expected to do. If we assign people irrelevant properties in advance, it affects also the outcome of our judgement. Now that is of course common sense and that’s’ what the equal opportunity legislation in western world tries to achieve anyway, but in practise it’s not enough as we have seen. In the previous blog I gave examples how people still treat exactly similar job applications differently depending whether the applicant’s name is male or female. So I fear the glass ceilings will not get broken by the legislative actions alone.
I suspect that there are very few jobs anymore in the post-industrialized world where biological sex really has any relevance. In fact hardly any work (if any other than being a prostitute) requires specific sex organs to do the job. It may even be sex organs might have relevance only in activities what they are good for, namely reproduction and sexual recreational pleasure. So with the Quantum Gender approach our sex should not come into being at all when we define ourselves as professionals. Of course that has been the goal for feminism at all times, but since the feministic theory has been so far based on the dichotomies, sex has still been a predefined property of individuals. It means that feminism so far has been saying: Let’s be Politically Correct (statement PC)
PC: We are men and women – but hey, it is forbidden treat us such when it doesn’t count
Whereas the Quantum Gender proposal (statement QG) would be more like
QG: We are people - and when we want to think about having sex, let’s observe our sexes then
I think QG approach would make a more easy path to break the glass ceilings in the long run. Firstly I hear a lot of the people complain about political correctness. I think it is because some feel the PC statement is fundamentally saying “We have sexes, but let’s not think about it” and it becomes a bit like saying “Don’t think about a pink elephant” - and of course you end up doing just that. My observation is that for the more simple minded people the PC statement seems to be stressful ;-) Secondly QG should be good also in sense that it should free ourselves from gender role expectations as careerists, household keepers, parental roles…(and anywhere outside bed room activities =) If we assume that there are no sexes, where they don’t count, there should not be any pressure on expectations either. But in order to get there the QG idea should be part of our culture.
Changing culture towards QG makes sense in my opinion. Us humans are self aware intelligent creatures and we have adapted our culture many times to support the life conditions we have lived in. Today we don’t live in caves any longer and in modern information society advancing equality should benefit both the common good and individual happiness by allowing us to use our abilities and properties in ways that are relevant to what we want to do. Not by labelling us in advance according to our sex organs.
Of course I am not saying that legislation everywhere in the western world or OECD countries is fully compliant to move to QG yet. Particularly in terms of maternity leave compensation there is still a lot to do in many countries, although I think EU is in average more progressive than US at the moment. However, I think QG could be the next step…but how to get there?
I don’t have any program how we could move from PC to QG yet. I do not suggest that governements should start tuning their legislations right this instance just because I wrote this blog =)…. But I would rather challenge people to start thinking of the next generation of feministic movement by investigating Barad and Butler seriously, thinking about what differenc QG could make, research what the implementation of Barak’s and Butler’s ideas would mean in practise and how this implementation could be done with concrete actions.
I know also that when I am saying that 3rd gen feminism is promoting PC, I am not giving enough credit to all contemporary feministic studies. There are of course a lot of woman studies scholars that are basically saying essentially the same thing as I outline here as a QG principle. However, oftentimes they reject being called feminists, and that I don’t agree with. I think as long as we are not people first and men and women only where it counts…there is no reason to give up feministic movements. And we are not there yet.
I see the equality train slowing down in the west and I fear it is in a jeopardy of stopping altogether before reaching the station unless it is fuelled with new ideas.
[1] Barad, Karen “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning”, Duke Unoversity Press
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism
[3] Butler, Judith “Gender Trouble”, Routledge, 1989
-----
Phew…it has been a really busy fall. I haven’t had much time do blogging even though the world is no less full of topics to rant about than before =). Cheers to anyone dropping by here!
fredag 7 augusti 2009
Status update on patriarchy / Feminism in a standstill
Ann Gallagher and James C. Kaufmann conclude in their book “Gender differences in mathematics” [1] that It has simply never been established that there is any meaningful and substantial sex differences in mathematics ability that is not massively confounded with factors related to individual experience. Therefore researchers whose goals are to are to understand the biological basis of behaviour still need even to produce data that suggest that there is that there is any sex difference that can be even partly explained by biological factors.
There is a huge amount of research on the subtleties of differences between female and male cognition, but all research indicates that whatever differences there are (for example in problem solving strategies) based on the current data, it is practically impossible to unambiguously separate biological factors from what is caused by gender roles and individuals' personal histories of learning. There seems to be more variance in intellectual performance within a group consisting solely of men than a group of women. In other words the Gaussian distribution seems to be more spread out of a fully male group in terms all types of intellectual performance (not just mathematical) than with a fully female group. But this too, could be just a reaction to how the school systems and teachers have reflected to gender role based behaviours and expectations [2].
The history of science and philosophy has truly been “His Story” since other than a very few exceptions, women have been banned to participate higher education up until about 100 years ago. The most courageous and eager of women did however make themselves heard in science, but they had to usually do it either anonymously or using their husbands name to be able to get their thoughts published.
For exemple Marie-Sophie Germain, who was the first woman to get a seat in the French academy of science, had to first pretend to be man, “monsier LeBlanc”, in order to be taken seriously and to establish the correspondence with her first mentor Friedrich Gauss, the most prominent mathematician of the time. Here is how she eventually revealed herself to Gauss in 1807 [4]:
But how to describe to you my admiration and astonishment at seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur Le Blanc metamorphose himself into this illustrious personage who gives such a brilliant example of what I would find it difficult to believe. A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius. Indeed nothing could prove to me in so flattering and less equivocal manner that the attractions of this science, which has enriched my life with so many joys, are not chimerical, [than] the predilection with which you have honored it.
There are many sad stories during the 19th centuries how brilliant women were simply prohibited attending universities, especially in mathematics and philosophy, but that was then. Today the situation is of course different at least in western societies…or is it?
Namely there are still amazingly few women in science and technology and even philosophy, much less than you would expect now that there should not be any more legal restrictions for women doing science (in western world). I claim that it is largely because the old gender role based patriarchy is still there between our ears. I think such strong cultural traditions don’t completely disappear in 100 years, in just a few generations.
From my own personal experience I can say that I have several times run into attitudes and heard many men claim that women are somehow less capable to succeed in mathematics, philosophy, technology or Information technology, because their problem solving strategies are somehow more “conservative” or “less creative” or whatever. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. There are a lot of studies showing that in IT business and engineering, exactly similar job applications get a less favourable review, if the applicant has a female name than a male name [5]. Interestingly I remember reading a study that showed that if a male job application reviewer had a women engineer in his family, he would rate female engineering job applicants more favourably than men who have no experience about woman engineers…The prejudices seem to go away with experience.
In fact I have met some young male “hero” SW developers that have been quite convinced that women are up to no good particularly as programmers. Well I myself am not up to any good...that's true... but I wonder if these guys are aware that many of the modern programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are based on the theoretical findings of this year’s Turing price winner (most esteemed recognition in computing) Barbara Liskov’s work on data abstraction and programming language development [6] (thanks Strider). So dear boys before you judge all the woman programmers beforehand, remember that the tools you use might have a solid female touch in them ;-)
During the 10 years I have hung out in the internet participating philosophy discussions I have met even admitted misogynists, who think that women just make too much noise about themselves. I don’t agree they do since I dare to suspect that practically every women over the age of 35 has some experiences how the patriarchy's attitudes have surfaced in some instance in a way that it has had a disruptive effect in some serious work at hand, whether it be in business or academia. Glass ceilings are still there in many places! When you are younger, you don’t care so much about individual incidents, at least if they don’t occur everyday, or if you are of the more naive sort, you might not even understand some of the underlying innuendos to connect the dots. But when you start approaching middle age, at some point you will start to notice that patriarchy and sexism are still alive and an undercurrent in many places that matter.
And in fact the patriarchy is not in the business of going away at the moment. The statistics show that women’s share of the traditionally male dominated businesses has not increased significantly during the last 20-30 years in the western countries and women still earn smaller salaries with same ratio that they did a few decades back. I think this is a major failure for the feministic movement.
I will not accuse men…or let me take that back... yes I do accuse some men. The kind of men who have made a hasty conclusion that all feminism in general is useless or unnecessary, without acknowledging that our western societies are still far from being equal, or men who think the equality has just come automatically, without knowing all the work that was done by feminist movements before women got to vote, go to school or even go to work in any society today. Or the kind of men who use constantly sexist argumentation just out of mean sexist attitudes (disguised sometimes as humor), fear of women or plain stupidity, or the men who outright hate women and see it acceptable to spread hatred. Of course there can be man hating women too and they would be equally harmful, but according to my experience these men (or women) are just the-not-so-smart people among us, who are afraid of loosing their identity if they do not maintain an illusion being superior just because of their sex. I personally believe that with proper understanding of gender roles and how they work in a society, the reasons to be afraid would in general diminish in the long run. There would be less reasons to be afraid of loosing "manhood" (or womanhood for that matter).
But I think discussing how feminism and feministic theory should evolve is important. I suspect that feministic or gender theories are in a standstill, because they seem not being able to analyse the gender questions further in a way that would explain satisfactorily why equality among sexes does not seem to be making progress at the moment.
- - - - - -
My original plan was to write more about the gender theories, especially refer to Judith Butler and Karen Barad, since I think they have very original ideas that could open new ways by challenging the traditional dichotomies... but I ran out of time now :-( I hope to be able to continue soon, since I already had a cool title for that writing: Quantum gender !!!
- of course :D
Q
[1] Gallagher, A. and Kaufmann, J. “Gender differences in mathematics”, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[2] McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. and De Lisi R. Biology, “Society and Behavior, The Development of Sex differences in cognition”, Ablex publishing, 2002
[3] http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/germain.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
[5] Wilson, F.M. “Organizational behaviour and gender”, Ashgate publishing, 2003
[6] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/
There is a huge amount of research on the subtleties of differences between female and male cognition, but all research indicates that whatever differences there are (for example in problem solving strategies) based on the current data, it is practically impossible to unambiguously separate biological factors from what is caused by gender roles and individuals' personal histories of learning. There seems to be more variance in intellectual performance within a group consisting solely of men than a group of women. In other words the Gaussian distribution seems to be more spread out of a fully male group in terms all types of intellectual performance (not just mathematical) than with a fully female group. But this too, could be just a reaction to how the school systems and teachers have reflected to gender role based behaviours and expectations [2].
The history of science and philosophy has truly been “His Story” since other than a very few exceptions, women have been banned to participate higher education up until about 100 years ago. The most courageous and eager of women did however make themselves heard in science, but they had to usually do it either anonymously or using their husbands name to be able to get their thoughts published.
For exemple Marie-Sophie Germain, who was the first woman to get a seat in the French academy of science, had to first pretend to be man, “monsier LeBlanc”, in order to be taken seriously and to establish the correspondence with her first mentor Friedrich Gauss, the most prominent mathematician of the time. Here is how she eventually revealed herself to Gauss in 1807 [4]:
But how to describe to you my admiration and astonishment at seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur Le Blanc metamorphose himself into this illustrious personage who gives such a brilliant example of what I would find it difficult to believe. A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius. Indeed nothing could prove to me in so flattering and less equivocal manner that the attractions of this science, which has enriched my life with so many joys, are not chimerical, [than] the predilection with which you have honored it.
There are many sad stories during the 19th centuries how brilliant women were simply prohibited attending universities, especially in mathematics and philosophy, but that was then. Today the situation is of course different at least in western societies…or is it?
Namely there are still amazingly few women in science and technology and even philosophy, much less than you would expect now that there should not be any more legal restrictions for women doing science (in western world). I claim that it is largely because the old gender role based patriarchy is still there between our ears. I think such strong cultural traditions don’t completely disappear in 100 years, in just a few generations.
From my own personal experience I can say that I have several times run into attitudes and heard many men claim that women are somehow less capable to succeed in mathematics, philosophy, technology or Information technology, because their problem solving strategies are somehow more “conservative” or “less creative” or whatever. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. There are a lot of studies showing that in IT business and engineering, exactly similar job applications get a less favourable review, if the applicant has a female name than a male name [5]. Interestingly I remember reading a study that showed that if a male job application reviewer had a women engineer in his family, he would rate female engineering job applicants more favourably than men who have no experience about woman engineers…The prejudices seem to go away with experience.
In fact I have met some young male “hero” SW developers that have been quite convinced that women are up to no good particularly as programmers. Well I myself am not up to any good...that's true... but I wonder if these guys are aware that many of the modern programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are based on the theoretical findings of this year’s Turing price winner (most esteemed recognition in computing) Barbara Liskov’s work on data abstraction and programming language development [6] (thanks Strider). So dear boys before you judge all the woman programmers beforehand, remember that the tools you use might have a solid female touch in them ;-)
During the 10 years I have hung out in the internet participating philosophy discussions I have met even admitted misogynists, who think that women just make too much noise about themselves. I don’t agree they do since I dare to suspect that practically every women over the age of 35 has some experiences how the patriarchy's attitudes have surfaced in some instance in a way that it has had a disruptive effect in some serious work at hand, whether it be in business or academia. Glass ceilings are still there in many places! When you are younger, you don’t care so much about individual incidents, at least if they don’t occur everyday, or if you are of the more naive sort, you might not even understand some of the underlying innuendos to connect the dots. But when you start approaching middle age, at some point you will start to notice that patriarchy and sexism are still alive and an undercurrent in many places that matter.
And in fact the patriarchy is not in the business of going away at the moment. The statistics show that women’s share of the traditionally male dominated businesses has not increased significantly during the last 20-30 years in the western countries and women still earn smaller salaries with same ratio that they did a few decades back. I think this is a major failure for the feministic movement.
I will not accuse men…or let me take that back... yes I do accuse some men. The kind of men who have made a hasty conclusion that all feminism in general is useless or unnecessary, without acknowledging that our western societies are still far from being equal, or men who think the equality has just come automatically, without knowing all the work that was done by feminist movements before women got to vote, go to school or even go to work in any society today. Or the kind of men who use constantly sexist argumentation just out of mean sexist attitudes (disguised sometimes as humor), fear of women or plain stupidity, or the men who outright hate women and see it acceptable to spread hatred. Of course there can be man hating women too and they would be equally harmful, but according to my experience these men (or women) are just the-not-so-smart people among us, who are afraid of loosing their identity if they do not maintain an illusion being superior just because of their sex. I personally believe that with proper understanding of gender roles and how they work in a society, the reasons to be afraid would in general diminish in the long run. There would be less reasons to be afraid of loosing "manhood" (or womanhood for that matter).
But I think discussing how feminism and feministic theory should evolve is important. I suspect that feministic or gender theories are in a standstill, because they seem not being able to analyse the gender questions further in a way that would explain satisfactorily why equality among sexes does not seem to be making progress at the moment.
- - - - - -
My original plan was to write more about the gender theories, especially refer to Judith Butler and Karen Barad, since I think they have very original ideas that could open new ways by challenging the traditional dichotomies... but I ran out of time now :-( I hope to be able to continue soon, since I already had a cool title for that writing: Quantum gender !!!
- of course :D
Q
[1] Gallagher, A. and Kaufmann, J. “Gender differences in mathematics”, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[2] McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. and De Lisi R. Biology, “Society and Behavior, The Development of Sex differences in cognition”, Ablex publishing, 2002
[3] http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/germain.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
[5] Wilson, F.M. “Organizational behaviour and gender”, Ashgate publishing, 2003
[6] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/
torsdag 28 maj 2009
Loki the Liger
One day my roommate at our Heffalump (!) apartement, Lokifluff Clarity, was wearing a Liger avatar. I guess a Liger is taxonomically somewhere between a Tiger and a Lion. Doesn't it look amazing? By clicking the picture you can see it in full screen size :
Here is another shot. The kitty on the floor was the package for the liger Avi.
The liger could roar and jump and do all the things a real life liger would do...if only it existed
Aww...isn't it cute!!!
smiles
Q
måndag 11 maj 2009
Q&A about Dar Innis's metaphysics
I managed to get Dar here on my blog and he was kind to do a Q&A session about his metaphysics essay:
QS: Hi Dar and welcome! I’m very glad that you got the time to visit my blog, how have you been?
DI: I've been doing well, thanks.
QS: Thanks for letting me publish your thoughts about “Being Is Not Relative, And Perspectives Of Being Are Relative”. I was very impressed when I read it. I think that although your basic idea is deceptively simple, it is at the same time extremely clever! But first could you clarify more why did you choose to use the word “Being” rather than “exist”?
DI: It's not really my idea. It's Parmenides idea. I simply take it a step further than he was able to. I actually used to refer to that which I here call Being as existence. Existence didn't work so well as I want to talk about what unconditionally is, and I found that people strongly associate the word existence with things that conditionally are. Being also suffers this problem, but people seem more willing to get beyond that with 'capital B Being'. I personally prefer the word truth, next I prefer 'capital T Truth'; yet, with the word truth I have to clarify that I am not speaking of propositional truth and the like. I've even tried making a new word: isness. Lao-tzu made a good point in the Tao Te Ching when he referred to this subject as unnamable. Yet, we have to refer to it in some way. He went with the Tao. Currently I favor 'capital B Being'.
QS: One of the reasons I personally liked your writing is that it seemed to suit my personal views on metaphysics. According to your definition, it is not only physically directly observable things that can exhibit Being, but anything that can be stated in some form including things like logical truths, fictitious statements or even dreams. But do you think it would be still possible to categorize the different types of being in some more “fundamental” levels of existences? For example, it seems to me that many physicists seem to rank the being of physically observable things more “real” than our thoughts, even if the thoughts were about what we make of our observations. I, on the contrary, have always thought that logical truths are somehow more fundamental than physical observations =).
DI: I do not think it useful to regard any real thing as any more real than any other real thing. Everything that is, is. There is not anything that is in a way that is more or less than anything else is. In understanding how different things relate, I would agree that logical truths are more fundamental than physical truths. I think physical truths are a manifestation of logical truths. However, I also think that thinking and the development of logic depend upon having something like a brain which depends upon physical truths.
QS: You make a separation between perspectives of being and being itself. Being exists in every way it is possible for it to exists, allowing different perspectives. But aren’t the perspectives themselves some sort of beings? Like the notion “A is shorter than B” is a sentence that is being, at the same time it is a perspective to the being of A. Do you see any contradiction that a thing is at the same time being and a description of a perspective?
DI: This is really an excellent question. Being itself is sort of it's own universe of discourse, and it cannot be related to anything else. Perspectives of Being constitute another universe of discourse. All perspectives of Being are Being, but no single perspective of Being is Being itself. Sort of like A is a letter of the alphabet without being the alphabet itself, or a circle is geometrical without being Geometry itself. No, I do not see it as a contradiction for a sentence to both be and to be a description of a perspective.
QS: Ok, so perspectives are something that get shape through our cognition, right?
DI: No, these perspectives I am talking about are not shaped through our cognition. Being itself seems to have a crude awareness of itself. From this awareness arise the singular and continuum perspectives of Being. Betwixt these two extremes there lies a continuum of intermediate perspectives where the singular and continuum perspectives relate with each other. It is this relativity of perspectives that give rise to physical phenomena and the complexity necessary for human cognition.
I realize it seems odd to consider non-human perspective, or that Being itself has a crude sort of awareness. This is likely the most fantastical seeming aspect of this metaphysic. If being did not have some sort of awareness of itself, the perspectives of Being would not arise. If the perspectives of Being did not arise, nothing resembling us or the world in which we live would arise. At least, that is the case if this metaphysic is correct. I suspect that human awareness is like a spike in the crude awareness of Being itself. Augmented by sense organs and a brain for memory and computation, our awareness is much more advanced than the crude baseline awareness Being as of itself.
As for actual Beings, I do not think there are any such things. Being is indivisible, singular. It cannot be separated into Beings. There does not be such a thing that is other than Being by which Being could be divided.
I'm much more in line with the Buddhist view of the world. We would not consider the blinking of an eye as a Being. The blinking of an eye has no independent being or substance of its own. The blinking of an eye arises, occurs, then ceases, so is impermanent. The blinking of an eye only is while the eye blinks, so is dependent upon and conditioned by the eye blinker. The blinking of an eye is an act, and we consider the blinker of the eye to have a greater claim to be a Being than the blinking of an eye.
Well, I am an act done by organs. Organs are acts done by tissues. Tissues are acts done by cells. Cells are acts done by organelles. Organelles are acts done by molecules. Molecules are acts done by atoms. Atoms are acts done by subatomic phenomena. Some subatomic phenomena are acts done by other subatomic phenomena. Other subatomic phenomena seem elemental. We do not know what does these elemental subatomic phenomena. We do know that these elemental subatomic phenomena are 'quanta of energy'. Quanta of energy is a scientific way of saying 'discrete packets with measurable activity'. Discrete packets of with measurable activity is a verbose way of saying 'acts'. We are acts, just like the blinking of an eye is an act. I may occur longer than the blinking of an eye, but this makes me no less empty, impermanent, or conditioned than the blinking of an eye. It would be inconsistent for me to regard myself a Being so long as I do not consider the blinking of an eye a Being. Furthermore, I have yet to encounter anything else that I could consistently regard as a Being. The Buddha speaking of things in the phenomenal world would say 'All is Dhukkha'. I would say, also regarding the phenomenal world, 'All is activity'.
QS: I see! But the “act” that we call our cognition does seems anyway to interact with other cognitions through language , so could it be said that the relationship between “universe of discourse (about perspectives)” and “universe of actual Beings” is in some way similar to relationship of language and the true essence of perspectives of beings, that Wittgenstein, existentialists and others have been trying to study?
DI: Our language developed in response to the world as we had to engage it. Rarely did we have time to consider the nature of things. Things like mountains, people, and hammers seem to long endure. From a practical perspective likening them to acts such as the blinking of an eye seems absurd.
I think that existentialist projects have a great deal going for them; however, I do think that many existentialists confuse their primarily epistemological projects with metaphysics, or think that they allow them to make proclamations about metaphysics that I would classify as categorical errors. I covered one such instance when I spoke of Heidegger's lecture, 'What is Metaphysics'. I certainly do not think metaphysics is a linguistic confusion as some would suggest. If it were, it should be much easier to find the right words to express metaphysical claims.
I haven't explored existential philosophy perhaps as much as I should. To me, its enough that I experience anything at all to know that it is Being that I experience something, and that it is not Being that I do not experience something to establish that there is Being.
QS: What do you think is the implication of your metaphysics to the definition to causality? If Beings of things are not related to each other, they probably can’t be causes to each other? So is causality also all about perspectives, too?
DI: What I mean by Being is quite different than what we mean by the being of a thing. In perspectives where there are many things, these things can relate with other such things. Perspective does seem to me to be close to the root of causality though. The crude physical theory this metaphysic lead to uses the two basic perspectives of Being, and the need to make them consistent with each other in intermediate perspectives, as its basis. As for Being itself, that is beyond causality.
QS: In light of your metaphysics, do you think that the lack of something, or the not-being of a thing, can cause a perception of something else being? So that that not-being could be cause of something (even a perception?)
DI: If a thing is not, it is not even a thing. A thing cannot not be. The basic perspectives of Being might seem a sort of nothing, but they are still perspectives of Being, and that is not nothing. I called an earlier form of this metaphysic 'Nothing and the Void', as a point without anything beyond it would seem like a sort of nothing, and an undifferentiated infinite continuum would seem like an endless void.
QS: You made nicely provocative statements that your metaphysics would make quantum mechanics less unintuitive….here is what came into my mind: When you say things are either Being or not, they become being only when they get some sort of stated form. And stating how things are Being needs someone to do it, there must be someone doing it. I understood the analogy to quantum mechanics, so that we know that physical things exists only when by observing them, but the observation is always part of the interpretation of a specific consciousness. We don’t know about the Being of things unless there is a conscious observer…or how would you describe the analogy?
DI: Well, perspective is the most mysterious aspect of this theory to me. For there to be the basic perspectives, and for them to interact, there must be some sort of awareness to in some way perceive them. For there to be motion at the speed of light or gravity or electromagnetism, according to this metaphysic, there must be some sort of awareness. I do not want to suggest this awareness is anything like human awareness. In the case of the basic perspectives, there does not exist enough complexity for even a crude half baked notion, no less self reflection, in either one of them. To get to the aspects of quantum strangeness this metaphysic seems to help resolve, I'd need to go into more detail on the crude scientific theory this metaphysic leads to. Some of it comes down to how the basic perspectives must interact in the intermediate perspectives. Some of it will come down to how different perspectives become more or less significant in determining how phenomena unfold. When we make an observation, we alter that dynamic.
QS: What about the concept of emergence? Does it become useless in light of your metaphysics? Since beings of things are not related, the whole question of reductionism vs. holism is only about perspectives?
DI: Well, the way the perspectives must interact in order to remain consistent causes all sorts of things to emerge. I guess you could put me more on the holism side. I think that awareness is inherent in Being, which enables Being to perceive itself in different ways. I tend to think of human awareness as sort of spikes in this awareness, where our physical bodies have enabled more detailed sensing with organs and an ability to record, organize, and ponder what is sensed with brains. Sometimes I like to think of consciousness and life as Being seeking to take a more active role with itself. I do not believe in disembodied thought, even if I think Being itself has some sort of crude inherent awareness.
QS: What do you plan to do next? Are you planning studying specific applications?
DI: I'm still working on expressing this understanding better, and I need to work on expressing the scientific theory it leads to better. Trying to pummel it into words is not easy for me, and most of my attempts seem to fall short. I need to get it polished to a point where it falls short slightly less so.
QS: Thank you!
QS: Hi Dar and welcome! I’m very glad that you got the time to visit my blog, how have you been?
DI: I've been doing well, thanks.
QS: Thanks for letting me publish your thoughts about “Being Is Not Relative, And Perspectives Of Being Are Relative”. I was very impressed when I read it. I think that although your basic idea is deceptively simple, it is at the same time extremely clever! But first could you clarify more why did you choose to use the word “Being” rather than “exist”?
DI: It's not really my idea. It's Parmenides idea. I simply take it a step further than he was able to. I actually used to refer to that which I here call Being as existence. Existence didn't work so well as I want to talk about what unconditionally is, and I found that people strongly associate the word existence with things that conditionally are. Being also suffers this problem, but people seem more willing to get beyond that with 'capital B Being'. I personally prefer the word truth, next I prefer 'capital T Truth'; yet, with the word truth I have to clarify that I am not speaking of propositional truth and the like. I've even tried making a new word: isness. Lao-tzu made a good point in the Tao Te Ching when he referred to this subject as unnamable. Yet, we have to refer to it in some way. He went with the Tao. Currently I favor 'capital B Being'.
QS: One of the reasons I personally liked your writing is that it seemed to suit my personal views on metaphysics. According to your definition, it is not only physically directly observable things that can exhibit Being, but anything that can be stated in some form including things like logical truths, fictitious statements or even dreams. But do you think it would be still possible to categorize the different types of being in some more “fundamental” levels of existences? For example, it seems to me that many physicists seem to rank the being of physically observable things more “real” than our thoughts, even if the thoughts were about what we make of our observations. I, on the contrary, have always thought that logical truths are somehow more fundamental than physical observations =).
DI: I do not think it useful to regard any real thing as any more real than any other real thing. Everything that is, is. There is not anything that is in a way that is more or less than anything else is. In understanding how different things relate, I would agree that logical truths are more fundamental than physical truths. I think physical truths are a manifestation of logical truths. However, I also think that thinking and the development of logic depend upon having something like a brain which depends upon physical truths.
QS: You make a separation between perspectives of being and being itself. Being exists in every way it is possible for it to exists, allowing different perspectives. But aren’t the perspectives themselves some sort of beings? Like the notion “A is shorter than B” is a sentence that is being, at the same time it is a perspective to the being of A. Do you see any contradiction that a thing is at the same time being and a description of a perspective?
DI: This is really an excellent question. Being itself is sort of it's own universe of discourse, and it cannot be related to anything else. Perspectives of Being constitute another universe of discourse. All perspectives of Being are Being, but no single perspective of Being is Being itself. Sort of like A is a letter of the alphabet without being the alphabet itself, or a circle is geometrical without being Geometry itself. No, I do not see it as a contradiction for a sentence to both be and to be a description of a perspective.
QS: Ok, so perspectives are something that get shape through our cognition, right?
DI: No, these perspectives I am talking about are not shaped through our cognition. Being itself seems to have a crude awareness of itself. From this awareness arise the singular and continuum perspectives of Being. Betwixt these two extremes there lies a continuum of intermediate perspectives where the singular and continuum perspectives relate with each other. It is this relativity of perspectives that give rise to physical phenomena and the complexity necessary for human cognition.
I realize it seems odd to consider non-human perspective, or that Being itself has a crude sort of awareness. This is likely the most fantastical seeming aspect of this metaphysic. If being did not have some sort of awareness of itself, the perspectives of Being would not arise. If the perspectives of Being did not arise, nothing resembling us or the world in which we live would arise. At least, that is the case if this metaphysic is correct. I suspect that human awareness is like a spike in the crude awareness of Being itself. Augmented by sense organs and a brain for memory and computation, our awareness is much more advanced than the crude baseline awareness Being as of itself.
As for actual Beings, I do not think there are any such things. Being is indivisible, singular. It cannot be separated into Beings. There does not be such a thing that is other than Being by which Being could be divided.
I'm much more in line with the Buddhist view of the world. We would not consider the blinking of an eye as a Being. The blinking of an eye has no independent being or substance of its own. The blinking of an eye arises, occurs, then ceases, so is impermanent. The blinking of an eye only is while the eye blinks, so is dependent upon and conditioned by the eye blinker. The blinking of an eye is an act, and we consider the blinker of the eye to have a greater claim to be a Being than the blinking of an eye.
Well, I am an act done by organs. Organs are acts done by tissues. Tissues are acts done by cells. Cells are acts done by organelles. Organelles are acts done by molecules. Molecules are acts done by atoms. Atoms are acts done by subatomic phenomena. Some subatomic phenomena are acts done by other subatomic phenomena. Other subatomic phenomena seem elemental. We do not know what does these elemental subatomic phenomena. We do know that these elemental subatomic phenomena are 'quanta of energy'. Quanta of energy is a scientific way of saying 'discrete packets with measurable activity'. Discrete packets of with measurable activity is a verbose way of saying 'acts'. We are acts, just like the blinking of an eye is an act. I may occur longer than the blinking of an eye, but this makes me no less empty, impermanent, or conditioned than the blinking of an eye. It would be inconsistent for me to regard myself a Being so long as I do not consider the blinking of an eye a Being. Furthermore, I have yet to encounter anything else that I could consistently regard as a Being. The Buddha speaking of things in the phenomenal world would say 'All is Dhukkha'. I would say, also regarding the phenomenal world, 'All is activity'.
QS: I see! But the “act” that we call our cognition does seems anyway to interact with other cognitions through language , so could it be said that the relationship between “universe of discourse (about perspectives)” and “universe of actual Beings” is in some way similar to relationship of language and the true essence of perspectives of beings, that Wittgenstein, existentialists and others have been trying to study?
DI: Our language developed in response to the world as we had to engage it. Rarely did we have time to consider the nature of things. Things like mountains, people, and hammers seem to long endure. From a practical perspective likening them to acts such as the blinking of an eye seems absurd.
I think that existentialist projects have a great deal going for them; however, I do think that many existentialists confuse their primarily epistemological projects with metaphysics, or think that they allow them to make proclamations about metaphysics that I would classify as categorical errors. I covered one such instance when I spoke of Heidegger's lecture, 'What is Metaphysics'. I certainly do not think metaphysics is a linguistic confusion as some would suggest. If it were, it should be much easier to find the right words to express metaphysical claims.
I haven't explored existential philosophy perhaps as much as I should. To me, its enough that I experience anything at all to know that it is Being that I experience something, and that it is not Being that I do not experience something to establish that there is Being.
QS: What do you think is the implication of your metaphysics to the definition to causality? If Beings of things are not related to each other, they probably can’t be causes to each other? So is causality also all about perspectives, too?
DI: What I mean by Being is quite different than what we mean by the being of a thing. In perspectives where there are many things, these things can relate with other such things. Perspective does seem to me to be close to the root of causality though. The crude physical theory this metaphysic lead to uses the two basic perspectives of Being, and the need to make them consistent with each other in intermediate perspectives, as its basis. As for Being itself, that is beyond causality.
QS: In light of your metaphysics, do you think that the lack of something, or the not-being of a thing, can cause a perception of something else being? So that that not-being could be cause of something (even a perception?)
DI: If a thing is not, it is not even a thing. A thing cannot not be. The basic perspectives of Being might seem a sort of nothing, but they are still perspectives of Being, and that is not nothing. I called an earlier form of this metaphysic 'Nothing and the Void', as a point without anything beyond it would seem like a sort of nothing, and an undifferentiated infinite continuum would seem like an endless void.
QS: You made nicely provocative statements that your metaphysics would make quantum mechanics less unintuitive….here is what came into my mind: When you say things are either Being or not, they become being only when they get some sort of stated form. And stating how things are Being needs someone to do it, there must be someone doing it. I understood the analogy to quantum mechanics, so that we know that physical things exists only when by observing them, but the observation is always part of the interpretation of a specific consciousness. We don’t know about the Being of things unless there is a conscious observer…or how would you describe the analogy?
DI: Well, perspective is the most mysterious aspect of this theory to me. For there to be the basic perspectives, and for them to interact, there must be some sort of awareness to in some way perceive them. For there to be motion at the speed of light or gravity or electromagnetism, according to this metaphysic, there must be some sort of awareness. I do not want to suggest this awareness is anything like human awareness. In the case of the basic perspectives, there does not exist enough complexity for even a crude half baked notion, no less self reflection, in either one of them. To get to the aspects of quantum strangeness this metaphysic seems to help resolve, I'd need to go into more detail on the crude scientific theory this metaphysic leads to. Some of it comes down to how the basic perspectives must interact in the intermediate perspectives. Some of it will come down to how different perspectives become more or less significant in determining how phenomena unfold. When we make an observation, we alter that dynamic.
QS: What about the concept of emergence? Does it become useless in light of your metaphysics? Since beings of things are not related, the whole question of reductionism vs. holism is only about perspectives?
DI: Well, the way the perspectives must interact in order to remain consistent causes all sorts of things to emerge. I guess you could put me more on the holism side. I think that awareness is inherent in Being, which enables Being to perceive itself in different ways. I tend to think of human awareness as sort of spikes in this awareness, where our physical bodies have enabled more detailed sensing with organs and an ability to record, organize, and ponder what is sensed with brains. Sometimes I like to think of consciousness and life as Being seeking to take a more active role with itself. I do not believe in disembodied thought, even if I think Being itself has some sort of crude inherent awareness.
QS: What do you plan to do next? Are you planning studying specific applications?
DI: I'm still working on expressing this understanding better, and I need to work on expressing the scientific theory it leads to better. Trying to pummel it into words is not easy for me, and most of my attempts seem to fall short. I need to get it polished to a point where it falls short slightly less so.
QS: Thank you!
söndag 3 maj 2009
Strider Villota discusses SL applications
Strider Villota is my friend from Education Island. Since he has lectured to business people in SL, I was eager to hear his opinion about the thoughts I wrote in “what did Rosedale really say”. I knew he had a lot of great insight in how SL is actually perceived today so I had to ask for an interview for the blog and he was very kind to go for it, so here it is!
QS: Welcome to my blog Strider. It’s a privilege to have you here!
SV: Thank you very much, Quintessential. I am very happy to be part of your blog. Though, according to some of the studies in your happiness articles, it is not my being here that makes me happy. I guess it is in my DNA… but I digress. I enjoy the variety of topics explored in your blog and I am honored that you asked for my opinion on SL.
QS: You have been following SL for quite a while and even lecturing here to information management professionals. What is your feeling, is SL still a hot topic or do you see the interest fading or changing now?
SV: I think the interest is changing, but it depends on the group. In general, I believe SL has followed the classic Gartner Hype Cycle (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). In this model, the interest in a new technology climbs until it reaches a point of “inflated expectations”, disappointment follows and the hype decreases until it reaches a “trough of disillusionment”, and then the hype increase again through a gradual “slope of enlighten.” Judging by the recent press as mentioned in your earlier article, I think we are probably close to the trough of disillusionment.
QS: You have lectured both to industry CIOs (Chief Information Officers) as well as to University information system administrators. Were there any differences in their interest in SL, and if there was, why?
SV: Yes, I have talked about SL with industry CIOs and other high level managers in IS, as well as people associated with universities. From my experience, there has always been a different level of interest between the groups. In a presentation I made in 2007, I had both groups in the audience. SL was receiving a lot of press at the time. The university administrators were very enthusiastic about the possibilities. They asked many questions about using SL for recruiting students, teaching, alumni relations, and creating a social network among students. During the presentation, my colleague passed me a note to pay attention to the industry representatives. When I focused on this group, I found that they were extremely bored. Through my questioning, I discovered that they found little or no value in SL. They could not see how to attract customers with SL (in fact, they didn’t think universities could either), saw some minor possibilities for training, and felt there were much better 3D modelling tools to illustrate their products on their web sites. The industry representatives were also concerned about adult content in SL.
QS: What do you think were the initial expectations about SL in professional use? Do you think
SL has lived up to those expectations so far?
SV: While some companies have experimented in SL, most of the companies I talked with (with a few exceptions) were never interested. The few that were interested saw it as a possible vehicle for training. Some, though, were just experimenting with such things as virtual offices. I don’t know that the expectations were ever that high in the first place. A few years ago when companies had budgets to experiment, some would try new things like SL to see if they could discover a use. Judging by the number of companies that have left SL, I think most companies have not really found a use. In addition, although there are some interesting stories about university use, on the whole it has not really taken off in that market either.
QS: How do you see the future, how could SL offer the best value as an extension to RL business communications?
SV: Wow, this is a tough question. I think it probably depends on the industry. In general, I have difficulty seeing where SL might be a leading platform to support RL business communication. Usually, voice, text, charts, and tables are fine to support business communication. Where video is important, Skype or similar products that are not based on avatars would work better. The SL world allows activity in addition to communication. I think its unique feature is that it supports virtual physical interaction. That is why universities see it as a possible place for teaching and some businesses see possibilities for training. I’ve talked with some businesses that are interested in developing better robots in SL. I think they are interested in this because it would support controlled training exercises. I think there might also be some opportunities in SL for companies to offer activities like virtual social gatherings for customer groups. They could sponsor a band and a dance, for example, as a way to promote customer relations (this might be a bit farfetched). On the other hand, people at Philosophy House seem to like to sit around and talk. So, you never know how the desires of different groups may evolve.
QS: What about the technology? Do you think SL software supports the HW used in PCs (like graphics cards) efficiently or do you see room for development?
SV: One of the biggest problems I face with SL is that it runs best on only certain graphics cards. The Intel cards that come with many laptops these days are not supported. Although the laptops can sometimes run SL, SL frequently runs poorly (e.g., grind to a halt when there are many avatars or sculpted prims in the area). Consequently, it is difficult to hold a class or develop a training exercise when most of your students have laptops that do not run SL at least moderately well. Most students are only thinking about running word processing, presentation, and web browsing software when they buy their laptops…not SL.
QS: SL has several groups talking about metaverse, which I believe means the interoperability between different virtual worlds (besides SL I know of Open sim at least). There is even a discipline called metanomics! Do you think there exists any actual use of metaverse applications yet? What could be the benefits in the long run?
SV: I have not followed the discussion on metaverse applications, so my answer will be somewhat general. Normally, in IT interoperability is a good thing. One reason the web became so successful is that the user could jump from site to site regardless of the web server used and the information being displayed. If you needed a different browser for different web servers or different types of information, the web would be very difficult to use. Following that line of thought, it would be very convenient to easily jump from one virtual world to another. Ideally, you could do this with the same avatar and have some of the same features (inventory) of that avatar also work in the other world. In this case, different companies might create different specialized worlds. Some worlds could be geared toward gaming and others geared towards RL real estate, for example. Of course, SL may like it if it is all done through them, but different companies may evolve the technology in different directions.
QS: I understood you were slightly sceptical about my argument that anonymity would be one of the main benefits in SL communications (at least for people working in private companies). Could you tell what do you think would be the main benefit for NOT being anonymous in SL? If your avi just represents your RL self on-to-one, why would SL be preferential to an existing RL on-line communication system like Adobe connect Pro, or Skype even
SV: First, I think you do have a valid argument about anonymity. Even within a company, a discussion where participants are anonymous could generate more effective brainstorming. There are technologies that support that now, though, so you don’t necessarily need SL for that. My point on the anonymity feature of SL is that it seems to be counter to the way the world is moving. Teenagers, young adults, and even older adults seem to want the opposite of anonymity. That is, though cell phones, Twitter, and Facebook, people like to share information about their real life self. From a practical standpoint, as a teacher I would prefer to see my students’ real names in SL. As another example, if you were to hold an alumni event in SL, it would be much more fun to spot a RL friend by their RL name. I think SL does not offer an advantage over Skype of Adobe connect when the focus is primarily a business meeting. However, I don’t believe that you can hug a friend, dance, ski, or enjoy a virtual drink together while watching the same TV show on these other platforms.
QS: You mentioned to me about an idea connecting SL to RL social networking systems like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. How would that work in practise? What would be the benefit?
SV: Seamless integration, on the technology side, may be somewhat difficult to implement. So, skimming over the technical problems, let’s just focus on the functionality. It is possible that the future Internet will be a highly connected social network. That is, it will be easy for an individual user or a group to move from one Internet application to another with ease. In a way, SL is at its infancy at doing this. Currently, you can jump from a website to a SL location through a SLurl and it is easy to jump from SL to a website. However, the transition is not very smooth. It takes awhile for SL or the browser to open. You can also play YouTube videos (thanks for showing me that, by the way), through a SL TV. Based on this idea, it would seem like a natural step for friends visiting in Facebook, for example, to quickly move to SL, Skype, or a virtual game. Imagine visiting a friend’s Facebook page, reading about their recent life, and maybe even chatting with them through IM. Then you click a button and travel to their SL apartment where you can also see family pictures and, if they are in world, you visit with them, give them a hug, and perhaps play a 3D game. You could crudely do this now through a SLurl, but good integration would make it even easier. Perhaps a mini SL window would open inside of Facebook or the Facebook page could be wallpaper on the SL apartment. Of course, SL would not be the only thing connected. If you wanted to see the RL person and just converse, the click of a different button would give the friend a Skype call.
QS. Interesting ideas! But based on your experiences and the feedback you have received by lecturing to business information management professionals, how do you think SL itself will evolve?
SV: It seems that technology predictions are frequently wrong. So, I’m not confident in my answer at all. One possibility is that SL will continue to cater to those really seeking a second life, where anonymity is important. SL may have enough of a user base to continue to be a viable fairly small player on the Internet, in the scheme of things. Another possibility is that Linden Labs could start to segment their market. One segment would cater to the social networking arena. In this arena, anonymity would not be a sales feature. A second segment would cater to business training. LL would develop features in SL that make it easy to develop teamwork exercises, etc. A third segment could focus on professional level 3D models. These are just ideas. The advantage of the segments is that LL could experiment a bit to see if any of the ideas take off.
QS: Strider, what do you personally expect to get out of SL professionally in the future?
SV: Gosh, I don’t have high expectations for myself. I originally entered SL because I thought my students would be more interested in animated simulated worlds then the boring text based simulations that are used in higher education. For example, you might be able to teach entrepreneurship in SL by constructing a SL business. As another example, you could potentially teach project management by building something in SL, developing a schedule and budget, and then hiring SL firms to do the job. I’m still hopeful to do that someday if I can find the time.
QS That was great, thank you Strider!
It’s been a great spring for me in SL. And with the top class contributor’s I have managed to persuade to participate in this blog, I can start to be actually really proud of it!
Q
QS: Welcome to my blog Strider. It’s a privilege to have you here!
SV: Thank you very much, Quintessential. I am very happy to be part of your blog. Though, according to some of the studies in your happiness articles, it is not my being here that makes me happy. I guess it is in my DNA… but I digress. I enjoy the variety of topics explored in your blog and I am honored that you asked for my opinion on SL.
QS: You have been following SL for quite a while and even lecturing here to information management professionals. What is your feeling, is SL still a hot topic or do you see the interest fading or changing now?
SV: I think the interest is changing, but it depends on the group. In general, I believe SL has followed the classic Gartner Hype Cycle (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). In this model, the interest in a new technology climbs until it reaches a point of “inflated expectations”, disappointment follows and the hype decreases until it reaches a “trough of disillusionment”, and then the hype increase again through a gradual “slope of enlighten.” Judging by the recent press as mentioned in your earlier article, I think we are probably close to the trough of disillusionment.
QS: You have lectured both to industry CIOs (Chief Information Officers) as well as to University information system administrators. Were there any differences in their interest in SL, and if there was, why?
SV: Yes, I have talked about SL with industry CIOs and other high level managers in IS, as well as people associated with universities. From my experience, there has always been a different level of interest between the groups. In a presentation I made in 2007, I had both groups in the audience. SL was receiving a lot of press at the time. The university administrators were very enthusiastic about the possibilities. They asked many questions about using SL for recruiting students, teaching, alumni relations, and creating a social network among students. During the presentation, my colleague passed me a note to pay attention to the industry representatives. When I focused on this group, I found that they were extremely bored. Through my questioning, I discovered that they found little or no value in SL. They could not see how to attract customers with SL (in fact, they didn’t think universities could either), saw some minor possibilities for training, and felt there were much better 3D modelling tools to illustrate their products on their web sites. The industry representatives were also concerned about adult content in SL.
QS: What do you think were the initial expectations about SL in professional use? Do you think
SL has lived up to those expectations so far?
SV: While some companies have experimented in SL, most of the companies I talked with (with a few exceptions) were never interested. The few that were interested saw it as a possible vehicle for training. Some, though, were just experimenting with such things as virtual offices. I don’t know that the expectations were ever that high in the first place. A few years ago when companies had budgets to experiment, some would try new things like SL to see if they could discover a use. Judging by the number of companies that have left SL, I think most companies have not really found a use. In addition, although there are some interesting stories about university use, on the whole it has not really taken off in that market either.
QS: How do you see the future, how could SL offer the best value as an extension to RL business communications?
SV: Wow, this is a tough question. I think it probably depends on the industry. In general, I have difficulty seeing where SL might be a leading platform to support RL business communication. Usually, voice, text, charts, and tables are fine to support business communication. Where video is important, Skype or similar products that are not based on avatars would work better. The SL world allows activity in addition to communication. I think its unique feature is that it supports virtual physical interaction. That is why universities see it as a possible place for teaching and some businesses see possibilities for training. I’ve talked with some businesses that are interested in developing better robots in SL. I think they are interested in this because it would support controlled training exercises. I think there might also be some opportunities in SL for companies to offer activities like virtual social gatherings for customer groups. They could sponsor a band and a dance, for example, as a way to promote customer relations (this might be a bit farfetched). On the other hand, people at Philosophy House seem to like to sit around and talk. So, you never know how the desires of different groups may evolve.
QS: What about the technology? Do you think SL software supports the HW used in PCs (like graphics cards) efficiently or do you see room for development?
SV: One of the biggest problems I face with SL is that it runs best on only certain graphics cards. The Intel cards that come with many laptops these days are not supported. Although the laptops can sometimes run SL, SL frequently runs poorly (e.g., grind to a halt when there are many avatars or sculpted prims in the area). Consequently, it is difficult to hold a class or develop a training exercise when most of your students have laptops that do not run SL at least moderately well. Most students are only thinking about running word processing, presentation, and web browsing software when they buy their laptops…not SL.
QS: SL has several groups talking about metaverse, which I believe means the interoperability between different virtual worlds (besides SL I know of Open sim at least). There is even a discipline called metanomics! Do you think there exists any actual use of metaverse applications yet? What could be the benefits in the long run?
SV: I have not followed the discussion on metaverse applications, so my answer will be somewhat general. Normally, in IT interoperability is a good thing. One reason the web became so successful is that the user could jump from site to site regardless of the web server used and the information being displayed. If you needed a different browser for different web servers or different types of information, the web would be very difficult to use. Following that line of thought, it would be very convenient to easily jump from one virtual world to another. Ideally, you could do this with the same avatar and have some of the same features (inventory) of that avatar also work in the other world. In this case, different companies might create different specialized worlds. Some worlds could be geared toward gaming and others geared towards RL real estate, for example. Of course, SL may like it if it is all done through them, but different companies may evolve the technology in different directions.
QS: I understood you were slightly sceptical about my argument that anonymity would be one of the main benefits in SL communications (at least for people working in private companies). Could you tell what do you think would be the main benefit for NOT being anonymous in SL? If your avi just represents your RL self on-to-one, why would SL be preferential to an existing RL on-line communication system like Adobe connect Pro, or Skype even
SV: First, I think you do have a valid argument about anonymity. Even within a company, a discussion where participants are anonymous could generate more effective brainstorming. There are technologies that support that now, though, so you don’t necessarily need SL for that. My point on the anonymity feature of SL is that it seems to be counter to the way the world is moving. Teenagers, young adults, and even older adults seem to want the opposite of anonymity. That is, though cell phones, Twitter, and Facebook, people like to share information about their real life self. From a practical standpoint, as a teacher I would prefer to see my students’ real names in SL. As another example, if you were to hold an alumni event in SL, it would be much more fun to spot a RL friend by their RL name. I think SL does not offer an advantage over Skype of Adobe connect when the focus is primarily a business meeting. However, I don’t believe that you can hug a friend, dance, ski, or enjoy a virtual drink together while watching the same TV show on these other platforms.
QS: You mentioned to me about an idea connecting SL to RL social networking systems like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. How would that work in practise? What would be the benefit?
SV: Seamless integration, on the technology side, may be somewhat difficult to implement. So, skimming over the technical problems, let’s just focus on the functionality. It is possible that the future Internet will be a highly connected social network. That is, it will be easy for an individual user or a group to move from one Internet application to another with ease. In a way, SL is at its infancy at doing this. Currently, you can jump from a website to a SL location through a SLurl and it is easy to jump from SL to a website. However, the transition is not very smooth. It takes awhile for SL or the browser to open. You can also play YouTube videos (thanks for showing me that, by the way), through a SL TV. Based on this idea, it would seem like a natural step for friends visiting in Facebook, for example, to quickly move to SL, Skype, or a virtual game. Imagine visiting a friend’s Facebook page, reading about their recent life, and maybe even chatting with them through IM. Then you click a button and travel to their SL apartment where you can also see family pictures and, if they are in world, you visit with them, give them a hug, and perhaps play a 3D game. You could crudely do this now through a SLurl, but good integration would make it even easier. Perhaps a mini SL window would open inside of Facebook or the Facebook page could be wallpaper on the SL apartment. Of course, SL would not be the only thing connected. If you wanted to see the RL person and just converse, the click of a different button would give the friend a Skype call.
QS. Interesting ideas! But based on your experiences and the feedback you have received by lecturing to business information management professionals, how do you think SL itself will evolve?
SV: It seems that technology predictions are frequently wrong. So, I’m not confident in my answer at all. One possibility is that SL will continue to cater to those really seeking a second life, where anonymity is important. SL may have enough of a user base to continue to be a viable fairly small player on the Internet, in the scheme of things. Another possibility is that Linden Labs could start to segment their market. One segment would cater to the social networking arena. In this arena, anonymity would not be a sales feature. A second segment would cater to business training. LL would develop features in SL that make it easy to develop teamwork exercises, etc. A third segment could focus on professional level 3D models. These are just ideas. The advantage of the segments is that LL could experiment a bit to see if any of the ideas take off.
QS: Strider, what do you personally expect to get out of SL professionally in the future?
SV: Gosh, I don’t have high expectations for myself. I originally entered SL because I thought my students would be more interested in animated simulated worlds then the boring text based simulations that are used in higher education. For example, you might be able to teach entrepreneurship in SL by constructing a SL business. As another example, you could potentially teach project management by building something in SL, developing a schedule and budget, and then hiring SL firms to do the job. I’m still hopeful to do that someday if I can find the time.
QS That was great, thank you Strider!
It’s been a great spring for me in SL. And with the top class contributor’s I have managed to persuade to participate in this blog, I can start to be actually really proud of it!
Q
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