Incomplete Ideas, Volume 3

• incomplete ideas = brainshards
• Fantasy universe where oppositional magic systems are actually different computation models. e.g. functional/lambda calculus as white magic, imperative/turing machines as black magic, etc. Holy shit, this is an expansion on the Harold Shea stuff.
• Do (name)tag heavy environments result in an atrophying of facial/personal recognition ability?
• Ranking system for prioritizing book reading and rss feed reading order, perhaps with a small amount of randomization.
• Are electric knifefish a sort of distributed intelligence?
• The whole idea that work often or always involves alienation from ones family and children seems to be a post agricultural one.
• Distributed and peer to peer systems constrast with centralized systems in ways quite similar to the free market/centralized planning dichotomy. A similar analogy might be the utility of memetic diversity and free interaction among peers ought be similarly advantageous to genetic diversity and sexual vs asexual reproduction.
• Transgendered points of view have potential utility because they can act as a differential operator regarding social expectation and personal treatment as a function of gender. This can almost certainly be generalized. Transracial? Transreligious? Transheight?
  • Is low cost, reversible, true gender reassignment the solution gender discrimination?
• A free society ought never adopt the convention that a behaviour be justified as a necessity to be allowed. Freedom to act as one pleases without justification to others (and without harm to them) is the essence of liberty. (Nearly) any behavior/item involving actually physical power can be abused to cause harm to others. If there is a level of risk in a behavior so great as to justify limitations on that behavior, that standard should be applied universally without appeal to aesthetics, morality or other view point dependent justifications.
• Cooperative RTS or TBS where players perform roles like General (military leader), Architect (base builder) and Economist (Resource management)
• Dunbar's number is ~150, which was roughly the attendance of '99 MGS. Ought camps and other self contained societies and clubs be around such a size?

Incomplete Ideas, Volume 2

• Distributed social media/facebook analog with strong searching, git-like back end and directed acyclic graphs for comment threads
• Conjecture: We're just not wired to emotionally understand or intuit the risks of living in a teleconnected 300 million person nation/society. In some sense, we believe that we live in a much smaller society and so we can't correctly the process the risk or distance when we see scary/bad thing happen to other people. This is both good, for empathy, and bad, for unreasonable reaction due to fear and/or poor risk estimation.
  • Can we use this as way to calculate a "natural or optimal size for human communities" (perhaps as a function)? i.e. pick a human societal size that causes our reaction to rare events to be an appropriate risk estimate.
• We ought culture a desire to test everything (possible) with adversarial systems. White hat crackers writ large.
• There's a reasonable level of donation to any store/service/gathering that one benefits from, one might calculate an hourly tip rate to avoid tragedy of the commons situations and provide for and signal interest in useful gathering places. Slightly relevant
• Human societies are self organizing?
• Cell phone holders for rest rooms

Incomplete Ideas, Volume 1

• Health care can't be an effective right as long as it is scarce.
• What if the statist/anarchist conflict is Hegelian dialectic synthesizing global consciousness?
• Explicit understanding of one's social networks as a component of the overall intelligence of a societal overmind. Is connectivity more important? Actual intelligence?
• It seems that it would behoove a sentient race of individuals driven to survive and propagate to become as small and numerous as possible.
• How many books/movies/games, etc, should one randomly select to consume per unit time? Is there a similar number for meeting new people?