Vinge's Focus Virus (was "A Deepness in the Sky")
Douglas Muir
interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
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Okay, the Focus virus causes people to concentrate *absolutely* on a
particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
would become something transcendant.
Focus can be applied to a wide variety of topics, so you can create
super-programmers, super-researchers, super-engineers and accountants
and translators.
Focus has some drawbacks. It's easy to set up a secondary Focus on
obedience, so the Focused are easily enslaved. A person in Focus is, at
best, barely able to feed him or herself. Without care, most Focused
will quickly die of self-neglect.
The Focused lack affect; they care about nothing outside the scope of
their Focus. This includes family, loved ones, etc. A Focused mother
would let her child starve while she worked on her program (sculpture,
blueprint, whatever).
Certain tasks are not suitable to Focusing. The Focused generally do
not make good managers, for instance, or anything else requiring people
skills or a broad range of abilities. There are super-programmers, but
no super-politicians.
Bringing someone out of Focus is difficult and dangerous; it isn't
always successful, and there may be memory loss, personality damage, or
even death.
In aDitS, the Focused are all Emergent slaves. None are voluntary, and
manumission is very rare. Vinge presents Focus as something close to an
intrinsically evil technology... useful, but ultimately destructive.
This is why Pham Nuwen finally turns away from it.
But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
except by one that matches its methods.
Focus, once loose, can't be contained. And it's already loose in Pham's
universe; three whole planets, plus the fleet at OnOff. The genie won't
go back in the bottle.
I think the first priority in controlling it would be to develop a
vaccine against the Focus virus. Spread that around first. This would
prevent the emergence of more Emergents. Then you can start using
Focus, carefully, on unvaccinated volunteers...
My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
alone.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
Mary K. Kuhner
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
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>of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
>if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
>intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
>willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
>be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
>handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
I question what the common good has to do with it. Obsession is pure,
it puts aside one's other goals and little human pettynesses, but
it's by no means guaranteed to be altruistic. You give chessplayers
as an example up above. I was chasing the Master's title when I
was in my teens and twenties, and I can say it's passionate, and
obsessive, and cleans all other things out of your life, and there's
nothing in the least selfless about it except that in that intensity
of concentration one's not aware of self in the same way.
My lab runs the departmental computers. We hung them recently, and
all over the department scientists started pouring out to tell us
that things weren't working and they *needed to work now*. This
wasn't business-like at all, it wasn't about profits or making
deadlines: these folk, many of them, were obsessed and found it
acutely painful to be unable to keep working. I suddenly realized
that I don't want to be the manager of a working group of Focussed.
I also think I know people who would do this. I'm not ready to say
whether I would be tempted (given a different life history,
without family) or not. But I don't think selfless devotion to
the common good would have much to do with it--it's more about
being driven already, in one way or another, and seeing Focus as
the ultimate expression of that drive.
>I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
>enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
>be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
>that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
>country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
>except by one that matches its methods.
I wonder, however, if societies that go down this route will become
unstable in the long term, subject to horrendous positive feedback
loops (societal obsessions which, in the end, interfere with societal
necessities just as badly as being individually Focussed interferes
with one's physical and social necessities).
I just followed this line of reasoning a bit further and landed on
"but the Blight is stable." Oof.
One might do a comparison/contrast with the Draka, or with the
situation at the end of Haldeman's _Tool of the Trade_, or with
what the Mule does to the scientifically inclined around him.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Sea Wasp
>
> I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
> interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>
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> particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
> eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
> exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
> soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
> would become something transcendant.
> alone.
>
> Thoughts?
I thought Focus was a new take, at first, then I realized where we'd
seen it... and where the use of Focus, even in supposedly limited and
controlled ways, would take your culture, quite swiftly:
Can you say "Moties"? I knew you could.
--
Sea Wasp http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.html
/^\
;;; _Morgantown: The Jason Wood Chronicles_, at
http://www.hyperbooks.com/catalog/20040.html
Douglas Muir
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> >be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
> >handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
> I question what the common good has to do with it. Obsession is pure,
> it puts aside one's other goals and little human pettynesses, but
> it's by no means guaranteed to be altruistic.
It is if the Focusing programmer sets a suitably altruistic goal. "Find
an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
out what income tax system is most efficient".
Yah, the Focused themselves would still be utter obsessives. But the
people who are saved from HIV or starvation (or even inefficient taxes)
won't notice or care. You don't have to be a good person to do good.
> >I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
> >enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
> >be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
> >that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
> >country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
> >except by one that matches its methods.
>
> I wonder, however, if societies that go down this route will become
> unstable in the long term, subject to horrendous positive feedback
> loops (societal obsessions which, in the end, interfere with societal
> necessities just as badly as being individually Focussed interferes
> with one's physical and social necessities).
Well, it's implied that the Emergents have found that there's a natural
balance between having enough people Focused and having too many. "The
death of details" and like that.
Possibly the best long-term equilibrium is lower than the one that has
worked for them for a few generations. But if we restrict Focusing to
volunteers, and for shortish periods of time (a year or two), this
shouldn't be a big problem.
> One might do a comparison/contrast with the Draka, or with the
> situation at the end of Haldeman's _Tool of the Trade_, or with
> what the Mule does to the scientifically inclined around him.
Mm. The Mule's power did result in something pretty similar to
Focusing, didn't it. Although it seemed to kill the victim directly via
some sort of stress effect. Vinge's Focus doesn't do anything like
that... just leaves the Focused uninterested in trivial desiderata like
food.
You know, the more I look at aDitS, the more I see stuff that looks
familiar... I mean, we've seen a lot of these ideas before, in Asimov
and Niven and Anderson and others. Yet the book felt remarkably fresh.
Doug M.
Wim Lewis
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
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>But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
Or psychiatric Focusing. Got an unhealthy obsession? Have it Focused
out. Crippling mental trauma? Unpleasant memories? Poor impulse
control? Mindrot is the answer. Actor wanting to accurately portray
a monomaniac or stroke victim? Come to Akbar & Jef's Discount Brain-
Tuning Hut!
>Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
>of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
>if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
>intact.
Sure. Maybe I'm willing to give up my social life (if any) for a year,
get a significant pay raise (plus not spending much on myself in the
meantime) and get the kind of experience that comes only with immersive
work. I'd guess there are quite a few people willing to do that if the
chances of dying or being enslaved were small enough.
I suspect that if the value placed on the continued health and
deFocusability of focused persons were higher, then higher success
rates could be had than the Emergents did. Brughel's(sp?) habits
are considered expensive, but not exorbitantly so, by Nau; obviously
Focused persons are generally regarded as cheap and replaceable, so
there probably isn't much effort put into making sure that deFocusing
is always successful.
People around here will sign on an Alaskan fishing boat for six months
of grueling work and a fair amount of money. It's dangerous, unpleasant,
and you don't see much solid land. If people will do that they'll accept
Focus.
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
"I'd always [seen adults] as, I don't know, confused and (John Kensmark)
harried children with credit cards and driver's licenses." (in rasfw )
Coyu
is Sherkaner Underhill. "So high, so low, so many things to know."
Scattershot brilliance vs. Focused intensity?
Tony Zbaraschuk
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>
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>particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
>eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
>exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
>soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
>would become something transcendant.
Or very very good at any rate: in the universe of -AFutD_,
"Transcendent" has a rather special meaning :)
Seriously, I'm not quite sure it's this good -- Focus seems to let a
person ignore distractions and, well, focus on their area at max,
but it doesn't necessarily let them _surpass_ their own ability,
only use it to its uttermost extent.
Very good, but not superhuman.
>Certain tasks are not suitable to Focusing. The Focused generally do
>not make good managers, for instance, or anything else requiring people
>skills or a broad range of abilities. There are super-programmers, but
>no super-politicians.
Though there are occasional (very occasional) super-managers :)
>In aDitS, the Focused are all Emergent slaves. None are voluntary, and
>manumission is very rare. Vinge presents Focus as something close to an
>intrinsically evil technology... useful, but ultimately destructive.
>This is why Pham Nuwen finally turns away from it.
>
>But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
Well, they don't _quite_ transcend their limits; they just move
right up to them.
I think there are people who would do it -- Trixia, for instance,
_wants_ to stay focused on understanding the Spiders. Some people
might accept it because they really were concerned only with
their discipline (if it's amenable to Focusing), others
because it might guarantee a good living for their family.
I wouldn't. But then I like my hobbies too much to Focus down
on any one thing.
(OK, Tricia wants to stay _semi_-focused on understanding the
Spiders. What about intermediate versions of the technology,
where you're mostly obsessed but can still realize that the
outside world exists and interact with it?)
>Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
>of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
>if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
>intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
>willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
>be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
>handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
Very, very possibly. I could certainly see a religious order
doing that, or the Young Communists of the 1930s, or quite a few
other groups.
>I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
>enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
>be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
>that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
>country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
>except by one that matches its methods.
Until it stultifies. It's very easy for a Focused researcher to get
lost down the wrong track, and with a lot of your brightest people
Focused on their own discipline, where do new ideas (which
frequently arise from a cross-mixing of fields) come from?
The Qeng Ho beat the Emergents because old age and treachery wins
out over youth and skill, but the Emergent hierarchy never
detected the Spider's counterlurk. If they'd had more people
devoted to _thinking_ about the problem, as opposed to obsessing
on it, maybe they'd have noticed. Certainly if the Focused
translators had been less obsessed with communication and more
with the implications of communication, things might have been
very different in the outcome.
Plus, you apparently have moderately high casualties due to
things like mindrot runaways, lack of personal hygiene, that
sort of thing. Is this _actually_ more productive in the long
term?
>Focus, once loose, can't be contained. And it's already loose in Pham's
>universe; three whole planets, plus the fleet at OnOff. The genie won't
>go back in the bottle.
Agreed. But... one of the themes of life among the Qeng Ho is,
"This, too, shall pass"; no civilization lasts forever on the
planets. Focus will just become yet another way for them to
collapse (since you need a fairly high-tech MRI system to keep
it going, it won't last through the Dark Ages, and the new
civilization may not rebuild it.)
>I think the first priority in controlling it would be to develop a
>vaccine against the Focus virus. Spread that around first. This would
>prevent the emergence of more Emergents. Then you can start using
>Focus, carefully, on unvaccinated volunteers...
I can certainly see Ann setting up something like this, and
maybe Pham as well.
>My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
>alone.
Like the Larson locaters? Maybe the Qeng Ho will manage to keep
the details for themselves?
But, yeah, there's a lot more that could be done with this sort of
thing.
It has just occured to me that _A Fire upon the Deep_ is primarily
about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
Tony Z
--
"The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stays will die for naught, and home there's no returning."
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.--A.E. Housman
Nancy Lebovitz
Tony Zbaraschuk <to...@eskimo.com> wrote:
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>I think there are people who would do it -- Trixia, for instance,
>_wants_ to stay focused on understanding the Spiders. Some people
>might accept it because they really were concerned only with
>their discipline (if it's amenable to Focusing), others
>because it might guarantee a good living for their family.
>
You could have a nasty civilization where it's assumed that one
or two children from every family will be Focused to supply income
for the rest of the family.
(....)
>Very, very possibly. I could certainly see a religious order
>doing that, or the Young Communists of the 1930s, or quite a few
>other groups.
>
There was a story (possibly _Fairyland_ by McAuley) about a society
where everyone who couldn't defend themselves (that is, those without
money) was subject to "memetic viruses".
Douglas Muir
> >interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
> >
> >Minor spoiler space follows:
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> Seriously, I'm not quite sure it's this good -- Focus seems to let a
> person ignore distractions and, well, focus on their area at max,
> but it doesn't necessarily let them _surpass_ their own ability,
> only use it to its uttermost extent.
>
> Very good, but not superhuman.
Mmmm, in general I agree. In some situations, though, "superhuman" may
be exactly right. Look how staggered Pham is by his first encounter
with Focused attention to detail... "inhuman" is how he thinks of it.
A Focused security officer, for instance, might watch a set of TV
screens with _absolute and unwavering_ concentration, 16 hours a day
every day for a year. No human could do that, so "superhuman" is
probably appropriate here.
> (OK, Tricia wants to stay _semi_-focused on understanding the
> Spiders. What about intermediate versions of the technology,
> where you're mostly obsessed but can still realize that the
> outside world exists and interact with it?)
Oh, the absolute dream version of the tech would be one where (1)
intermediate versions existed, along a spectrum from normality to full
Focus, and (2) it was quickly, easily, and safely reversible.
La! I'd take a half-power hit of Focus over a weekend and knock off a
term paper or two. Sweet...
> >These could
> >be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
> >handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
>
> Very, very possibly. I could certainly see a religious order
> doing that, or the Young Communists of the 1930s, or quite a few
> other groups.
Oh yeah. You can't Focus a politician, but I bet you could Focus a
terrorist just fine. Now there's a killer app...
> >I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
> >enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
> >be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
> >that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
> >country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
> >except by one that matches its methods.
>
> Until it stultifies. It's very easy for a Focused researcher to get
> lost down the wrong track, and with a lot of your brightest people
> Focused on their own discipline, where do new ideas (which
> frequently arise from a cross-mixing of fields) come from?
Mm. Well, you want to keep it rare anyhow, for humanitarian and social
reasons. Right? So if at any given time only a handful of people are
Focused, this shouldn't be a big concern.
> The Qeng Ho beat the Emergents because old age and treachery wins
> out over youth and skill,
Ha. Nicely put.
> but the Emergent hierarchy never
> detected the Spider's counterlurk. If they'd had more people
> devoted to _thinking_ about the problem, as opposed to obsessing
> on it, maybe they'd have noticed.
I wonder. Nobody was looking for it... Certainly I wasn't.
> Certainly if the Focused
> translators had been less obsessed with communication and more
> with the implications of communication, things might have been
> very different in the outcome.
Well, I think we can stipulate that the Emergents were not using Focus
as efficiently as possible. The Podmasters' first priority was keeping
themselves on top, after all.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the Podmaster caste must have been
very small... on the order of one percent of the population, if that.
After all, there were only two on the expedition, out of, what, hundreds
of people? And it's celar that relations among them are fairly
anarchic, which reinforces that assumption; if there were many millions
of them, they would have to have stratfication and social enforcement
mechanisms among themselves. They don't... Brughel defers to Nau
because he's smarter and has control of Anne, not because he has higher
rank, and no social group is mentioned other than a "clique".
A group that small is less likely to optimize, I suspect.
> Plus, you apparently have moderately high casualties due to
> things like mindrot runaways, lack of personal hygiene, that
> sort of thing. Is this _actually_ more productive in the long
> term?
See above. I think the Emergents were abusing Focus as much as using
it. Certainly mindrot runaways and bad hygiene are easily correctable.
A rough analogy might be the awful working conditions of the early
Industrial Revolution. Yes, steam power _was_ more efficient, but that
didn't mean that countless lives had to be consumed by unsafe machinery,
black lung, etc.
> >Focus, once loose, can't be contained. And it's already loose in Pham's
> >universe; three whole planets, plus the fleet at OnOff. The genie won't
> >go back in the bottle.
>
> Agreed. But... one of the themes of life among the Qeng Ho is,
> "This, too, shall pass"; no civilization lasts forever on the
> planets. Focus will just become yet another way for them to
> collapse (since you need a fairly high-tech MRI system to keep
> it going, it won't last through the Dark Ages, and the new
> civilization may not rebuild it.)
Mm. Point.
Although I suspect that it may pop up again and again, just because it's
so temptingly useful. Well... after a few millenia, it'll be fairly
clear just how, if at all, it can be used safely.
> >My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
> >alone.
>
> Like the Larson locaters? Maybe the Qeng Ho will manage to keep
> the details for themselves?
Perhaps they'd try, but what happens after the Emergency has been
overthrown, and Balacrea and Frenk start broadcasting their story to the
whole galaxy?
> It has just occured to me that _A Fire upon the Deep_ is primarily
> about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
> about _obessions_.
Hmm. Hadn't seen it that way... how do the Spiders fit in? The trads?
> I wonder what the next one will be about?
Based on past experience, we should have another five to seven years to
speculate (sigh).
Doug M.
Ethan A Merritt
>about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
>about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
I would say rather that _Fire_ is about distributed consciousness,
and _Deepness_ is about intermittant consiousness. In both cases
Vinge explores the notion of consciousness from the level of the
individual up through the level of whole galactic cultures.
In _Fire_ the skroderiders, as individuals, distribute their
consciousness between their own bio-ware and the skrode hardware.
Then we see the distributed consciousness of the tine packs,
with some exploration of their bandwidth and range limitations
(ultrasound) and what happens when you overcome them (radio cloaks).
Then jumping up a level in the hierarchy we see a parallel in the
bandwidth and range limitations of the "net of a thousand lies"
connecting the civilizations of the Beyond.
In _Deepness_ the notion of intermittant consciousness for
individuals is explored both for the spiders, sleeping away
200 years at a time while OnOff is Off, and for the Qeng Ho,
alternating Watches on and off in cold sleep. Then
ratcheting up a notch we can view the whole cultural underpinning
of the Qeng Ho as intermittant oscillations between
high-tech and barbarism. Even the exploration of 'focus'
fits in here, as a contrast to the intermittant nature
of thought or attention in a normal individual.
I've tried to think what a parallel third theme might be.
Oscillatory consciousness, whatever that might be? Or is that
too close to intermittant? Maybe shared, as opposed to
distributed, consciousness - something along the lines of
Cherryh's Tc'a matrix minds?
Ethan A Merritt
mer...@u.washington.edu
Tony Zbaraschuk
Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>In article <7c4nl3$vd2$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>,
>Tony Zbaraschuk <to...@eskimo.com> wrote:
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>>I think there are people who would do it -- Trixia, for instance,
>>_wants_ to stay focused on understanding the Spiders. Some people
>>might accept it because they really were concerned only with
>>their discipline (if it's amenable to Focusing), others
>>because it might guarantee a good living for their family.
>>
>or two children from every family will be Focused to supply income
>for the rest of the family.
Sure. (Or, for a fantasy take on this, look at Dave Farland's
_The Runelords_. Not _quite_ the same thing, but there are
some interesting similarities.)
>
>(....)
>
>>Very, very possibly. I could certainly see a religious order
>>doing that, or the Young Communists of the 1930s, or quite a few
>>other groups.
>>
>There was a story (possibly _Fairyland_ by McAuley) about a society
>where everyone who couldn't defend themselves (that is, those without
>money) was subject to "memetic viruses".
Or the Meme Wars in John Barnes' _Kaleidoscope Century_.
Douglas Muir
>> intermediate versions existed, along a spectrum from normality to full
>> Focus, and (2) it was quickly, easily, and safely reversible.
>>
>> La! I'd take a half-power hit of Focus over a weekend and knock off a
>> term paper or two. Sweet...
>
>something like that is widely available in the Beyond if you want
>to do it (of course, you can just have your automation do it _for_
>you in that case, so you don't need it.)
Yeah. Well, wonders without drawbacks are less interesting.
And less realistic, too. Most of the wonders in the here-and-now have
had drawbacks of one sort or another.
>> Oh yeah. You can't Focus a politician, but I bet you could Focus a
>> terrorist just fine. Now there's a killer app...
>
>Literally. Or you could Focus a nurse, or a surgeon.
Yep. Exactly. In fact, I think those would be some of the very "best"
candidate professions for Focus. Wouldn't you _prefer_ a surgeon who
was utterly and obsessively dedicated to perfection?
>_Such_ a temptation. Such a bittersweet, deadly, temptation.
Yeah. On the dark side... well, I don't think the tiny sliver of the
Emergency that we saw really explored the nastier possibilities.
We've seen Focused security at work. Now imagine Focused bodyguards,
ready to throw themselves in front of their masters at any moment.
They'll be needed, because there will be Focused assassins too.
Focused soldiers, utterly careless of their own lives. Focused workers
in hazardous industries.
Focused servants. I'm quite sure the Podmasters have these; we didn't
see them only because Nau and Brughel were so shorthanded, and also had
to present an appropriate image. But it's too easy to imagine
obsessively perfect maids and butlers.
The Emergents would _not_ have Focused religious types. But we'd see
them if the virus ever got out to the universe at large. You think the
[pick a group]s are annoying now...
Focused prostitutes and sex toys. The absolute dedication to the job
might be interesting. If you could overlook the lack of affect, and the
fact that the person was a slave. Which most Emergents probably could
and would.
Focus as punishment. I'm quite sure this is how the Emergency deals
with criminals. Minor offense, life as a Focused street sweeper. Major
offense... well, Anne Reynolt's example suggests that the Podmasters
have an unpleasant sense of humor.
>> Mm. Well, you want to keep it rare anyhow, for humanitarian and social
>> reasons. Right? So if at any given time only a handful of people are
>> Focused, this shouldn't be a big concern.
>
>Possibly. One of the problems is that you'd rapidly be tempted to
>overuse it -- the first generation might use Focus only for
>humanitarian and social reasons, but how long do you think that
>would last?
Mm. There would have to be some serious controls.
Where is the chokepoint? Not the virus, it's obviously contagious. Not
MRI equipment, that's easy-peasy for any advanced society.
Ah. Training technicians to use it... it's clear that this requires a
certain amount of skill.
Okay, you train only a handful of these at a time, and you pay them very
very very well, and you *watch* them. Until they die. Anyone who wants
the job accepts that stricture with it.
>> > Certainly if the Focused
>> > translators had been less obsessed with communication and more
>> > with the implications of communication, things might have been
>> > very different in the outcome.
>>
>> Well, I think we can stipulate that the Emergents were not using Focus
>> as efficiently as possible. The Podmasters' first priority was keeping
>> themselves on top, after all.
>
>Granted. But that's an eternal problem with aristocracies, even
>the best ones. The system has to guard against that somehow.
Good aristocracies can generate positive externalities by inspiring
competition among the aristocrats (cf. quattrocento Florence). Of
course, too _much_ competition is just as bad or worse...
>(That's one problem with Focus: it's so dreadfully easy to create
>slaves. Even if we grant that a world may pick up the idea and
>try to use it for good ends, it's still _very_ vulnerable to abuse.)
Yep.
>> Incidentally, it seems to me that the Podmaster caste must have been
>> very small... on the order of one percent of the population, if that.
>> After all, there were only two on the expedition, out of, what, hundreds
>> of people? And it's celar that relations among them are fairly
>> anarchic, which reinforces that assumption; if there were many millions
>> of them, they would have to have stratfication and social enforcement
>> mechanisms among themselves. They don't... Brughel defers to Nau
>> because he's smarter and has control of Anne, not because he has higher
>> rank, and no social group is mentioned other than a "clique".
>
>Plus they even have dreams of one Podmaster ruling everybody,
>though Tomas Nau (I think) realizes that that's only fantasy.
Yeah. I think that's another hint that there aren't many of them.
>And Trud what's-his-name compares them to "statesmen", which is
>further evidence the class is very small.
Right. And also, there's just a *feel* to them... like there were just
a tiny handful at the beginning, and their numbers have never been
large. Nau doesn't seem to doubt for a moment that a takeover of his
entire society is possible. And Pham and Anne's optimism at the end
suggests this too.
>> A group that small is less likely to optimize, I suspect.
>
>Depends on what you optimize _for_. Staying in power, you can
>do, as long as you're not faced with an external threat (like
>whatever Pham & Anne will do -- I suspect that would be an
>interesting story in itself). Optimizing for other stuff, no;
>even if you wanted to, you're too small for anything other
>than pure theoretical physics, and by then the Qeng Ho free libraries
>are probably two geniuses and three Revolutions past what any
>small group can do on their own.)
I was thinking of optimizing for the most socially efficient use of
Focus. And given the lack of external threats, and the absolute control
that they exercise, I don't think this will be a major issue.
>> Certainly mindrot runaways and bad hygiene are easily correctable.
>
>Personal hygiene yes, but mindrot runaways seem to be partly
>caused by people getting off on different tangents and personal
>disputes (over the meaning of what they're Focused on) escalating.
>Seems to be an inherent problem.
You cut down the connectivity between your Focused. Less of a problem
if there are fewer of them, of course.
>> Well... after a few millenia, it'll be fairly
>> clear just how, if at all, it can be used safely.
>
>If at all. There are probably long-term failure modes with Focus
>that the Emergents haven't had time to discover yet.
Well, they've been using it for decades at least. Not clear how long
exactly.
They had already bounced back from barbarism when Sammy found Pham on
Triland, and it's implied (though not clearly stated) that this recovery
was from the mindrot. Sammy is already using the name Emergents, which
is connected to the Emergency, so they had surely converted mindrot into
Focus by that point.
Do the math: Triland to OnOff, 50 ly at 0.3 t0 0.33c = 150-166 years.
Which is about right; Onoff is shining when Sammy looks at the sky, but
is getting ready to shut down ("in just a few years"). Yeah... 215 year
dark period; it goes dark to Triland eyes while the fleet is assembling,
meaning it has already been dark for 50 years; it's a few years from
relight when the fleet arrives about 150 years later.
Okay, so, say the Emergent system is 20 ly from Triland and 40 from
OnOff. Their ram drive is slower... let's say that the QH fleet could
run ("redlining the ramscoops") at 0.33c, letting them travel 50 ly in
150 years, while the Emergents had to hold at 0.3c, giving a trip time
of 133 years to cross 40 ly. So, uhhh...
Okay, I need to do a chronology here...
Year
0: OnOff begins to emit radio signals.
5: End of cycle on Arachna; Dark falls.
40: Signals reach Emergents
50: Signals reach Triland. Park's fleet arrives.
55: OnOff goes dark, as seen from Triland
60: QH fleet leaves Triland for Arachna
77: Emergent fleet leaves Balacrea for Arachna
210: Fleets arrive at Arachna
215: OnOff lights up again
...give or take a few years. Okay. So in year 50, the Qeng Ho at
Triland are vaguely aware that the Emergents have emerged, which
suggests that they came to power at least a generation earlier. So by
the time of Nau's departure, Focus had been in wide use for at least
half a century.
But not very much longer than that, I think. It doesn't feel like an
old culture, and the conquest of Frenk was still quite recent. Pulling
dates out of air, we could say that the Emergency began to get the
mindrot under control somewhere between -100 and -50, unified and
pacified Balacrea by 0, and the conquest of Frenk occurred between 40
and 60. So Nau's culture is only a century or so old when he leaves.
Hmmm... the book ends somewhere in the 260s. By the time Pham and Anne
arrive at Balacrea, it'll be around 300. The Emergent culture might be
interestingly decadent by that point.
Okay, that was a lengthy digression. Point being, you're right, they
haven't been using it long enough to discover the long-term failure
modes.
Of course, this is also true of almost all of *our* technology. Won't
we be unhappy when we find out that alternating electrical current
causes sterility in the seventh and subsequent generations...
>> > >My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
>> > >alone.
>> >
>> > Like the Larson locaters? Maybe the Qeng Ho will manage to keep
>> > the details for themselves?
>>
>> Perhaps they'd try, but what happens after the Emergency has been
>> overthrown, and Balacrea and Frenk start broadcasting their story to the
>> whole galaxy?
>
>The story, yes, but would they beam the details? I don't know if
>Slow Zone tech is up to reverse-engineering viruses from their
>descriptions.
Mm, they could simply broadcast the genome sequence. A virus is simple
enough to make this practical... we could almost do it today. And even
if they don't, well, something that useful could inspire a lot of
research.
And unlike the Larson locators, people will know the Qeng Ho have it,
and so will be asking to buy it from them.
cheers,
Doug M.
Matthew Hunter
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>
>
>
>
>
>la
>
>
>
>
>
>la
>
>
>
>
>
>la
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>
>
>
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>la
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>
>manumission is very rare. Vinge presents Focus as something close to an
>intrinsically evil technology... useful, but ultimately destructive.
>This is why Pham Nuwen finally turns away from it.
>
>But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
The problems with Focus are pretty obvious. It's clearly too easy to
abuse, even on a voluntary basis. Once focused, how do you ensure that
you are later defocused in accordance with your agreement? How do you
ensure that you are treated as a human being, and not as a slave? Such
a person would, after undergoing voluntary focus, be left entirely at
the mercy of their handlers.
The arguments against voluntary Focus can be considered basically
identical to the arguments against voluntary, but legally binding,
slavery. If you can voluntarily sell yourself to another person, you
have no way of enforcing the agreement should the other party choose to
go beyond the original arrangement. If you are tricked or coerced into
the situation, you have no way to rectify it.
>Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
>of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
>if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
>intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
>willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
>be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
>handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
They can't be "asbolutely and selflessly" devoted to the common good.
They will be absolutely and selflessly devoted to the goals of the
person giving them orders, because they can't see outside their focus
clearly enough to perceive the greater good.
>I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
>enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
>be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
>that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
>country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
>except by one that matches its methods.
Hardly. If the cost for scientific fame and fortune is time in Focus,
how many people will seek fame and fortune in scientific fields and
endeavor? Very few, I assure you. And those people unwilling or
unable to be Focused aren't going to be doing anything productive.
>I think the first priority in controlling it would be to develop a
>vaccine against the Focus virus. Spread that around first. This would
>prevent the emergence of more Emergents. Then you can start using
>Focus, carefully, on unvaccinated volunteers...
>
>My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
>alone.
I doubt it will be left alone, if anything remotely close is possible.
I dearly wish that it would be.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Samael
Matthew Hunter wrote in message ...
>On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 15:25:38 -0500, in rec.arts.sf.written,
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>>
>>Minor spoiler space follows:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>la
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>la
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>la
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>la
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>In aDitS, the Focused are all Emergent slaves. None are voluntary, and
>>manumission is very rare. Vinge presents Focus as something close to an
>>intrinsically evil technology... useful, but ultimately destructive.
>>This is why Pham Nuwen finally turns away from it.
>>
>>But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>>always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>>death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
>
>The problems with Focus are pretty obvious. It's clearly too easy to
>abuse, even on a voluntary basis. Once focused, how do you ensure that
>you are later defocused in accordance with your agreement? How do you
>ensure that you are treated as a human being, and not as a slave? Such
>a person would, after undergoing voluntary focus, be left entirely at
>the mercy of their handlers.
The fact that if they abuse the focussed, nobody will want to be one?
Which will shortly thereafter lweave them without any focussed people.
Most people have _some_ concept of long term gain....
Samael
Andrew Plotkin
Coyu (co...@aol.com) wrote:
I note that for the last several years, he's forced to concentrate on a
single topic, for the benefit of a tiny group of people. The videomancy
takes so much of his time that he stops spinning off other ideas -- at
least, no ideas unrelated enough to be publically discussable.
Neat.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Douglas Muir
Glanced through Chapter 1 again, and it tells us that everything used to
build the Emergent habitat had been "lugged across 20 light years".
Also that the Qeng Ho ships were "much" faster than the Emergents.
Then later, in Anne's confrontation with Pham, she says she lost a war
but not as a member of the Xevalle clique: "tas a century before
Xevalle. For fifteen years we fought them..."
So, we adjust the chronology.
> Okay, so, say the Emergent system is 20 ly from Triland and 40 from
> OnOff.
Well, reverse that... make it 20 from OnOff and 40 from Triland.
> Their ram drive is slower... let's say that the QH fleet could
> run ("redlining the ramscoops") at 0.33c, letting them travel 50 ly in
> 150 years, while the Emergents had to hold at 0.3c, giving a trip time
> of 133 years to cross 40 ly.
Let's say the Emergents' drive runs at 0.25c, giving a trip time of 80
years to cross 20 ly.
Yeah. This clears up one last inconsistent fact, viz., that Tomas Nau's
Uncle Alan had chosen him as an heir, but also wanted him out of the way
for a while until he (Alan) was safely dead of old age. Given 300 year
lifespans, a 160 year round trip would just about work to do this.
Okay, so, adjusted chronology looks like:
Year
0: OnOff begins to emit radio signals.
5: End of cycle on Arachna; Dark falls.
20: Signals reach Emergents
50: Signals reach Triland. Park's fleet arrives.
55: OnOff goes dark, as seen from Triland
60: QH fleet leaves Triland for Arachna
100: Earliest date Emergents may detect/hear of QH fleet en route
135: Emergent fleet leaves Balacrea for Arachna
210: Fleets arrive at Arachna; Great Treachery
215: OnOff lights up again
The Emergent conquest of Frenk is moved back to somewhere between years
0 and 30. By 50, Park is referring to the Emergents as a "three star
system"; if Balacrea is 40 ly from Triland, this may mean the conquest
was complete by year 10. So possibly Anne was falling into Focused
slavery right around the same time that Victory was retiring into
deep-sleep on the front lines of the Great War.
Okay, this is extreme nitpicking... but it's nice to get these things
straight; chronology in a big STL universe can get interestingly
complicated. And it's nice to see that everything fits together, since
this suggests that Vinge has troubled to keep things straight too...
Doug M.
Laura Burchard
dougla...@yale.edu wrote:
> Focused prostitutes and sex toys. The absolute dedication to the job
> might be interesting. If you could overlook the lack of affect, and the
> fact that the person was a slave. Which most Emergents probably could
> and would.
I suspect the Emergency has all your other types as well, but this one they
definitely have. Tomas Nau first considers Focussing Qiwi as a 'body toy',
then decides it's more of a thrill to make her trust him of her own will.
Anne Reynolt's original punishment was going to be being a body slave as well,
before Alan Nau had the clever idea to see if they could focus her at a higher
level.
I think the only real defense against the use of Focus is to research it so
well that unFocusing people becomes simple. That way, if you start abusing
it, it's fairly easy for a rebellion to unFocus all your slaves, leaving you
with many angry enemies that know your system well. And if some of them are
like Trixia, wanting to remain half-Focused for their own reasons, many angry
*Focused* enemies.
I suspect that by the time Anne was done unFocusing the two thousand of the
Attic (she mentions that she's much better at it by the time they get to
Trixia) and the Focused slaves of three worlds, the techniques of unFocusing
are safely embedded in the Qeng Ho net.
Laura Burchard <l...@radix.net>
http://www.radix.net/~lhb * ICQ: 6854921 * IRC: dctrav
X-Review: http://traveller.simplenet.com/xfiles/episode.htm
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
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Damien Neil
>> Minor spoiler space follows:
> I thought Focus was a new take, at first, then I realized where we'd
>seen it... and where the use of Focus, even in supposedly limited and
>controlled ways, would take your culture, quite swiftly:
One of my first thoughts, once the general usefulness of Focus became
apparant, was that Focus was an attempt at making an environment where
computers behave the way they do on SF TV shows, while keeping things
believable.
And no, this doesn't have much to do with your comment. But I wanted
to mention it somewhere. :>
- Damien
James Nicoll
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>
>Focused prostitutes and sex toys. The absolute dedication to the job
>might be interesting. If you could overlook the lack of affect, and the
>fact that the person was a slave. Which most Emergents probably could
>and would.
The Focused have poor personal hygine. If sex-Focused
people don't have a 'stay clean' aspect, I could see them being
very effective vectors for STDs.
I wonder if the Emergents put any research into partial
focusing, where the Focused retain some social skills.
--
March 20, 1999: Imperiums To Order's 15th Anniversary Party. Guests include
Rob Sawyer [SF author], Jo Walton [game designer and soon to be published
fantasy author] and James Gardner [SF author]. DP9 is a definite maybe.
Imperiums is at 12 Church Street, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Douglas Muir
> people don't have a 'stay clean' aspect, I could see them being
> very effective vectors for STDs.
Given the Emergent paranoia about contagion (note that their curse words
are things like "pus" and "pestilence"), I suspect that such people
would be marched through the showers pretty regularly. Possibly by
people whose Focus is taking care of the Focused.
> I wonder if the Emergents put any research into partial
> focusing, where the Focused retain some social skills.
Somehow I doubt it.
Doug M.
James Nicoll
Mary K. Kuhner
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
[I don't think these are still spoilers, though reader beware.]
>Mary wrote:
>> I question what the common good has to do with it. Obsession is pure,
>> it puts aside one's other goals and little human pettynesses, but
>> it's by no means guaranteed to be altruistic.
>It is if the Focusing programmer sets a suitably altruistic goal. "Find
>an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
>out what income tax system is most efficient".
>Yah, the Focused themselves would still be utter obsessives. But the
>people who are saved from HIV or starvation (or even inefficient taxes)
>won't notice or care. You don't have to be a good person to do good.
Eek!
What does a person *do* who is obsessed with feeding the poor of Calcutta?
I would suspect that effective answers almost surely start with over-
throwing the government of India, and/or radically restructuring Indian
society. The problem with obsession is that it blocks out everything but
its object: for example, the moral or social or practical reasons that
restructuring Indian society by force might not be such a good idea.
Or take "find an HIV vaccine." We could do a much better job of that, in
terms of getting results, if we were willing to put aside niceties like
human-subjects laws and informed consent and the prohibition against infecting
people with AIDS in order to get a good vaccine test. And that is,
historically, exactly the risk of overly-obsessed researchers. "Nothing will
stand in my way."
I'm realizing another literary analogue to all this: Niven's Protectors.
Do you remember Pssthpok's (or was it Brennan's?) plan for wiping out
humankind? It started with seeding Tree-of-Life in nature reserves in
Africa, and organizing the chimpanzee and gorilla Protectors to protect their
kinsfolk.
The average Focussed might not be up to this sort of grand scheme, but gods
help us, it only takes one.
The more I think about this, the more other stories pop out. Greg Egan's
"The Moral Virologist" is about someone obsessed with fixing a problem, hm?
And the graphic novel _Watchmen_. Ozymandias is that kind of obsessed, and
has goals for the good of humanity too.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Tony Zbaraschuk
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
<snip adjusted chronology>
>Okay, this is extreme nitpicking... but it's nice to get these things
>straight; chronology in a big STL universe can get interestingly
>complicated. And it's nice to see that everything fits together, since
>this suggests that Vinge has troubled to keep things straight too...
I can pretty much guarantee he did. :)
If you have the CD-ROM version of _Fire_, some of Vinge's notes
include chronological ones, working out the whole timeschedule with
a calendar program set to 15000+ AD (don't remember the exact year.)
I can't imagine he doesn't have an obsessively-worked-out timescale
here as well.
Douglas Muir
> >an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
> >out what income tax system is most efficient".
>
> >Yah, the Focused themselves would still be utter obsessives. But the
> >people who are saved from HIV or starvation (or even inefficient taxes)
> >won't notice or care. You don't have to be a good person to do good.
>
> Eek!
>
> What does a person *do* who is obsessed with feeding the poor of Calcutta?
> I would suspect that effective answers almost surely start with over-
> throwing the government of India, and/or radically restructuring Indian
> society. The problem with obsession is that it blocks out everything but
> its object: for example, the moral or social or practical reasons that
> restructuring Indian society by force might not be such a good idea.
Hokay, but it's stipulated that the Focused don't necessarily get hung
up on a single solution. When Nau won't take Anne's advice to shut Pham
down, she shrugs. When North Paw is destroyed, Qiwi's father begins to
speculate about building a new and different sort of microG garden.
So:
"Throw out the government of India."
"Can't do it that way. Try something different."
"Ship a couple million of them to New Zealand. That country should be
able to support -- "
"Not an option. Go again."
"The modest proposal thing. Take half the babies and -- "
"No."
"Green tech. More productive rice, and garden plots that can be
purchased with microloans."
"Okay, that sounds like a promising line. Sit down and go to work, and
I'll check back in sixteen hours to put you to bed."
> Or take "find an HIV vaccine." We could do a much better job of that, in
> terms of getting results, if we were willing to put aside niceties like
> human-subjects laws and informed consent and the prohibition against infecting
> people with AIDS in order to get a good vaccine test. And that is,
> historically, exactly the risk of overly-obsessed researchers. "Nothing will
> stand in my way."
So you have someone keeping an eye on your Focused.
Heck, maybe another Focused... one whose Focus is ethics. Of course,
you have to give her a club. "I said NO! No testing on humans!" "But
it's the most efficient -- " (*thud*)
> I'm realizing another literary analogue to all this: Niven's Protectors.
Yah, I thought of them too. But, you know, having just one or two
protectors around was a good thing!
> The more I think about this, the more other stories pop out. Greg Egan's
> "The Moral Virologist" is about someone obsessed with fixing a problem, hm?
> And the graphic novel _Watchmen_. Ozymandias is that kind of obsessed, and
> has goals for the good of humanity too.
Scary tool. Many pitfalls along the way.
Still very very tempting.
Perhaps we should wait until humanity is spread across more than one
planet before we start playing with it, though.
Doug M.
Christopher K Davis
> You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
My response to that can be summed up in five words:
"Light fuse and run away."
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>
Thomas
Douglas Muir wrote:
NO. I do -not- want to see someone focused on etichs.
You can get other forms of focused to try diffrent approaces
but if you give someone ethics as a focus there is not going to
be any way short of deadly force to stop the focused from
doing what he/she precives as right and focusing does not
prevent you from being -wrong-.
Scott Fluhrer
jam...@ece.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) wrote:
> You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
You don't think he's obsessive enough as it is???
--
poncho
Matthew Hunter
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>> >Minor spoiler space follows:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>> >la
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>> >These could
>> >be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
>> >handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
>> it puts aside one's other goals and little human pettynesses, but
>> it's by no means guaranteed to be altruistic.
>an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
>out what income tax system is most efficient".
Goals like that are *way* outside the scope of anyone in Focus. A
Focused person could plan such an effort, but they wouldn't be able to
mobilize the resources. And if you can mobilize the resources, you
don't need the Focused person to organize it; organizing it is the easy
part.
Focus is pretty clearly limited to either a) manual labor of various
kinds, perhaps requiring extensive amounts of detail work, or b) purely
intellectual pursuits (translation, navigation, scientific research).
In other areas, getting resources will be harder than "solving" the
problem.
>Yah, the Focused themselves would still be utter obsessives. But the
>people who are saved from HIV or starvation (or even inefficient taxes)
>won't notice or care. You don't have to be a good person to do good.
That's a very, very dangerous attitude. It's right up there with "Lets
go rob the rich; they have more than enough anyway." You *have* to
think about consequences and tradeoffs; the Focused don't.
>Possibly the best long-term equilibrium is lower than the one that has
>worked for them for a few generations. But if we restrict Focusing to
>volunteers, and for shortish periods of time (a year or two), this
>shouldn't be a big problem.
You have no way of enforcing this.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Matthew Hunter
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>> >I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>> >interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>> >
>> >Minor spoiler space follows:
>>
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>> Seriously, I'm not quite sure it's this good -- Focus seems to let a
>> person ignore distractions and, well, focus on their area at max,
>> but it doesn't necessarily let them _surpass_ their own ability,
>> only use it to its uttermost extent.
>> Very good, but not superhuman.
>Mmmm, in general I agree. In some situations, though, "superhuman" may
>be exactly right. Look how staggered Pham is by his first encounter
>with Focused attention to detail... "inhuman" is how he thinks of it.
>A Focused security officer, for instance, might watch a set of TV
>screens with _absolute and unwavering_ concentration, 16 hours a day
>every day for a year. No human could do that, so "superhuman" is
>probably appropriate here.
And such a Focused security officer would be relatively ineffective in
dealing with anyone who understood their limitations. You could
eliminate petty crime completely, and no one would ever smuggle a
penknife past the front desk again, but anyone with a little creativity
could get around it.
Focus is not a panacea, even if you ignore the social cost.
>> (OK, Tricia wants to stay _semi_-focused on understanding the
>> Spiders. What about intermediate versions of the technology,
>> where you're mostly obsessed but can still realize that the
>> outside world exists and interact with it?)
>Oh, the absolute dream version of the tech would be one where (1)
>intermediate versions existed, along a spectrum from normality to full
>Focus, and (2) it was quickly, easily, and safely reversible.
>La! I'd take a half-power hit of Focus over a weekend and knock off a
>term paper or two. Sweet...
Keep doing that regularly, and that .1% chance or so of it not wearing
off this time adds up fast.
>> Until it stultifies. It's very easy for a Focused researcher to get
>> lost down the wrong track, and with a lot of your brightest people
>> Focused on their own discipline, where do new ideas (which
>> frequently arise from a cross-mixing of fields) come from?
>Mm. Well, you want to keep it rare anyhow, for humanitarian and social
>reasons. Right? So if at any given time only a handful of people are
>Focused, this shouldn't be a big concern.
That also cuts into the proposed benefits pretty harshly.
>> but the Emergent hierarchy never
>> detected the Spider's counterlurk. If they'd had more people
>> devoted to _thinking_ about the problem, as opposed to obsessing
>> on it, maybe they'd have noticed.
>I wonder. Nobody was looking for it... Certainly I wasn't.
I was, actually; UnderHill spotting the exhaust during his first
excursion tipped me off.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Nancy Lebovitz
Matthew Hunter <mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 21:15:54 -0500, in rec.arts.sf.written,
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>>> >Minor spoiler space follows:
>>> >
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>>an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
>>out what income tax system is most efficient".
>
>Goals like that are *way* outside the scope of anyone in Focus. A
>Focused person could plan such an effort, but they wouldn't be able to
>mobilize the resources. And if you can mobilize the resources, you
>don't need the Focused person to organize it; organizing it is the easy
>part.
>
>Focus is pretty clearly limited to either a) manual labor of various
>kinds, perhaps requiring extensive amounts of detail work, or b) purely
>intellectual pursuits (translation, navigation, scientific research).
>In other areas, getting resources will be harder than "solving" the
>problem.
>
solution, would that make it easier to get the resources for
implementation?
Unfortunately, this is most likely the moral equivalent of "I don't
understand it, but the computer said so--it must be right".
David Dyer-Bennet
train somebody to be a Mentat. That seems to do less damage to the
person, and leaves them more control over what they use their skills
on, but it seems to belong vaguely in the same family tree.
--
David Dyer-Bennet d...@ddb.com
http://www.ddb.com/~ddb (photos, sf) Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon
http://ouroboros.demesne.com/ The Ouroboros Bookworms
Join the 20th century before it's too late!
t...@rak061.oulu.fi
> You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
Focused Miles Vorkosigan is a redundant concept.
--
Tapio Erola t...@paju.oulu.fi (No mail to t...@sliver.oulu.fi please)
I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.
Lydia Nickerson
>jam...@ece.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) writes:
>> You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
>Focused Miles Vorkosigan is a redundant concept.
Not really. He'd lose his sparkle. He wouldn't be insubordinate. He
wouldn't be creative. And he'd be far more likely to spiral out of
control, he's got that tendancy in real life.
--
----
Lydia Nickerson ly...@ddb.com
Andrew Plotkin
> >jam...@ece.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) writes:
Right. Charismatic leadership is going to be even harder to Focus than
"simple" impersonal management of human resources. Exponentially harder.
Nancy Lebovitz
>Another fictional predecessor to Focus is whatever they do in Dune to
>train somebody to be a Mentat. That seems to do less damage to the
>person, and leaves them more control over what they use their skills
>on, but it seems to belong vaguely in the same family tree.
>
big social problem novels) might be another related concept.
Tony Zbaraschuk
Ethan A Merritt <mer...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>In article <7c4nl3$vd2$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>,
>Tony Zbaraschuk <to...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
>>about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
>
>I would say rather that _Fire_ is about distributed consciousness,
>and _Deepness_ is about intermittant consiousness. In both cases
>Vinge explores the notion of consciousness from the level of the
>individual up through the level of whole galactic cultures.
OK, I can see this, but more as a parallel possibility than
a replacement. Cooperation really is distributed consciousness --
many minds/parts-of-minds working together on one effort.
Intermittent is one-on-many (whether separated in time or apart
in time.)
I guess the next step might be many-on-many, but maybe that's
too large for a novel -- or one-on-one, but does Vinge do lone
geniuses well?
>In _Fire_ the skroderiders, as individuals, distribute their
>consciousness between their own bio-ware and the skrode hardware.
>Then we see the distributed consciousness of the tine packs,
>with some exploration of their bandwidth and range limitations
>(ultrasound) and what happens when you overcome them (radio cloaks).
>Then jumping up a level in the hierarchy we see a parallel in the
>bandwidth and range limitations of the "net of a thousand lies"
>connecting the civilizations of the Beyond.
And presumably one can then project upwards to the Transcend,
with Powers having (mostly) overcome the bandwidth problem.
But that's an unwritable story, probably.
>In _Deepness_ the notion of intermittant consciousness for
>individuals is explored both for the spiders, sleeping away
>200 years at a time while OnOff is Off, and for the Qeng Ho,
>alternating Watches on and off in cold sleep. Then
>ratcheting up a notch we can view the whole cultural underpinning
>of the Qeng Ho as intermittant oscillations between
>high-tech and barbarism. Even the exploration of 'focus'
>fits in here, as a contrast to the intermittant nature
>of thought or attention in a normal individual.
Interesting. Yup, I can see this.
>I've tried to think what a parallel third theme might be.
>Oscillatory consciousness, whatever that might be? Or is that
>too close to intermittant? Maybe shared, as opposed to
>distributed, consciousness - something along the lines of
>Cherryh's Tc'a matrix minds?
We're getting close to the Transcendent here -- and in some ways
the Tines are already shared consciousness. Perhaps a multiple
consciousness, that can do several things at once, like Walter
John Williams' _Aristoi_? But then how to write it in such a
way that we can read it?
Wayne Throop
: Eptification from _Stand on Zanzibar_ (or possibly one of Brunner's
: other big social problem novels) might be another related concept.
Probably somebody has already mentioned the revived Thrint's
effect on a human scientist from a Pournelle/Niven Man/Kzin War story.
But just in case; "the revived Thrint's effect on a human scientist".
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Lydia Nickerson
>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>Minor spoiler space follows:
>la
>la
>la
>la
>Okay, the Focus virus causes people to concentrate *absolutely* on a
>particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
>eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
>exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
>soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
>would become something transcendant.
I think this is an inaccurate assessment of the power of Focus. You don't
get a transcendant chess player, you get an obsessive chess player. If
you want a brilliant chess player, you may need a team of focused chess
players. Certain aspects of inspiration appear to be difficult to focus,
probably because they come from synthesizing data from many different
places. If all that's needed to win at chess is the ability to trace out
the possible moves and countermoves for several hundred moves, well, a
team of Focused players of no special skill could do that. If a chess
master's insights are entirely bounded within his understanding of the
game, then he might be a startlingly better chess player when Focused. But
Focus makes the victim less flexible, unable to adapt easily to new input.
Chess has very nice, distinct boundaries. But for things that are
fuzzier, like physics or pure math, it would depend on the person and how
they process data.
>Focus can be applied to a wide variety of topics, so you can create
>super-programmers, super-researchers, super-engineers and accountants
>and translators.
Again, per above, not necessarily, and not predictably. You could turn a
brilliantly innovative programmer into a very precise but uninspired
programmer.
>Focus has some drawbacks. It's easy to set up a secondary Focus on
>obedience, so the Focused are easily enslaved. A person in Focus is, at
>best, barely able to feed him or herself. Without care, most Focused
>will quickly die of self-neglect.
I think you underestimate the negative consequences of Focus. One of the
truly horrible things about Focus is that it can partially or entirely
obliterate volition. It creates a severe, and possibly irreversible
change to personality. I do not think that this is merely a technological
glitch. Altered states of mind can change people, sometimes profoundly.
This is what happened to Trixia. Focus will _change_ people in
unpredictable ways. The experience of Focus will have to be processed by
the newly unFocused person, very possibly with a rusty skill set for
dealing with the emotional, logistical, and personal upheaval. A person
who's in jail for a year loses contact with people, has his social net
shredded, and often comes out with fewer coping skills than when he went
in. Focus is much worse, since there is no processing of any extraneous
emotions or information. The people returning to the world will be
returning to a world that has moved on without them. You can lose touch
with a lot of people that way. Few friends or lovers are as obsessive as
Ezr.
>Bringing someone out of Focus is difficult and dangerous; it isn't
>always successful, and there may be memory loss, personality damage, or
>even death.
And very possibly insanity, I'd think, going suddenly from one world to
another, moving from a state of perfect irresponsibilty back to a world
where free will and responsibility are daily concerns.
>In aDitS, the Focused are all Emergent slaves. None are voluntary, and
>manumission is very rare. Vinge presents Focus as something close to an
>intrinsically evil technology... useful, but ultimately destructive.
>This is why Pham Nuwen finally turns away from it.
I'm on Vinge's side. It's intrinsically evil. Taking free will from a
human being is evil.
>But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
There are always human beings willing to take any risk, no matter how
foolish or pointless. Russian roulette, frex, and that only for the
thrill of fear. With fully informed consent, I might let people choose
Focus, mostly because if I don't, my ethical system becomes inconsistent.
Informed consent, though, would be a bugger in this case.
>Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
>of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
>if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
>intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
>willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
>be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
>handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
I don't think you'd have very many volunteers if my assessment of the
value and dangers is more accurate than yours. What Focus really excels
at is substituting organic brains and bodies for machine automation. How
many artists or scientists would be willing to gamble their ability to
work on a year or two of focus? Focused work in teams, managed by an
unFocused person. There's a lack of ego boo available on the flip side of
Focus that I think would act as a deterrant as well.
>I see Focus as a very very dangerous technology, because of the ease of
>enslaving the Focused... but I also see it as one too useful to leave
>be. After all, any group that uses Focus will quickly outcompete one
>that does not. A business with Focused accountants and engineers, a
>country that uses Focused tacticians and researchers, will be unbeatable
>except by one that matches its methods.
Is slavery wrong? If someone, tomorrow, comes up with a virus that would
turn every person with certain genes into loving slaves, would it be moral
to turn those people into slaves? Should a corporation be able to demand
that someone already working for them accept that virus if they have the
right genetic makeup? I _don't_care_ how "efficient" it makes an
organization. Organizations should exist to benefit the people that
make up that organization, not for the benefit of the the organization
itself.
>Focus, once loose, can't be contained. And it's already loose in Pham's
>universe; three whole planets, plus the fleet at OnOff. The genie won't
>go back in the bottle.
I'm afraid you are right.
>I think the first priority in controlling it would be to develop a
>vaccine against the Focus virus. Spread that around first. This would
>prevent the emergence of more Emergents. Then you can start using
>Focus, carefully, on unvaccinated volunteers...
Oh, yes, develope the vaccine. But no, don't experiment on volunteers.
Vaccinate _everybody_. Leaving unvaccinated volunteers around is like
leading those lambs to the slaughter. As you said, the genie won't go
back in the bottle.
Lydia Nickerson
>In article <36E583...@yale.edu>,
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>>
>>Minor spoiler space follows:
>
>>
>>
>>
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>>la
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>Plus, you apparently have moderately high casualties due to
>things like mindrot runaways, lack of personal hygiene, that
>sort of thing. Is this _actually_ more productive in the long
>term?
It depends on what you have a surplus of, in part. The Focused approach
is extremely labor intensive. One assumes that there are an excess of
people and a shortage of resources within the Emergency. Much of the cost
of this approach is subsumed by a devaluation of human life. Most of the
Focused are treated as interchangeable parts, and when one wears out, you
swap in a new one. I suspect that the broken one is most often killed,
rather than rehabilitated. Even unFocused have a very limited value to
the Pod People. As the value of individuals go up, the economy of a
Focused approach goes down. Which is cheaper, a machine automated drink
tray, which makes a few errors, or a drink tray controlled by a Focused
person? The same is true in more abstract venues. The translators and
the physicist worked in teams. A single Focused person is unlikely to hve
the kind of results that a team can manage, because insight comes from
multiple points of view, and when Focused, each component only has one
point of view. UnFocused, people can gather outside information and
question their conclusions, in effect learning to look at the problem from
several angles. The insights of a Focused team and an unFocused
individual might well be qualitatively different. But don't forget the
labor costs involved in keeping a team of Focused people working together,
healthy, and productive. Productive is another odd one, here, because you
have to rely on an unFocused person with no direct access to the insights
of the Focused to direct research away from dead ends. I'm pretty sure
the Emergency deFocused the wrong physicist.
>It has just occured to me that _A Fire upon the Deep_ is primarily
>about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
>about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
Interesting. I would have said the divisions were cooperation and
competition.
Douglas Muir
> >particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
> >eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
> >exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
> >soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
> >would become something transcendant.
>
> I think this is an inaccurate assessment of the power of Focus. You don't
> get a transcendant chess player, you get an obsessive chess player.
I picked chess rather deliberately, actually. Except at the highest and
lowest levels, chess skill tends to correlate fairly closely with
obsessiveness and time investment.
I've gotten re-hooked on the game two or three times now. Each time,
having bought some books and software and jumped back in, I could
actually feel my skill level rising as I pumped more time and attention
into it.
This relationship breaks down at the highest levels; even if I spent 15
hours a day on chess for the next 20 years, I doubt I could whip a
Fischer or Kasparov. I do think I could make him sit up and sweat a
bit, though.
> Certain aspects of inspiration appear to be difficult to focus,
> Focus makes the victim less flexible, unable to adapt easily to new input.
No... I don't think that's altogether true. Look at Trixia's
translations. Heck, look at Ali Lin's gardening! When Pham destroys
his park, he adapts just fine, thanks. Comes up with a whole new art
form, in fact.
I think much depends on who you're Focusing, and what you're focusing
them _on_. The best results (Trixia, Ali, Anne) seem to come when
someone is being Focused on something they already were good at and were
deeply engaged with.
> >Focus has some drawbacks. It's easy to set up a secondary Focus on
> >obedience, so the Focused are easily enslaved. A person in Focus is, at
> >best, barely able to feed him or herself. Without care, most Focused
> >will quickly die of self-neglect.
>
> I think you underestimate the negative consequences of Focus. One of the
> truly horrible things about Focus is that it can partially or entirely
> obliterate volition. It creates a severe, and possibly irreversible
> change to personality. I do not think that this is merely a technological
> glitch. Altered states of mind can change people, sometimes profoundly.
> This is what happened to Trixia.
Well, it's clear that this risk is reducible. To what _extent_ it's
reducible is not at all clear.
In any event Trixia seems perfectly happy at the end. She can care for
herself and form emotional relationships again. She doesn't love Ezr,
but then she didn't love him before she was Focused either. She's no
worse off than any normal person who loves their work and gets a little
obsessive about it sometimes.
> Focus will _change_ people in unpredictable ways.
Life may do that regardless.
> The experience of Focus will have to be processed by
> the newly unFocused person, very possibly with a rusty skill set for
> dealing with the emotional, logistical, and personal upheaval.
Yah, this is why I think you'd want to keep it to limited periods of
time... a year or two at the most.
A person
> who's in jail for a year loses contact with people, has his social net
> shredded, and often comes out with fewer coping skills than when he went
> in. Focus is much worse, since there is no processing of any extraneous
> emotions or information. The people returning to the world will be
> returning to a world that has moved on without them. You can lose touch
> with a lot of people that way. Few friends or lovers are as obsessive as
> Ezr.
Agreed. For best results, you'd need a strong support system. Possibly
an institutional one.
> I'm on Vinge's side. It's intrinsically evil. Taking free will from a
> human being is evil.
And if the person chooses, of her own free will, to give free will
away...?
> >But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
> >always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
> >death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
>
> There are always human beings willing to take any risk, no matter how
> foolish or pointless. Russian roulette, frex, and that only for the
> thrill of fear. With fully informed consent, I might let people choose
> Focus, mostly because if I don't, my ethical system becomes inconsistent.
> Informed consent, though, would be a bugger in this case.
Don't see why. There's three planets worth of db. Most of it horribly
negative examples, to be sure... but anyone who chooses Focus after
seeing how it worked on Balacrea is definitely going to be aware of the
risks.
> >Heck, I've met some... researchers, programmers, artists. I can think
> >of several people I know who would probably take a year or two in Focus
> >if they had at least a decent chance of coming out the other side
> >intact. And I bet there'd be a small but significant minority who'd be
> >willing to accept _permanent_ Focus for some greater good. These could
> >be the "loving slaves" that Pham speculates about... never more than a
> >handful, but *absolutely* and selflessly devoted to the common good.
>
> I don't think you'd have very many volunteers if my assessment of the
> value and dangers is more accurate than yours.
Demur. There are a lot of obsessive sorts out there. Also a lot of
people who have no lives anyhow (or think they don't). Also fanatics of
one sort or another.
Even if the risks are quite high, there'd still be volunteers.
> What Focus really excels
> at is substituting organic brains and bodies for machine automation.
No... it *can* do that, yes, but in at least a few cases it can enable
humans to transcend their limits. Trixia and Ali aren't just more
productive; they're more creative, too.
If Focus were simply about turning people into machines, it would be
much easier to walk away from it.
> How
> many artists or scientists would be willing to gamble their ability to
> work on a year or two of focus?
Again, note that the people who were most creative under Focus -- Ali,
Anne, and Trixia -- all emerged relatively intact and perfectly capable
of doing further work.
Vinge isn't making this easy.
> Is slavery wrong? If someone, tomorrow, comes up with a virus that would
> turn every person with certain genes into loving slaves, would it be moral
> to turn those people into slaves?
Straw man argument; not the case here. Ask rather: is it moral to tell
those people about the virus, and give them the opportunity to take it
if they freely choose to?
Some people might _want_ to be loving slaves, after all.
> I _don't_care_ how "efficient" it makes an
> organization. Organizations should exist to benefit the people that
> make up that organization, not for the benefit of the the organization
> itself.
Ah, my point was, once one group starts using it, competing groups will
probably be compelled to use it too, or be outcompeted. So any society
that wants to use it will have to regulate it quite carefully, or its
use will spread.
And you know, if Focus is economically efficient -- and it's pretty
clear that it is -- then, putting the slavery question aside, economic
incentives will be offered.
Someone used the oil-rigger analogy. I think it's a good one. Oil rigs
pay people a lot of money to leave their families for six months or a
year, to live in near-complete isolation in the middle of the ocean
while doing hard, dirty, dangerous work. By and large, there are plenty
of people willing to do this.
So imagine that Microsoft offers, oh, half a million dollars to a new CS
graduate to spend two years under Focus, debugging Windows (obviously
there will be more than one doing this...). If we assume that the risks
are smallish -- say, a one percent chance of madness or death, and a
five percent chance of memory loss or major personality change -- how
many 22 year olds do you think would be willing to try it?
Doug M.
Tony Zbaraschuk
>to...@eskimo.com (Tony Zbaraschuk) writes:
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>
>>Plus, you apparently have moderately high casualties due to
>>things like mindrot runaways, lack of personal hygiene, that
>>sort of thing. Is this _actually_ more productive in the long
>>term?
>
>It depends on what you have a surplus of, in part. The Focused approach
>is extremely labor intensive.
As compared to what? One Focused person can probably substitute
for several non-Focused in the appropriate jobs, and doesn't need
as much additional care as a non-Focused person.
>One assumes that there are an excess of
>people and a shortage of resources within the Emergency. Much of the cost
>of this approach is subsumed by a devaluation of human life. Most of the
>Focused are treated as interchangeable parts, and when one wears out, you
>swap in a new one.
This is reasonable. Of course, the place is a classic oligarchy,
maintained by the Podmasters for the benefit of the Podmasters,
and so _they_ have an exceptionally good time at the expense of
just about everyone else. (The Followers, those people who aren't
focused, appear to be rather like feudal vassals -- I wonder if
there's another class in Emergent society besides Focused, Followers,
and Podmasters.)
>I suspect that the broken one is most often killed,
>rather than rehabilitated. Even unFocused have a very limited value to
>the Pod People. As the value of individuals go up, the economy of a
>Focused approach goes down.
Yes. But you do need Managers -- the sort of people who can get
the Focused doing things, keep them from blowing up, point them in
the right direction, etc. (If you have these, though, do you
_really_ need the Podmasters, or could you end up with a much
broader-based slave-owning class?)
>Which is cheaper, a machine automated drink
>tray, which makes a few errors, or a drink tray controlled by a Focused
>person?
Oh, an automated tray, of course, -- but the controlled tray is
actually of higher quality _for the Podmaster_; from his point of view,
it doesn't matter that the Focused don't have any drinks trays if he
can have the best one in existence.
> The same is true in more abstract venues. The translators and
>the physicist worked in teams. A single Focused person is unlikely to hve
>the kind of results that a team can manage, because insight comes from
>multiple points of view, and when Focused, each component only has one
>point of view. UnFocused, people can gather outside information and
>question their conclusions, in effect learning to look at the problem from
>several angles.
Now this is a useful argument against Focus: lack of creativity.
But then you have Ali -- a Focused person _can_ be creative within
the area of their Focus. And the translators certainly managed quite
a program of creative contact with the Spiders. Perhaps the same
number of unFocused persons wouldn't have been able to achieve
such a plan.
>The insights of a Focused team and an unFocused
>individual might well be qualitatively different. But don't forget the
>labor costs involved in keeping a team of Focused people working together,
>healthy, and productive. Productive is another odd one, here, because you
>have to rely on an unFocused person with no direct access to the insights
>of the Focused to direct research away from dead ends.
Well, the Focused need care and feeding and supervision, granted.
And I'll agree that their lack of error-checking routines (or at
least extreme tendency toward loss of same) is a problem. But
those people will still need food and housing and entertainment,
and probably more resources, if they're unFocused.
>I'm pretty sure
>the Emergency deFocused the wrong physicist.
Hmm... Have to look at that and see what happened. You could
be right.
>>It has just occured to me that _A Fire upon the Deep_ is primarily
>>about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
>>about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
>
>Interesting. I would have said the divisions were cooperation and
>competition.
Would you mind expanding on that a bit? Particularly the bit
about competition -- that _happens_ in aDitS, but I don't see it
as a primary theme of the book.
Douglas Muir
> >an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
> >out what income tax system is most efficient".
>
Mais non. Anne Reynolt. -- Granted, she's a rare fluke. But Trixia
and old man Lin both showed a certain... broadness of Focus.
Obsessives, but they could efficiently integrate all sorts of
information, some of it not directly and obviously relevant to the
obsession (like when Trixia is interpreting the "plaid" color -- it's
clear that she has a pretty good knowledge of Spider physiology).
> And if you can mobilize the resources, you
> don't need the Focused person to organize it; organizing it is the easy
> part.
Ah heh. If organizing is the easy part, all those management classes
were a *complete* waste of time...
> Focus is pretty clearly limited to either a) manual labor of various
> kinds, perhaps requiring extensive amounts of detail work, or b) purely
> intellectual pursuits (translation, navigation, scientific research).
Ummm, "it's limited to manual labor and intellectual pursuits" covers a
lot of ground.
> >Yah, the Focused themselves would still be utter obsessives. But the
> >people who are saved from HIV or starvation (or even inefficient taxes)
> >won't notice or care. You don't have to be a good person to do good.
>
> That's a very, very dangerous attitude. It's right up there with "Lets
> go rob the rich; they have more than enough anyway."
I don't think so. I'm not saying "the bad doesn't matter because the
result is good". No. I'm saying that few people are going to turn down
something that's obviously good -- for them -- because they're worried
about its provenance. IIRC I was responding to a poster who suggested
there'd be widespread revulsion for Focus. Having spent some time in
places where labor was cheap, I'm very very dubious of that one.
_Someone_ should worry about its provenance, yes, certainly. I was just
saying that the person on the street isn't going to, any more than he
worries about whether his shirt was sewn together by Chinese kids
working in a sweatship for three dollars a day.
> >But if we restrict Focusing to
> >volunteers, and for shortish periods of time (a year or two), this
> >shouldn't be a big problem.
>
> You have no way of enforcing this.
?
We pass a law saying "any person or institution putting someone into
Focus shall do so for a fixed period of time not to exceed two years in
any case. The Focusing person or institution shall be responsible for
deFocusing that person. Failure to comply shall result in the following
criminal penalties [...] and also liability to civil lawsuits".
We also pass laws requiring informed consent, a cooling-off period
before entering into Focusing, a counseling requirement, and that
someone (ideally a spouse or family member, but could be an institution)
take on legal responsibility as a guardian _in loco parentis_ to the
Focused. Oh, and a short statute noting that Focused persons are
legally incompetent (like minors and the insane) and so cannot enter
into binding contracts, marry, etc.
Not hard.
The only trickyish part is crafting the civil liability provisions.
Frank Focused is supposed to debug our air traffic control software. He
decides that the best way to do this is to shut the system down, and
somehow manages to pull this off. Lawsuits ensue... who is liable?
Obviously not Frank; he isn't responsible for his actions while
Focused. His guardian? The HMO that did the Focusing? Whoever was
supposed to be supervising him? Should the law protect any of these
people, or leave them all open to suit and let the courts sort it out?
A bit tricky, but we _have_ dealt with stuff as bad, or worse. As any
lawyer will tell you, at length.
FWIW, my inclination would be to place a lot of legal responsibility on
the Focusing entity (doctor, hospital, HMO, whatever). This will make
Focusing fairly expensive (honkin' huge malpractice premiums) and so
fairly rare; it won't be used for trivial problems; the invisible hand
of the market will make sure that it's only used where it's _really_
useful or necessary.
Illicit Focusing might be a problem, but it's clear that a fair degree
of training and skill are required to do it, so it's not going to be
_that_ common. And you deter it with some fairly alarming criminal
statutes (my own impulse would be to take illicit Focusers and Focus
them... preferably on something like tracking down every MRI set in the
world... but this might be too excessively cute).
Doug M.
Matthew Hunter
>In article <slrn7ecs4u....@elite.res.cmu.edu>,
>Matthew Hunter <mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >la
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >la
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >la
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >la
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>kinds, perhaps requiring extensive amounts of detail work, or b) purely
>>intellectual pursuits (translation, navigation, scientific research).
>>problem.
>If several Focused people working independently came up with the same
>solution, would that make it easier to get the resources for
>implementation?
No more than several non-Focused people under the same conditions. The
Focused can be just as *wrong* as anyone else, remember.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Matthew Hunter
Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>> >Focus has some drawbacks. It's easy to set up a secondary Focus on
>> >obedience, so the Focused are easily enslaved. A person in Focus is, at
>> >best, barely able to feed him or herself. Without care, most Focused
>> >will quickly die of self-neglect.
>> I think you underestimate the negative consequences of Focus. One of the
>> truly horrible things about Focus is that it can partially or entirely
>> obliterate volition. It creates a severe, and possibly irreversible
>> change to personality. I do not think that this is merely a technological
>> glitch. Altered states of mind can change people, sometimes profoundly.
>> This is what happened to Trixia.
>Well, it's clear that this risk is reducible. To what _extent_ it's
>reducible is not at all clear.
It is not at all clear that the risk of personality changes due to the
experience (rather than the chemistry) of Focus is reducible. I don't
think it CAN be reduced signficantly without a process equally as
invasive as Focus.
>In any event Trixia seems perfectly happy at the end. She can care for
>herself and form emotional relationships again. She doesn't love Ezr,
>but then she didn't love him before she was Focused either. She's no
>worse off than any normal person who loves their work and gets a little
>obsessive about it sometimes.
Except when you consider that she went through *years* of experiences
in an altered state of mind and not by choice. That will change
someone. She may not be *worse* off.. but she *was* changed, and not
in an avoidable way.
>> Focus will _change_ people in unpredictable ways.
>Life may do that regardless.
Lots of processes cause change in unpredictable ways... most people do
not seek these processes out. Some people do dangerous things for the
"experience" (skydiving, say)
>> The experience of Focus will have to be processed by
>> the newly unFocused person, very possibly with a rusty skill set for
>> dealing with the emotional, logistical, and personal upheaval.
>Yah, this is why I think you'd want to keep it to limited periods of
>time... a year or two at the most.
You have no way to enforce that. "How long have you been focused?"
"Oh, I don't know, ooes it matter? Get out of my way."
"We want to deFocus you now." "No, no, I need to finish my work!"
"Allright, sign this renewal authorization..."
>> A person
>> who's in jail for a year loses contact with people, has his social net
>> shredded, and often comes out with fewer coping skills than when he went
>> in. Focus is much worse, since there is no processing of any extraneous
>> emotions or information. The people returning to the world will be
>> returning to a world that has moved on without them. You can lose touch
>> with a lot of people that way. Few friends or lovers are as obsessive as
>> Ezr.
>Agreed. For best results, you'd need a strong support system. Possibly
>an institutional one.
When dealing with emotional issues, an *institutional* support system
will often fail miserably. "here, these are your new friends..."
>> I'm on Vinge's side. It's intrinsically evil. Taking free will from a
>> human being is evil.
>And if the person chooses, of her own free will, to give free will
>away...?
This is a very tricky question. For various reasons, I believe that it
is acceptable for a person to choose to give their free will away, but
the process of Focus can be performed *involuntarily*, which makes it
severely dangerous.
In principle, free will can be ethically given away to another
(although I would want to insert some caveats about being able to
change your mind later), but in practice, Focus cannot be an ethical
means for doing so.
>> >But is this really so? What about voluntary Focusing? Wouldn't there
>> >always be some people who'd be willing to take the risk of madness or
>> >death in order to transcend the limits of humanity for a while?
>> There are always human beings willing to take any risk, no matter how
>> foolish or pointless. Russian roulette, frex, and that only for the
>> thrill of fear. With fully informed consent, I might let people choose
>> Focus, mostly because if I don't, my ethical system becomes inconsistent.
>> Informed consent, though, would be a bugger in this case.
>Don't see why. There's three planets worth of db. Most of it horribly
>negative examples, to be sure... but anyone who chooses Focus after
>seeing how it worked on Balacrea is definitely going to be aware of the
>risks.
Aware of the risks, yes, but not necessarily fully cognizant of what
those risks *mean*.
Its sort of like the endless debates about the age at which you can
legally engage in some (unspecified moderately dangerous activity). At
some point you will be able to choose, and the person's right to make
their own choices says you can't arbitrarily bar them from this
process. However, I don't think there IS a good way to deal with Focus
safely in any kind of widespread fashion.
>> I don't think you'd have very many volunteers if my assessment of the
>> value and dangers is more accurate than yours.
>Demur. There are a lot of obsessive sorts out there. Also a lot of
>people who have no lives anyhow (or think they don't). Also fanatics of
>one sort or another.
>
>Even if the risks are quite high, there'd still be volunteers.
Stupidity is common. That doesn't make it a good thing.
>> What Focus really excels
>> at is substituting organic brains and bodies for machine automation.
>No... it *can* do that, yes, but in at least a few cases it can enable
>humans to transcend their limits. Trixia and Ali aren't just more
>productive; they're more creative, too.
I doubt it. They spend more time thinking about their Focus, which ...
well... Focused their creativity. But they don't write poetry or read
SF, for example. No hobbies, just the obsession.
They might even be arguably *less* creative as a result of Focus,
compared to spending the same amount of time in an unFocused state.
>> How
>> many artists or scientists would be willing to gamble their ability to
>> work on a year or two of focus?
>Again, note that the people who were most creative under Focus -- Ali,
>Anne, and Trixia -- all emerged relatively intact and perfectly capable
>of doing further work.
>Vinge isn't making this easy.
ISTR that Ali wasn't able to work. Certainly a substantial fraction of
those who were deFocused were unable to.
Trixia... since she wasn't fully deFocused, we can't know for sure.
But there is a reference on page 585 that states clearly, "The
structures are so deep. She'd lose knowledge she's gained, probably
her born language talent." (Anne Reynolt)
Anne herself is a special case in many ways.
I don't think you can draw any kind of causal link between high
creativity and surviving Focus with your creativity intact, because
there simply is not enough evidence; yet you are trying to do exactly
that on the basis of a few anecdotes.
>> Is slavery wrong? If someone, tomorrow, comes up with a virus that would
>> turn every person with certain genes into loving slaves, would it be moral
>> to turn those people into slaves?
>Straw man argument; not the case here. Ask rather: is it moral to tell
>those people about the virus, and give them the opportunity to take it
>if they freely choose to?
Ask rather: "Is it moral to allow and encourage the development and use of
a technology that can be used to *involuntarily* mold the personalities
of those it is used on?"
Remember, we are not talking about a clear-cut situation. You can't
separate voluntary use from involuntary use. And involuntary use is so
*tempting*.
If you make voluntary use even remotely common, you make involuntary
use inevitable. And all the benefits from all the Focused do not
outweigh a single person's *involuntary* loss of free will that
results.
>Some people might _want_ to be loving slaves, after all.
Yes... but that is not the whole picture. A large number of people do
not wish to be, and it is exceptionally unethical to create the risk of
an involuntary conversion.
>> I _don't_care_ how "efficient" it makes an
>> organization. Organizations should exist to benefit the people that
>> make up that organization, not for the benefit of the the organization
>> itself.
>Ah, my point was, once one group starts using it, competing groups will
>probably be compelled to use it too, or be outcompeted. So any society
>that wants to use it will have to regulate it quite carefully, or its
>use will spread.
This is one of the serious dangers involved. *Any* use creates
competitive pressures that force others to use it. A "small number of
Focused" is an inherently unstable situation.
>So imagine that Microsoft offers, oh, half a million dollars to a new CS
>graduate to spend two years under Focus, debugging Windows (obviously
>there will be more than one doing this...). If we assume that the risks
>are smallish -- say, a one percent chance of madness or death, and a
>five percent chance of memory loss or major personality change -- how
>many 22 year olds do you think would be willing to try it?
Not a single one smart enough to actually finish the job. This runs
into two problems:
1) Fixing Microsoft's OSes isn't a Focusable problem. The solutions
are not hard to grasp, theoretically, and could be created and debugged
reasonably. They haven't been because those solutions are not
palatable to Microsoft; they have significant costs. Sort of like
Focused someone on feeding the hungry in Africa: "Take all the excess
food from the United States and ship it there." "No." "Well then how
do you expect me to solve the problem?"
2) Half a million isn't anywhere near enough. I realize this isn't the
point of your example, though.
I understand that you see Focus as a tool for voluntary use that may
present an advantage to those using it and may be palatable to some
people with appropriate incentives.
What you do not understand is that effective prevention of abuse is
*impossible*, and the risks of encouraging the use of this techology
carry unacceptable costs in terms of the *abuse* of this technology.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Andrew Plotkin
> >> Focus will _change_ people in unpredictable ways.
> >Life may do that regardless.
> Lots of processes cause change in unpredictable ways... most people do
> not seek these processes out.
I would bloody well like to point out that high school, a college
education, a term in the military, and getting a job are all "processes
that cause change in unpredictable ways." And you'll have a hard time
convincing me that they're less deep and encompassing as Focus.
> Some people do dangerous things for the
> "experience" (skydiving, say)
Or drugs, say. Or getting married, say.
Mary K. Kuhner
[someone--attributions confused--wrote:]
>>If several Focused people working independently came up with the same
>>solution, would that make it easier to get the resources for
>>implementation?
>No more than several non-Focused people under the same conditions. The
>Focused can be just as *wrong* as anyone else, remember.
More wrong: the feeling of certainty one gets to when obsessed is an
amazing thing. And I bet Focus would do wonderfully at stilling the little
demons of reasonable doubt.
I review scientific grants now and then, and there's always the issue of
someone who says "I *know* I can do this," and seems to be sincere--how
can an outsider judge? I've also been on the other side, saying "I know
I can do this" and being unable to justify the statement at all, and asking
for a hundred thousand dollars to play with. Very scary. But you can't
scare the Focussed with such irrelevances, which is a big...advantage...
from their perspective. They think they can do it, they tell you so, and
there's no way for you to know--if you could duplicate their reasoning
you wouldn't need them in the first place.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Lydia Nickerson
> And Lydy wrote:
>> I think this is an inaccurate assessment of the power of Focus. You don't
>> get a transcendant chess player, you get an obsessive chess player.
>I picked chess rather deliberately, actually. Except at the highest and
>lowest levels, chess skill tends to correlate fairly closely with
>obsessiveness and time investment.
I know almost nothing about chess. I can't play it, it requires a type of
focus (so to speak) that I don't have. Would mere obsession with the
game would allow a person to play with superhuman skill?
>> Certain aspects of inspiration appear to be difficult to focus,
>> Focus makes the victim less flexible, unable to adapt easily to new input.
>No... I don't think that's altogether true. Look at Trixia's
>translations. Heck, look at Ali Lin's gardening! When Pham destroys
>his park, he adapts just fine, thanks. Comes up with a whole new art
>form, in fact.
Possibly Trixia. Ali Lin is _not_ flexible. Caught in a terrible,
life-threatening disaster, he only sees gardening. This is one of the
ways in which Focus can create things that are unique, but it doesn't
indicate flexibility in the least. I personally think that the way in
which Trixia relates to most personal interaction is tightly bound up in
her translation skills. Focusing her translation skills would, I
theorize, focus some of her skills at relationships. I believe this is
how she was able to communicate with Sherkaner. And for all of that,
almost none of her friendship with Ezr remains.
>I think much depends on who you're Focusing, and what you're focusing
>them _on_. The best results (Trixia, Ali, Anne) seem to come when
>someone is being Focused on something they already were good at and were
>deeply engaged with.
Again, my current theory is that Anne and Trixia are good at relating to
people because the skill set that was focused encompassed much of the way
they process human relationships. Ali, while being an even more brilliant
gardner, loses human relationships. The scene with Qiwi inserting
comments at precisely the right point in the pattern which Focus has
created is revealing. Ali does not interact with her as his daughter,
doesn't think of her as important. She can only catch him with things
that are within his focus. Most outside input is disregarded.
>Well, it's clear that this risk is reducible. To what _extent_ it's
>reducible is not at all clear.
I'd hate the see the experimental model with which one established the
actual risk.
>In any event Trixia seems perfectly happy at the end. She can care for
>herself and form emotional relationships again. She doesn't love Ezr,
>but then she didn't love him before she was Focused either. She's no
>worse off than any normal person who loves their work and gets a little
>obsessive about it sometimes.
I don't think it's anywhere that simple. If you had asked Trixia
beforehand if she wanted this, I think she would have recoiled in horror.
Look at the way she reacts to Emergency artwork. Trixia does love Ezr,
though she may not be _in_ love with Ezr. She loses that during Focus.
The only emotional relationships you see her forming after partial deFocus
are with Spiders. The fact that she's had many years chopped out of her
life is significantly more damage than what can happen to a normal person
with a little obsession. A lot of obsession, yeah. But not a fairly
normal amount.
Focus doesn't include a useful sense of duration, at least not
emotionally. All the emotional processing that most people do a bit at a
time as they experience the duration of their lives is left undone. When
Trixia came out of Focus, I wonder if she simply didn't want to deal with
some of that emotional debt, and opted to stay in the Spider mindset,
since that was the world in which at least some minimal emotional
processing had been occuring. She actually had an ongoing relationship
with the Underhill and his family while focused. Didn't Sherkaner mistake
her as a machine, though? Telling, if my memory's correct.
>> The experience of Focus will have to be processed by
>> the newly unFocused person, very possibly with a rusty skill set for
>> dealing with the emotional, logistical, and personal upheaval.
>Yah, this is why I think you'd want to keep it to limited periods of
>time... a year or two at the most.
I don't know. Time may not be the useful measurement here. The impact
may be more influenced by outside events in that person's social mileu or
that person's internal structure, neither one of which are particularly
susceptible to measurement. A year is easy to measure. How do you
measure the rate of change in someone else's life?
>Agreed. For best results, you'd need a strong support system. Possibly
>an institutional one.
I don't know that it would be enough.
>> I'm on Vinge's side. It's intrinsically evil. Taking free will from a
>> human being is evil.
>And if the person chooses, of her own free will, to give free will
>away...?
>
I get real nauseous. Seriously, though, we're talking at the moment about
regulating rather than obliterating the technology. Sound mind, sound
body, reasonable support system, carefully monitored employer, carefully
vetted caretaker, I don't know. Maybe. Probably. But I reserve the
right to be sick to my stomach.
>Don't see why. There's three planets worth of db. Most of it horribly
>negative examples, to be sure... but anyone who chooses Focus after
>seeing how it worked on Balacrea is definitely going to be aware of the
>risks.
Not really. The social structures on Balacrea and the rest are a dramatic
extreme. Not only do I think that it would be entirely possible for smart
and sane people to come to incorrect conclusions about how Focus would be
handled in their own culture (which is, by definintion, wiser and more
compassionate and all that jazz), but you really can't assess the risks
inherant in the new context until people have taken that risk. Balacrea
really doesn't tell you enough.
>> I don't think you'd have very many volunteers if my assessment of the
>> value and dangers is more accurate than yours.
>Demur. There are a lot of obsessive sorts out there. Also a lot of
>people who have no lives anyhow (or think they don't). Also fanatics of
>one sort or another.
>Even if the risks are quite high, there'd still be volunteers.
I agree. Above, I snipped my comment that there are volunteers to play
Russian roulette, too. The sad truth is that most people are really
incompetant at assessing risk, especially risk of this kind. I used to
work in Bone Marrow Transplant. I'm perfectly fine with someone deciding
to go for a 5% chance of survival if they understand what that means.
But too many of the gamblers either a) truly believe that those aren't the
real odds because God loves them, or they're emotionally strong, or some
other superstitious reason; or b) never think about the actual way in
which they are likely to die, if they miss their saving throw. There
really are fates worse than death.
>> What Focus really excels
>> at is substituting organic brains and bodies for machine automation.
>No... it *can* do that, yes, but in at least a few cases it can enable
>humans to transcend their limits. Trixia and Ali aren't just more
>productive; they're more creative, too.
Within their field of specialty, only. They are functioning way below
social norms in creatively addressing happiness, relationships, long-term
planning, all the bits of life that make it worth living for most people.
Neither Trixia nor Ali, before focus, was immune to the charm of daily
life.
>If Focus were simply about turning people into machines, it would be
>much easier to walk away from it.
But that's so close to what it does. And it certainly can do exactly
that, if the person running the machine wants it to.
>> How
>> many artists or scientists would be willing to gamble their ability to
>> work on a year or two of focus?
>Again, note that the people who were most creative under Focus -- Ali,
>Anne, and Trixia -- all emerged relatively intact and perfectly capable
>of doing further work.
What about Beni's dad, whose name I've forgotton? Trixia loses her
humanity, for god's sake. This is not what I would call "intact." She
gains something else, but I don't think the loss and gain can be balanced
against each other.
>> Is slavery wrong? If someone, tomorrow, comes up with a virus that would
>> turn every person with certain genes into loving slaves, would it be moral
>> to turn those people into slaves?
>Straw man argument; not the case here. Ask rather: is it moral to tell
>those people about the virus, and give them the opportunity to take it
>if they freely choose to?
I think it is immoral to infect them with it without their knowledge.
Free choice is something I'm very suspicious of. People don't make free
choices, they make constrained choices. We all live in the world. I
can't fly, I can't get spirits from the vasty deep to listen to me, and
I'm not male. If such a virus existed, I think that society might well
put pressure on those who had the virus to accept the slavery. Some
would, some wouldn't, but it wouldn't necessarily be an unconstrained
choice.
>Some people might _want_ to be loving slaves, after all.
Yep. I know some. But the difference between being a loving slave with
the ability to opt out and being a loving slave with no way to even wish
to opt out are different things. It sounds like a noble sacrifice, but
I'm suspicious of those, too. "Noble sacrifice" is one of those things
which is the subject of endless propaganda. And we're back to informed
and constrained choices.
>> I _don't_care_ how "efficient" it makes an
>> organization. Organizations should exist to benefit the people that
>> make up that organization, not for the benefit of the the organization
>> itself.
>Ah, my point was, once one group starts using it, competing groups will
>probably be compelled to use it too, or be outcompeted. So any society
>that wants to use it will have to regulate it quite carefully, or its
>use will spread.
If that's the case, then I think that we should find a way to cure or
vaccinate everyone, rather than trying to figure out a way to use it
judiciously. If it becomes vital for competition, then people have just
been rendered into pawns to be played or sacrificed at will.
>And you know, if Focus is economically efficient -- and it's pretty
>clear that it is -- then, putting the slavery question aside, economic
>incentives will be offered.
Again, I don't think that Focus is economically efficient. You have one
focused person, but you need a serious amount of support technology, a
significant rehab period, and at least one other person to look after the
focused person full time. I can't see that Focus can be efficient unless
you think humans are cheap.
>So imagine that Microsoft offers, oh, half a million dollars to a new CS
>graduate to spend two years under Focus, debugging Windows (obviously
>there will be more than one doing this...). If we assume that the risks
>are smallish -- say, a one percent chance of madness or death, and a
>five percent chance of memory loss or major personality change -- how
>many 22 year olds do you think would be willing to try it?
Your assumptions about damage are 1) entirely focused on the worst case
scenario, and ignore other likely outcomes like completely wrecking that
person's ability to work in their field again, or doing irreparable damage
to their personality which falls short of madness, and 2) unsupported, as
far as I know. We don't _know_ what Anne's success rate was. We know she
won some and she lost some, and we know she got better as she went along.
Most of the characters we saw came out ok. But those characters are
neither a cross-section nor a statistically significant sample.
Nancy Lebovitz
Matthew Hunter <mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>On 11 Mar 1999 13:22:45 GMT, in rec.arts.sf.written,
>Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>>In article <slrn7ecs4u....@elite.res.cmu.edu>,
>>Matthew Hunter <mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>>>>> >Minor spoiler space follows:
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >la
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >la
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >la
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >la
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>Focus is pretty clearly limited to either a) manual labor of various
>>>kinds, perhaps requiring extensive amounts of detail work, or b) purely
>>>intellectual pursuits (translation, navigation, scientific research).
>>>In other areas, getting resources will be harder than "solving" the
>>>problem.
>>solution, would that make it easier to get the resources for
>>implementation?
>
>No more than several non-Focused people under the same conditions. The
>Focused can be just as *wrong* as anyone else, remember.
>
the same wrong answer?
Mary K. Kuhner
>I know almost nothing about chess. I can't play it, it requires a type of
>focus (so to speak) that I don't have. Would mere obsession with the
>game would allow a person to play with superhuman skill?
I had a high Expert's ranking in the 80's: far below the top level, but
pretty high. I'd say that there are a lot of things which go into making
a good or great chessplayer, some of which Focus would certainly help, some
of which it might help, some where you would need the innate talent before
Focus would do any good.
At the very highest levels most games are draws, and the decisive games often
stem from mistakes--someone gets tired, gets distracted, misses something,
and loses as a result. The mistakes can be *very* subtle at that level.
It strikes me that if you took a master-class player and Focussed him he
would probably lose fewer games in this fashion, and that would be a subtantial
edge.
Games are also lost now and then because one player uses too much of his
time thinking out a continuation, and either actually runs out (forfeiting
the game) or has to make his remaining moves too quickly. This might be
a problem for a Focussed player, at least till he learned good clock management
skills (something many strong players have trouble with).
And then there's knowledge base--variations memorized, games studied, and
so forth. I quit playing in 1986 after some really stunning successes in
tournaments because keeping my skills at that level took too much, um,
attention and I wanted to do other things with my life: also because my
nerves were giving me trouble. Obsessive interest really is helpful here.
I was only giving it ten hours or so a week, and I would have played better
had I been able to make that five or six a day, except I would have gone
crazy.
Obsession is known to be harmful to your health, which eventually detracts
from your game because an unhealthy brain can't sustain attention. I am
reminded of the Mule burning out Foundation scientists. This would be a
problem.
Focus would probably be helpful in avoiding succumbing to psych tactics. It's
hard to say how important these are at the very top. Some players think
they are--they point to games like the one where a relatively minor
British GM played a totally whacky opening against Karpov and beat him.
Karpov may have been offended, or contemptuous, to the detriment of his play.
What I don't think Focus would give you is the aptitude, if you didn't have
it already: the knack of picking up tactics and strategies, "board sense".
I don't think this is purely a matter of attention. I am good at chess and
shogi, and bad at go: I know many people who are the reverse: for both
camps, equal attention to the different games produces very different results.
But I would be willing to put money on any grandmaster player being able to
compete for the World Championship, or any player of my (in 1985) caliber
being easily able to become a master, perhaps an international master, if
Focussed appropriately.
This one I know I would not volunteer for.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
David M. Jones
Spoilers ahead.
> A single Focused person is unlikely to hve the kind of results that
> a team can manage, because insight comes from multiple points of
> view, and when Focused, each component only has one point of
> view. [...] The insights of a Focused team and an unFocused
> individual might well be qualitatively different.
Fascination observation. I read these comments after Ethan Merritt's
and Tony Zbaraschuk's discussion of the distributed/intermittant and
cooperation/obsession themes in Fire and Deepness. I wonder to what
extent a team of Focused can be compared to a Tine pack. Remember the
comments about how a group of the Focused working on the same problem
tended to invent shorthand jargon to communicate? The translators in
Deepness showed a marked tendency to blur the boundaries between
themselves and the Spiders they were translating. I wonder how far a
similar blurring among the members of a Focused team could go?
By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
David M. Jones "Don't believe anyone.
dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu Don't read your mail.
Make light of every word you hear."
David M. Jones
> I think much depends on who you're Focusing, and what you're focusing
> them _on_. The best results (Trixia, Ali, Anne) seem to come when
> someone is being Focused on something they already were good at and were
> deeply engaged with.
I seem to recall that being pretty explicit in the book, but maybe I
just took it for granted.
I have to wonder how much of the specific effects of the Focus virus
that we seen in Deepness were cultural rather than inherent in the
virus. Don't the podmasters remark a couple of times on how many Qeng
Ho can't be focussed at all? I had assumed this was because of some
purely biological difference in resistance to the virus between the
two populations, but I'm not so sure. Of the three cases you
mentioned above who managed to maintain more of their creativity --
and, perhaps, their personality? -- two were Qeng Ho and the third was
the Frenkish Orc. Did we ever see or hear of anything similar among
the Emergent Focussed?
There are a few questions that keep running through my head when I
think about Focus and its relation to the Emergency.
1) Is the "loyal slave" aspect of Focus inherent, or is it just
something that the Podmasters find convenient to throw in while
they're tuning the Focussed?
2) The Emergency is a heavily regulated state and fascist state.
Members of that society undergoing Focus have already spent their
entire lives being indoctrinated into the idea that they are merely
tools of the government to be used for the greater good. Is it any
surprise that the Focussed Emergents were much more pliable and docile
than the Focussed Qeng Ho proved to be?
3) More generally, how much do we really know about the inherent
tradeoffs involved in Focus? All we've really seen is how one
particularly ruthless society has used it. Who's to say that it isn't
possible to induce enhanced powers of concentration and analysis
without having to destroy a person's volition and free will? Isn't
this more-or-less the state Trixia is left in at the end of the book?
Does anyone in the Emergency even know the answers to these questions?
I doubt that it would be in the best interests of the Podmasters to
have any of these questions examined in depth, even if it would occur
to any of them to ask the questions.
David M. Jones "We weren't on the wrong side, sweetness.
dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu We were the wrong side."
Matt Austern
aber...@princeton.edu (Aaron Bergman) writes:
> >When Vinge let on what had actually happened, *then* I decided he was sly.
>
> That's weird. I thought "ah -- now we see some transcendent tech".
> Of course, I missed the counterlurk entirely. Dangers of
> reading the last third post 3AM, I suppose.
I missed the counterlurk too. Which leads to an interesting question:
what clues did we have? In retrospect, I can think of two:
-- Sherkaner's reaction ("even the---") when he first learns
that the antigravity dust is real.
-- Anne's belief that someone was interfering with the Focused.
lam...@my-dejanews.com
Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote:
> James Nicoll <jam...@ece.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
>
> > You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
>
>
> "Light fuse and run away."
How could anyone tell the difference?
DougL
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
EdLincoln
>Mm. There would have to be some serious controls.
>
>Where is the chokepoint? Not the virus, it's obviously contagious. Not
>MRI equipment, that's easy-peasy for any advanced society.
Simple babysitting is the choke point. A focussed person needs to bewatched and
cared for. Remember how proud the technician was only 25% of his focussed had
injured their hands? Plus you really have to raise sonmeone normally andsend
him to school for years before you focus him.
Has anyone else thought that the focussed are an awfull lot like autistic
"idiot savants"? The symptoms of focus are a little bit like autism.
Autistic people often focus obsessvely on one thing to the exclusion of all
else...
Also, the Emergent society wasdesigned in such a way as to make everyone keep
their head down. Why go to college if it could lead to you being focussed? I
recall a Chinese saying "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down". Since
they can't kill everyone, the bestway to survive in a totalitarian society is
to act like everyone
Andrew Plotkin
> ly...@ddb.com (Lydia Nickerson) writes:
> Spoilers ahead.
> By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
> Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
> was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
> discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
Yes, except for the "sly" part. It seemed pretty blunt to me.
When Vinge let on what had actually happened, *then* I decided he was sly.
Comma, the bastard.
Tony Zbaraschuk
>In article <w4vhg8d...@kline-station.ckdhr.com>,
> Christopher K Davis <ckd-...@ckdhr.com> wrote:
>> James Nicoll <jam...@ece.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
>>
>> > You know who'd be very interesting to focus? Miles Vorkosigan.
>>
>> My response to that can be summed up in five words:
>>
>> "Light fuse and run away."
>
>How could anyone tell the difference?
That's easy. The Focused Miles Vorkosigan is the one with
absolutely no people skills and an incredible talent for
forensic plumbing.
Aaron Bergman
>David M. Jones (dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu) wrote:
>> ly...@ddb.com (Lydia Nickerson) writes:
>> Spoilers ahead.
>
>> By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
>> Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
>> was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
>> discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
>
>Yes, except for the "sly" part. It seemed pretty blunt to me.
>
>When Vinge let on what had actually happened, *then* I decided he was sly.
That's weird. I thought "ah -- now we see some transcendent tech".
Of course, I missed the counterlurk entirely. Dangers of
reading the last third post 3AM, I suppose.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
Matthew Hunter
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@netcom.com> wrote:
>Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu) wrote:
>> >> Focus will _change_ people in unpredictable ways.
>> >Life may do that regardless.
>> Lots of processes cause change in unpredictable ways... most people do
>> not seek these processes out.
>education, a term in the military, and getting a job are all "processes
>that cause change in unpredictable ways." And you'll have a hard time
>convincing me that they're less deep and encompassing as Focus.
All of these processes are basically predictable -- you go to college
expecting to learn something about a field, and possibly expecting to
use it as a transition to independent life. You go into the military
expecting them to teach you to fight, and to attempt to make you
psychologically capable of killing in a war, being obedient to
authority, etc.
A better analogy for Focus would be an addictive drug that provides
consciousness-boosting effects; the addiction may be reversible, can
cause damage, etc, etc.
The difference between Focus and, say, college or marriage, is that you
can *choose* to stop attending college or *choose* to divorce, and
doing so won't destroy your higher cognitive ability. e
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Jo Walton
mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu "Mary K. Kuhner" writes:
> Focus would probably be helpful in avoiding succumbing to psych tactics. It's
> hard to say how important these are at the very top. Some players think
> they are--they point to games like the one where a relatively minor
> British GM played a totally whacky opening against Karpov and beat him.
> Karpov may have been offended, or contemptuous, to the detriment of his play.
Have you read :The Peace War:?
I'd be really interested in your views of the chess scene in that, if
that corresponds to your experience at all.
It's the best demonstration of what a brain-computer interface could
actually _do_ I've read, it's what always comes to me when I think
about this sort of thing. Because of course, that would allow both,
the focus and getting away from it again.
Seems like Vinge's been thinking about this stuff for a while.
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
First NorAm Public Appearance: Imperiums to Order, Kitchener, March 20th
Freshly UPDATED web-page http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk - Interstichia;
RASFW FAQ, Reviews, Fanzine, Momentum Guidelines, Blood of Kings Poetry
Jo Walton
She actually had an ongoing relationship
> with the Underhill and his family while focused. Didn't Sherkaner mistake
> her as a machine, though? Telling, if my memory's correct.
He thought she was an AI, a machine like the computer intelligences in
old SF that have names and personalities and can fall in love. That's
not really "a machine".
Elisabeth Carey
>
> aber...@princeton.edu (Aaron Bergman) writes:
>
> > >When Vinge let on what had actually happened, *then* I decided he was sly.
> >
> > That's weird. I thought "ah -- now we see some transcendent tech".
> > Of course, I missed the counterlurk entirely. Dangers of
> > reading the last third post 3AM, I suppose.
>
> what clues did we have? In retrospect, I can think of two:
> -- Sherkaner's reaction ("even the---") when he first learns
> that the antigravity dust is real.
> -- Anne's belief that someone was interfering with the Focused.
Victory Smith's anger at Sherkaner having invited Hrunkner to see his
lab--Sherkaner trusts Hrunkner but Victory Smith doesn't, and we're
told that quite plainly well before that. Also Victory Lighthill's
conversation Hrunkner right after Hrunkner has seen that Sherkaner has
become obsessed with videomancy.
Lis Carey
Elisabeth Carey
>
> Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> writes:
>
> > I think much depends on who you're Focusing, and what you're focusing
> > them _on_. The best results (Trixia, Ali, Anne) seem to come when
> > someone is being Focused on something they already were good at and were
> > deeply engaged with.
>
> just took it for granted.
>
> I have to wonder how much of the specific effects of the Focus virus
> that we seen in Deepness were cultural rather than inherent in the
> virus. Don't the podmasters remark a couple of times on how many Qeng
> Ho can't be focussed at all? I had assumed this was because of some
> purely biological difference in resistance to the virus between the
> two populations, but I'm not so sure. Of the three cases you
> mentioned above who managed to maintain more of their creativity --
> and, perhaps, their personality? -- two were Qeng Ho and the third was
> the Frenkish Orc. Did we ever see or hear of anything similar among
> the Emergent Focussed?
It's explicitly stated that a large percentage of the Qeng Ho cannot
be permanently infected with the virus; they get sick from it, but
their immune systems defeat it completely. The Emergents had
encountered this before, but never such a high percentage of a
population.
I assume you're referring to Trixia and Ali. Trixia is not Qeng Ho,
she's a Trilander. Trixia, Ali, and Anne all retain their skills; only
in Anne's case is this really unusual because to a large extent her
skills are people-management skills. I think it's stretching things
quite a bit, though, to say that she actually retains, while Focussed,
any of the _personality_ of the Frenkish Orc. Ali has zero flexibility
outside his Focussed specialty, and does not retain his personality
while Focussed; Qiwi's efforts at maintaining contact are completely
futile except when she works within his Focus.
Trixia does actually manage to formulate and pursue a plan contrary to
her masters' intent while Focussed.
> There are a few questions that keep running through my head when I
> think about Focus and its relation to the Emergency.
>
> 1) Is the "loyal slave" aspect of Focus inherent, or is it just
> something that the Podmasters find convenient to throw in while
> they're tuning the Focussed?
The Focussed, with very rare exceptions like Anne, won't take care of
themselves. Regardless of the other intentions of their keepers,
they'd have to be conditioned to obey some unFocussed person enough to
allow that person to take care of them.
> 2) The Emergency is a heavily regulated state and fascist state.
> Members of that society undergoing Focus have already spent their
> entire lives being indoctrinated into the idea that they are merely
> tools of the government to be used for the greater good. Is it any
> surprise that the Focussed Emergents were much more pliable and docile
> than the Focussed Qeng Ho proved to be?
Most of the Qeng Ho Focussed were completely pliable and docile. The
translators were an unusual case; they were Focussed on achieving
understanding with beings outside the society of their masters, in
contacts that the masters _could not_ supervise effectively. Focus had
never previously faced the challenge of forty years of that kind of
effectively unsupervised contact with "outsiders". Amongst the people
_within_ the society, even involuntarily, the Qeng Ho and the
Trilanders, much as they hated the system and grieved the loss of
their loved ones to Focus, they eventually gave up, with the exception
of Ezr.
> 3) More generally, how much do we really know about the inherent
> tradeoffs involved in Focus? All we've really seen is how one
> particularly ruthless society has used it. Who's to say that it isn't
> possible to induce enhanced powers of concentration and analysis
> without having to destroy a person's volition and free will? Isn't
> this more-or-less the state Trixia is left in at the end of the book?
> Does anyone in the Emergency even know the answers to these questions?
>
> I doubt that it would be in the best interests of the Podmasters to
> have any of these questions examined in depth, even if it would occur
> to any of them to ask the questions.
Would Focus work exactly the same in an otherwise free society as in
the Emergency? Of course not. But it would remain something with the
power to obliterate free will in the Focussed, and there would be
_no_effective way to prevent abuses.
Lis Carey
Christopher K Davis
> Spoilers ahead.
> I wonder to what extent a team of Focused can be compared to a Tine
> pack.
I wonder what would happen if you could Focus a Tine pack....
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>
Andrew Plotkin
> On Fri, 12 Mar 1999 20:44:56 GMT, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@netcom.com> wrote:
> >Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu) wrote:
> >> >Life may do that regardless.
> >> Lots of processes cause change in unpredictable ways... most people do
> >> not seek these processes out.
> >education, a term in the military, and getting a job are all "processes
> >that cause change in unpredictable ways." And you'll have a hard time
> >convincing me that they're less deep and encompassing as Focus.
> All of these processes are basically predictable -- you go to college
> expecting to learn something about a field, and possibly expecting to
> use it as a transition to independent life. You go into the military
> expecting them to teach you to fight, and to attempt to make you
> psychologically capable of killing in a war, being obedient to
> authority, etc.
I disagree a whole lot. No part of growing up is that predictable. (And do
you really think that characterizes the expectations of the average
military recruit?)
> A better analogy for Focus would be an addictive drug that provides
> consciousness-boosting effects; the addiction may be reversible, can
> cause damage, etc, etc.
> The difference between Focus and, say, college or marriage, is that you
> can *choose* to stop attending college or *choose* to divorce, and
> doing so won't destroy your higher cognitive ability. e
However, you're quite right about that.
David Eppstein
>I missed the counterlurk too. Which leads to an interesting question:
>what clues did we have? In retrospect, I can think of two:
> -- Sherkaner's reaction ("even the---") when he first learns
> that the antigravity dust is real.
> -- Anne's belief that someone was interfering with the Focused.
I missed it three.
In retrospect, lurking is one of the things earth spiders do best,
maybe the ones on OnOff are similar...
But the most important clue was the one the spiders didn't miss:
a small back-transmission from the translaters onto the spider network
at the end of the translated debate between Underhill and Pedure.
--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epps...@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Ethan A Merritt
Matt Austern <aus...@sgi.com> wrote:
>
[ definite spoilers ahead!! ]
>
>
>I missed the counterlurk too. Which leads to an interesting question:
>what clues did we have? In retrospect, I can think of two:
> -- Sherkaner's reaction ("even the---") when he first learns
> that the antigravity dust is real.
> -- Anne's belief that someone was interfering with the Focused.
>
When Sherkaner's grad students first set up point-to-point
microwave communications, they say something to the effect
"that's odd, we seem to be hitting a second receiver".
Sherkaner's interest in steganography.
Sherkaner/Victory's recruitment of a family counter-ops group.
Victory's firing Rachner Thract when he is about to spill the
beans that they have evidence of outside tampering with the
communications and security systems.
Ethan A Merritt
mer...@u.washington.edu
Thomas Womack
<19990312193933...@ng-cb1.aol.com>...
>Has anyone else thought that the focussed are an awfull lot like
autistic
>"idiot savants"? The symptoms of focus are a little bit like autism.
>Autistic people often focus obsessvely on one thing to the exclusion of
all
>else...
I thought that was a deliberate point made - p.586 'a Focused person is
still a human being, not too different from certain rare types that have
always existed.'
Tom
Lydia Nickerson
>In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com>, Lydia Nickerson <ly...@ddb.com> wrote:
>>to...@eskimo.com (Tony Zbaraschuk) writes:
>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>la
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>la
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>la
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>la
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>>Plus, you apparently have moderately high casualties due to
>>>things like mindrot runaways, lack of personal hygiene, that
>>>sort of thing. Is this _actually_ more productive in the long
>>>term?
>>
>>It depends on what you have a surplus of, in part. The Focused approach
>>is extremely labor intensive.
>As compared to what? One Focused person can probably substitute
>for several non-Focused in the appropriate jobs, and doesn't need
>as much additional care as a non-Focused person.
That sounds flat out wrong, to me. I don't think that there's an easy,
one to two or three correspondence between unFocused and Focused workers.
For instance, piloting takes several Focused people working in a team, and
a team manager, rather than the more customary one person to fly the rig,
with one co-pilot as backup. And Focused people need _more_ additional
care, not less, up til the point that you decide that Focused people are
machine parts and not valuable. Even then, the Focused need wranglers,
and the acceptable damage rate is very high. If you actually want the
Focused to survive, you probably need the equivalent of one unFocused
person per every Focused person to keep them healthy. They need to be
chivvied into eating, sleeping, shitting, pissing, drinking, bathing, the
gamut of normal activity that an unFocused person does by themselves. You
are also discounting the general infrastructure necessary to maintain
a steady flow of Focused people to the industries who have decided that
they need them. Even if the technology is trivially easy, you still need
techs, administrators, investigators and the like. You can seriously
reduce the infrastructure if you don't worry about abuse, that is to say,
if abuse is a normal part of the system and you don't need to keep track
of trivialities like random inspections and records of who has been
Focused when and where they are and such.
>just about everyone else. (The Followers, those people who aren't
>focused, appear to be rather like feudal vassals -- I wonder if
>there's another class in Emergent society besides Focused, Followers,
>and Podmasters.)
If "followers" are, by definition, those who are neither Focused nor Pod
People, then maybe there's no need for additional classes. What would
they do?
>Yes. But you do need Managers -- the sort of people who can get
>the Focused doing things, keep them from blowing up, point them in
>the right direction, etc. (If you have these, though, do you
>_really_ need the Podmasters, or could you end up with a much
>broader-based slave-owning class?)
Interesting question. A lot of it depends on who the managers are
managing for. You are assuming they are not doing it for themselves (else
they'd just be the Pod People part II). What function would these slaves
serve in society?
>>Which is cheaper, a machine automated drink
>>tray, which makes a few errors, or a drink tray controlled by a Focused
>>person?
>Oh, an automated tray, of course, -- but the controlled tray is
>actually of higher quality _for the Podmaster_; from his point of view,
>it doesn't matter that the Focused don't have any drinks trays if he
>can have the best one in existence.
Well, yes, it's certainly better from the Podmaster's point of view, but
then all sorts of unspeakable evil appear to be perfectly good from the
Podmaster's point of view. Nor is this an efficient economy, I don't
think. A considerable percentage of the entire economy is tied up in the
comfort and pleasure of a very few rich. I think this creates a capital
sink, amongst other problems.
>Now this is a useful argument against Focus: lack of creativity.
>But then you have Ali -- a Focused person _can_ be creative within
>the area of their Focus. And the translators certainly managed quite
>a program of creative contact with the Spiders. Perhaps the same
>number of unFocused persons wouldn't have been able to achieve
>such a plan.
I believe that Ali is unusual. Every Focused person retaining
significant amounts of creativity is Qeng Ho, with the exception of Anne,
who was not raised within the Emergency. And a lot of the Qeng Ho were
physically impossible to Focus. This raises a number of interesting
questions which I don't have answers to. However, I don't think you can
plan on or count on acheiving that level of functioning for Focused
individuals. You can't build an economy on a couple of interesting
exceptions.
>>The insights of a Focused team and an unFocused
>>individual might well be qualitatively different. But don't forget the
>>labor costs involved in keeping a team of Focused people working together,
>>healthy, and productive. Productive is another odd one, here, because you
>>have to rely on an unFocused person with no direct access to the insights
>>of the Focused to direct research away from dead ends.
>Well, the Focused need care and feeding and supervision, granted.
>And I'll agree that their lack of error-checking routines (or at
>least extreme tendency toward loss of same) is a problem. But
>those people will still need food and housing and entertainment,
>and probably more resources, if they're unFocused.
I can't follow your line of argument. Does the first sentance have
anything to do with the second sentance? If either one is supposed to
support a theory, I can't figure out what that theory would be.
>>>It has just occured to me that _A Fire upon the Deep_ is primarily
>>>about _cooperation_, while _A Deepness in the Sky_ is primarily
>>>about _obessions_. I wonder what the next one will be about?
>>
>>Interesting. I would have said the divisions were cooperation and
>>competition.
>Would you mind expanding on that a bit? Particularly the bit
>about competition -- that _happens_ in aDitS, but I don't see it
>as a primary theme of the book.
Well, competition is the other side of cooperation. I hadn't even thought
about it until you mentioned cooperation in relation to aFUtD. The
central conflict of aDitS is the struggle between the Qeng Ho, a hyper
capitalist, competitive trading society, and the Emergency, a hyper
fascist command economy. The Qeng Ho encourage competition both outside
and inside their community. The Emergency wants to eliminate competition,
both outside and inside their community. The spiders, too, have huge
leaps in technology as a result of engaging in war, which is a competitive
occupation. In both aFUtD and aDitS, trading is seen as a noble
occupation which contributes to the flexibility and viability of cultures.
I'd say Vinge appears to believe that a competitive marketplace is a
universal, and often (always?) a good thing. On the other hand, neither
book is really quite that neat. Competition is rife within aFUtD, and
cooperation is crucial to the outcome in aDitS. As I said, they're the
flip side of each other. Vinge appears to have a very complex and
insightful understanding of this. I'll note, for the record, that I'm
probably a syndicalist-anarchist (mispelled, I fear), and not a
libertarian of any stripe.
Lydia Nickerson
>> >It is if the Focusing programmer sets a suitably altruistic goal. "Find
>> >an HIV vaccine", say. Or "feed the poor of Calcutta". Or even "figure
>> >out what income tax system is most efficient".
>>
>> Goals like that are *way* outside the scope of anyone in Focus.
>Mais non. Anne Reynolt. -- Granted, she's a rare fluke. But Trixia
>and old man Lin both showed a certain... broadness of Focus.
>Obsessives, but they could efficiently integrate all sorts of
>information, some of it not directly and obviously relevant to the
>obsession (like when Trixia is interpreting the "plaid" color -- it's
>clear that she has a pretty good knowledge of Spider physiology).
Anne may not be rare, she may be unique. Ali Lin shows no breadth of
Focus, he concentrates on gardening and biological manipulation which are
the same field, in this time and place. "Plaid" is not an example of
Trixia's breadth. That is precisely what translators _do_, they find ways
to express alien concepts in another language. Hell, Trixia is far gone,
she can't explain why she chose that, it takes Ezr to defend her choice
because he has enough breadth to be able to guess at what Trixia is doing.
>_Someone_ should worry about its provenance, yes, certainly. I was just
>saying that the person on the street isn't going to, any more than he
>worries about whether his shirt was sewn together by Chinese kids
>working in a sweatship for three dollars a day.
More like 75 cents a day, I'd thought. Or nothing at all, since they have
huge slave labor camps. And some of us do worry. In general you're
right, but you know, people kicked up enough of a fuss that South Africa
had some pretty serious economic troubles. And that was a grass roots
movement, not a government decision. Focus _could_ set off a huge
political movement opposed to it. It might not to, your point about
foreign labor practices is dead on. I don't think you can count on it
being calmly accepted, though. I think it's far more likely to trigger
social upheaval.
>> >But if we restrict Focusing to
>> >volunteers, and for shortish periods of time (a year or two), this
>> >shouldn't be a big problem.
>>
>> You have no way of enforcing this.
>?
>We pass a law saying "any person or institution putting someone into
>Focus shall do so for a fixed period of time not to exceed two years in
>any case. The Focusing person or institution shall be responsible for
>deFocusing that person. Failure to comply shall result in the following
>criminal penalties [...] and also liability to civil lawsuits".
>We also pass laws requiring informed consent, a cooling-off period
>before entering into Focusing, a counseling requirement, and that
>someone (ideally a spouse or family member, but could be an institution)
>take on legal responsibility as a guardian _in loco parentis_ to the
>Focused. Oh, and a short statute noting that Focused persons are
>legally incompetent (like minors and the insane) and so cannot enter
>into binding contracts, marry, etc.
>Not hard.
? Excuse me, but you are describing laws, not enforcement. In this
state, adultery is against the law. Oh, and sodomy and fornication. These
are laws I routinely ignore. Smoking dope is extremely illegal in all 50
states, and enforcement has had almost no affect on consumption. Writing
laws has nothing to do with enforcement. You didn't answer the question.
>Illicit Focusing might be a problem, but it's clear that a fair degree
>of training and skill are required to do it, so it's not going to be
>_that_ common. And you deter it with some fairly alarming criminal
>statutes (my own impulse would be to take illicit Focusers and Focus
>them... preferably on something like tracking down every MRI set in the
>world... but this might be too excessively cute).
Deterrance is nonsense. Capital punishment has no affect on the murder
rate. The primary result of increasing the penalties on smuggling
marijuana was to cause dope smugglers to smuggle higher density value
products like cocaine, rather than very bulky marijuana. You have _got_
to figure out some way of enforcing this. The measures may need to be
Draconian, and might be prohibitively expensive. I think the entire thing
is morally reprehensible. You argue that it isn't. This is a reasonable
disagreement. However, you don't seem to be able to imagine people
abusing Focus. You do seem to think that abusing Focus is a bad thing,
but you handwave about it, as if it can't happen, or as if there's no
motivation for people to do such horrid things. I suggest that you are
not thinking carefully enough about the issues raised. Or perhaps you
have an unrealistically rosy view of human nature.
Lydia Nickerson
>On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:35:59 -0500, in rec.arts.sf.written,
>Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
>>Lydy wrote:
>>> A person
>>> who's in jail for a year loses contact with people, has his social net
>>> shredded, and often comes out with fewer coping skills than when he went
>>> in. Focus is much worse, since there is no processing of any extraneous
>>> emotions or information. The people returning to the world will be
>>> returning to a world that has moved on without them. You can lose touch
>>> with a lot of people that way. Few friends or lovers are as obsessive as
>>> Ezr.
>>Agreed. For best results, you'd need a strong support system. Possibly
>>an institutional one.
>When dealing with emotional issues, an *institutional* support system
>will often fail miserably. "here, these are your new friends..."
*gurgle* *giggle* Elegant and true. Thanks.
>Trixia... since she wasn't fully deFocused, we can't know for sure.
>But there is a reference on page 585 that states clearly, "The
>structures are so deep. She'd lose knowledge she's gained, probably
>her born language talent." (Anne Reynolt)
Thanks. I'd forgotten that and it's important.
(Scott Schwartz) Scott Schwartz
> A better analogy for Focus would be an addictive drug that provides
> consciousness-boosting effects; the addiction may be reversible, can
> cause damage, etc, etc.
Nicotine apparently works like that.
Thomas Womack
<7ceglh$pnc$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>...
>In article <fxt1zit...@isolde.engr.sgi.com>,
>Matt Austern <aus...@sgi.com> wrote:
>>
>[ definite spoilers ahead!! ]
>
>
>>
>>
>>I missed the counterlurk too.
I'd sensed that the spiders were doing *something*, but I didn't quite
see that they had the abilities for a full-fledged counterlurk; I
thought the interference with the Focused was Pham acting through the
locators.
I saw the breach in signals security during the chaos after the
Children's Science Hour broadcast, I saw the 'ooh, there's a second
receiver' comment, I knew that Sherkaner was a genius (who asked 'Can
Vinge write lone geniuses?' Sherkaner, Puppies, the inventor of the
Bobble ...), I saw the 'steganography' interjection, but I still had not
a clue that the spiders were capable of perverting the Emergent network
in the way the Emergents were perverting theirs.
Tom
Phil Fraering
>I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
>interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
>Minor spoiler space follows:
>la
>la
>la
>la
>Okay, the Focus virus causes people to concentrate *absolutely* on a
>particular topic or subject. Give it to a chessplayer, say, and he will
>eat, sleep, and breathe chess... concentrate on it all day long, to the
>exclusion of any other subject or interest. An ordinary person will
>soon be able to challenge Fischer or Kasparov; a Fischer or Kasparov
>would become something transcendant.
You're missing one small thing here: Focus wouldn't make a genius
transcendant; in fact, it sort-of moves you in the opposite
direction. Remember, from _AFUtD_, how the Transcendant Powers
have really short attention spans, to the point of having
effectively short lifespans?
>Certain tasks are not suitable to Focusing. The Focused generally do
>not make good managers, for instance, or anything else requiring people
>skills or a broad range of abilities. There are super-programmers, but
>no super-politicians.
Actually, I'd suggest that the Focused are in some ways crippled
in even things related to programming, etc., compared to normal
people.
Look, for example, at what happened to the two Qeng Ho/Triland
astrophysicists who were Focused.
>Bringing someone out of Focus is difficult and dangerous; it isn't
>always successful, and there may be memory loss, personality damage, or
>even death.
Phil
--
"I see a great hand, reaching out of the stars. Phil Fraering
The hand is your hand. And I hear sounds. The p...@globalreach.net
sounds of billions of people calling your name." /Will work for *tape*/
"My followers?" "Your victims."
Tony Zbaraschuk
David M. Jones <dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>ly...@ddb.com (Lydia Nickerson) writes:
>Spoilers ahead.
>
>> a team can manage, because insight comes from multiple points of
>> view, and when Focused, each component only has one point of
>> individual might well be qualitatively different.
>
>and Tony Zbaraschuk's discussion of the distributed/intermittant and
>cooperation/obsession themes in Fire and Deepness. I wonder to what
>extent a team of Focused can be compared to a Tine pack. Remember the
>comments about how a group of the Focused working on the same problem
>tended to invent shorthand jargon to communicate? The translators in
>Deepness showed a marked tendency to blur the boundaries between
>themselves and the Spiders they were translating. I wonder how far a
>similar blurring among the members of a Focused team could go?
Hmm... Interesting thought. We're told a lot about the cases of
individual Focused, but not much about their group mentality.
But it seems to me that a Focused group is much more unstable
than a Tine pack, much more likely to fall apart. (Of course,
this is a common problem with designed vs. evolved systems).
But you can swap out Focused members of a team, and the Tines
can change pack members (though nowhere near as easily.)
>By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
>Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
>was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
>discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
That's what I thought. I also wondered if f maybe this is one
of the Zone differences -- Vinge makes a big point of all the
_other_ Failed Dreams that turned out to be true on Arachna,
and certainly for agrav to work you need to distinguish between
the two. So maybe in the Beyond there -is- a difference.
But, yup, the cavorite floored me as well :)
Mary K. Kuhner
>I'd be really interested in your views of the chess scene in that, if
>that corresponds to your experience at all.
I'm afraid I haven't.
>It's the best demonstration of what a brain-computer interface could
>actually _do_ I've read, it's what always comes to me when I think
>about this sort of thing. Because of course, that would allow both,
>the focus and getting away from it again.
>Seems like Vinge's been thinking about this stuff for a while.
My whole decision to learn to program, at age fifteen, came from
reading the short story "Fireship", which is about this kind of
man-machine interface. Had it not been for that story, I very
much suspect I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. (Which is
nothing to do with machine-man interfaces: connections are
funny things....) It was only on having blocked out this
paragraph in my mind that I finally recalled who wrote "Fireship":
it was Joan Vinge.
I reckon they have been thinking about it for a *long* time.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Phil Fraering
SpiderSpoilers ahead:
>By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
>Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
>was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
>discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
To what extent is the whole lurk/counterlurk thread a subtle
commentary on the UFO phenomenon?
_Is_ anyone on this group posting from a secret alien base at
the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
This just shows one more way that the universe is all ronzelle
between.
Andrea Leistra
>dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David M. Jones) writes:
>
>SpiderSpoilers ahead:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>commentary on the UFO phenomenon?
>
>_Is_ anyone on this group posting from a secret alien base at
>the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
Ping the site?
--
Andrea Leistra
Wayne Throop
:: actually _do_ I've read, it's what always comes to me when I think
:: about this sort of thing. Because of course, that would allow both,
:: the focus and getting away from it again.
: mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
: My whole decision to learn to program, at age fifteen, came from
: reading the short story "Fireship", which is about this kind of
: man-machine interface. Had it not been for that story, I very much
: suspect I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. (Which is nothing to
: do with machine-man interfaces: connections are funny things....) It
: was only on having blocked out this paragraph in my mind that I
: finally recalled who wrote "Fireship": it was Joan Vinge.
Or the bit in True Names, about using timeouts/reminders/prompts
to keep ... well, "focussed", while using VR interfaces.
Real-world xref: some of the papers by the group of folks working
on wearable computers, "mostly" originating at MIT's media lab
(but lots of others despite saying "mostly").
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/
Among many other facinating things, Rhodes' work on rememberance agents
http://rhodes.www.media.mit.edu/people/rhodes/research/
http://rhodes.www.media.mit.edu/people/rhodes/Papers/wear-ra-personaltech/
In a normal computer context, never lose track of what you're doing, or
who's email you are processing, or if you mention one thing that
beloings in a list never forget the other things that below in that
list, and so on and on. Done as an autonomous background agent that...
well, "keeps you focussed". In the context of wearable computers, never
again know the face but forget the name and/or how many kids if any,
etc. etc. etc.
In any event, computers are starting to get close to being able
to actually augment one's ability to think clearly and with focus
about most EVERYthing, day-to-day, not just a few narrow niches
like solving the 3-color map theorem. Indeed, the wearable rememberance
agent starts looking really good to me, given my cognitive style deficits.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Aaron Bergman
>In any event, computers are starting to get close to being able
>to actually augment one's ability to think clearly and with focus
>about most EVERYthing, day-to-day, not just a few narrow niches
>like solving the 3-color map theorem.
The four color theorem, actually. And I don't really see the connection.
The computer in that case was used to exhaustively check a bunch of
special cases, not really augment much of anything.
Lydia Nickerson
>A better analogy for Focus would be an addictive drug that provides
>consciousness-boosting effects; the addiction may be reversible, can
>cause damage, etc, etc.
There is no drug, used on a voluntary basis by people with reasonable
economic means, that has anything like the same destructive potential as
Focus. Focus is a different order of dangerous. Alcohol, cocaine,
heroin, and morphine are all dangerous if the user ends up in an addictive
cycle, but all of them have casual, recreational users. Focus is
instantly addictive, worse than nicotine. One dose and you're gone. No
drug is that bad, no drug steals your ability to control your use of the
drug the first time you touch it. It's a different ball game.
Lydia Nickerson
>In article <lydy.92...@gw.ddb.com> ly...@ddb.com "Lydia Nickerson" writes:
> She actually had an ongoing relationship
>> with the Underhill and his family while focused. Didn't Sherkaner mistake
>> her as a machine, though? Telling, if my memory's correct.
>He thought she was an AI, a machine like the computer intelligences in
>old SF that have names and personalities and can fall in love. That's
>not really "a machine".
It's not precisely a people, either. Does it indicate whether Sherkaner
thought she was an AI because of the provenance of the messages or because
of the content of the messages. I've been assuming he found her affect
too flat, and so assumed she wasn't a human (spider? real?).
Lydia Nickerson
>I have to wonder how much of the specific effects of the Focus virus
>that we seen in Deepness were cultural rather than inherent in the
>virus. Don't the podmasters remark a couple of times on how many Qeng
>Ho can't be focussed at all? I had assumed this was because of some
>purely biological difference in resistance to the virus between the
>two populations, but I'm not so sure. Of the three cases you
>mentioned above who managed to maintain more of their creativity --
>and, perhaps, their personality? -- two were Qeng Ho and the third was
>the Frenkish Orc. Did we ever see or hear of anything similar among
>the Emergent Focussed?
What a good point. Thank you. All of the interesting exceptions were not
raised in the Emergency. I wonder if this has more to do with the
pathways that are built while learning and growing, rather than the
genetic makeup. Qeng Ho are raised to be independant, Emergent members
are raised to be docile. Fascinating.
>1) Is the "loyal slave" aspect of Focus inherent, or is it just
>something that the Podmasters find convenient to throw in while
>they're tuning the Focussed?
Are we sure they can really do this? I don't remember it being directly
referenced, but I could have missed it. Trixia is deliberately working
against the Emergents, isn't she. Perhaps the loyalty thing isn't loyalty
so much as vulnerability and obsession. Focus someone, put them in front
of the specialty for which they are focused, and do you really need any
subsidiary loyalty programming? The Focused are awfully easy to
manipulate.
>3) More generally, how much do we really know about the inherent
>tradeoffs involved in Focus? All we've really seen is how one
>particularly ruthless society has used it. Who's to say that it isn't
>possible to induce enhanced powers of concentration and analysis
>without having to destroy a person's volition and free will? Isn't
>this more-or-less the state Trixia is left in at the end of the book?
>Does anyone in the Emergency even know the answers to these questions?
How would you design experiments to answer these questions that weren't
unethical? Trixia had volition, even when Focused, didn't she, else how
else could she and the other translators worked on the counterlurk? The
Emergency wouldn't have answers, I bet. They aren't interested in
research for its own sake, I don't think.
Anyway you go with Focus, I think that the first problem to solve is a
vaccination that can be distributed universally. If the vaccine is
allowed to run rampant, the opportunity for abuse is endless. Once you've
gotten the disease under control, then maybe some reasonable experiments
with the plus side of Focus triggered obsession would be in order.
Mary K. Kuhner
>In any event, computers are starting to get close to being able
>to actually augment one's ability to think clearly and with focus
>about most EVERYthing, day-to-day, not just a few narrow niches
>like solving the 3-color map theorem. Indeed, the wearable rememberance
>agent starts looking really good to me, given my cognitive style deficits.
Fritz Leiber did a good story (half funny, half scary) on this: the
reminder sytems turn out to have an agenda of their own. I don't
remember the name of the individual story, but it's collected in _Night
of the Wolf_, I think.
People have held chess tournaments where each "player" was a computer/
human team, but the inability of the teammates to usefully share
their reasoning and knowledge turns out to be a major problem, and
such teams (except for avoidance of a few human-characteristic and
machine-characteristic blunders) don't seem to play all that much
better than either could do individually. Often worse, probably due
to the human partner being distracted by the machine.
This almost seems like a pure interface problem, though the necessary
interface would probably be very tricky. Teams of cooperating
humans don't play very well either.
I'm imagining something that could bookkeep my mental "I go here,
he goes there, I go here" for me, give me a picture of the board
at the end of that variation, and keep track of my search tree so I
don't look at the same variation more than once or miss any
important continuations. This would take a rather intimate meshing
of my thoughts and its thoughts. Accurately bookkeeping my variations
for me, given how fragile the thinking-about-chess process is in
the first place, would almost require it to be able to subtly
and coercively prevent me from thinking down erroneous lines (say,
ones involving a mistake about the position on the board). This
seems to be heading back towards either Focus or some more intellectual
counterpart (ruling out extraneous thoughts directly).
I don't think I want to play better chess that badly, on consideration,
though it would certainly be an interesting experience.
There's some limited evidence that strong female chessplayers are
more likely to compute variations verbally, and strong male players
visually: I wonder if the verbal method would be easier to computer-
assist? (I think we will be able to tap into speech patterns in
the brain before visual imaginings.) That would upset the chess
community a bit.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Terry L. Smith
: dmj...@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David M. Jones) writes:
: SpiderSpoilers ahead:
: >By the way, did anyone else think that the first mention of the
: >Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
: >was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
: >discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
: To what extent is the whole lurk/counterlurk thread a subtle
: commentary on the UFO phenomenon?
: _Is_ anyone on this group posting from a secret alien base at
: the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
Oh, I don't think anyone is, do you? Though, as you comented,
how would you know?
From the circum-Lunar colonies, now that's a different matter.
"That thing is a war-crime of sentence structure."
- noted S F writer
"Yes, but it does have the virtue of redundancy. Not only that,
it repeats itself a lot, too."
- unnoted anonymous person
- M.Q.S., Cdr. C'mell, KPS AKA The Lady in Green
... the fact that I don't participate in IRC, and seldom answer
"talk" pings has nothing at all to do with it. With anything.
In fact, never mind. Forget you read this article.
There. That's better.
--
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
| M.Q.S. c/o T.L.S | "Don't play with that! You have no idea where |
| tls...@netcom.com | it's been..." -- Speaker to Elevators |
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
Scott Drellishak
)the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
Well, the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft is currently
orbiting Earth's L1 point. When contact was lost with the spacecraft a few
months ago, they used a big radio telescope like a radar dish to verify
that the spacecraft was still where they thought it was (and not an
expanding sphere of debris, I presume). So, if something were hanging out
in Earth's L1 point, we should be able to detect it. Of course, if they
can subvert our data networks like the humans in _Deepness_...
--
/ Scott Drellishak \
| "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." |
\ "Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness." /
Nancy Lebovitz
Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>People have held chess tournaments where each "player" was a computer/
>human team, but the inability of the teammates to usefully share
>their reasoning and knowledge turns out to be a major problem, and
>such teams (except for avoidance of a few human-characteristic and
>machine-characteristic blunders) don't seem to play all that much
>better than either could do individually. Often worse, probably due
>to the human partner being distracted by the machine.
>
>This almost seems like a pure interface problem, though the necessary
>interface would probably be very tricky. Teams of cooperating
>humans don't play very well either.
>
human/computer teams would lead to better interfaces.
Paul Clarke
wrote:
>In article <7cc7p0$7to$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>
> mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu "Mary K. Kuhner" writes:
>
>> Focus would probably be helpful in avoiding succumbing to psych tactics. It's
>> hard to say how important these are at the very top. Some players think
>> they are--they point to games like the one where a relatively minor
>> British GM played a totally whacky opening against Karpov and beat him.
>> Karpov may have been offended, or contemptuous, to the detriment of his play.
>
Hey, less of this "relatively minor"! Tony Miles was the first
British-born GM and at his peak was rated around 2600, in the days
when that put you in or around the world top ten.
Irrelevant anecdote: a few players from our university club went to a
tournament in London. Looking at the draw, we noticed that Miles was
playing and was, of course, on board 1. Our captain (rated BCF 140,
about 1700 ELO) couldn't find his own name on the list, until I gently
pointed out that he was also on board 1.
>Have you read :The Peace War:?
>
>I'd be really interested in your views of the chess scene in that, if
>that corresponds to your experience at all.
>
My only problem with that scene is a common one with chess scenes
(particularly in films): the assumption that highly intelligent people
will be very good at chess. What makes people really good at chess is
a combination of talent (only partly related to intelligence, I think)
and a lot of study.
I find the uses to which they put the brain-computer interfaces
plausible though.
Caveat: I haven't read _The Peace War_ for a while, and I'm not a very
good chess player.
Matt Austern
> I'm imagining something that could bookkeep my mental "I go here,
> he goes there, I go here" for me, give me a picture of the board
> at the end of that variation, and keep track of my search tree so I
> don't look at the same variation more than once or miss any
> important continuations. This would take a rather intimate meshing
> of my thoughts and its thoughts. Accurately bookkeeping my variations
> for me, given how fragile the thinking-about-chess process is in
> the first place, would almost require it to be able to subtly
> and coercively prevent me from thinking down erroneous lines (say,
> ones involving a mistake about the position on the board). This
> seems to be heading back towards either Focus or some more intellectual
> counterpart (ruling out extraneous thoughts directly).
The simplest form of such bookkeeping, of course, is pencil and paper.
All of the chess tournaments I've competed in forbade pencil and
paper, except for the limited purpose of making a record of the
game. (My understanding is that even annotating one's moves is usually
forbidden.) I wonder if there's any evidence that chess players who
are allowed to make notes can play any better.
Matt Austern
> How would you design experiments to answer these questions that weren't
> unethical? Trixia had volition, even when Focused, didn't she, else how
> else could she and the other translators worked on the counterlurk?
We don't know that. Remember how Anne saw the problem: someone was
interfering with the Focused. (Anne just didn't understand who the
"someone" was.) If Anne knew everything that we do by the end of the
book, she would undoubtedly have said, not that the translators had
free will, but that the counterlurkers were corrupting the
translators' programming via an unauthorized data channel and that
the translators were unusually vulnerable to such corruption because
they were supposed to pay attention to everything from the ground.
Perhaps Anne's understanding was correct.
Matt Austern
> >Spiders who found a difference between inertial and gravitational mass
> >was going to be nothing more than a sly reference to the purported
> >discovery of a Fifth Force of a decade or so ago?
>
> To what extent is the whole lurk/counterlurk thread a subtle
> commentary on the UFO phenomenon?
>
> _Is_ anyone on this group posting from a secret alien base at
> the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
High-latency pings?
Torbjorn Lindgren
>pgf@lungold (Phil Fraering) writes:
>> _Is_ anyone on this group posting from a secret alien base at
>> the Earth-Sun L1 point? If someone were, how would we know?
>
>High-latency pings?
LOL!
Unfortunately the really high ones seems to have gone the way of the
dinosaurs, I haven't seen any 4000+ ms pings in quite a while...
Once it was easy to get them, mostly by going to Germany... Pretty
impressive actually, considering that it's much closer physically than
the US from here, and you only got ~200 ms even at the worst back then
(to the East Coast, OK, if you go back even further this is probably
not true, but it was true of Swedish University links when I first
encountered them), as long it didn't drop back to geosync satellite
link (now it's ~100 ms to the east coast). Even backup satellite links
to the US didn't give more than 600 ms in round-trip!
I'm probably being a bit unfair to Germany here, there WERE a few
other places that you could get similar effects from at that time, but
IIRC in most other cases you actually covered lots of ground too (say
parts of Asia, which you accesses through the US from here (both now
and then), which means that in some cases the information probably
traveled at least 3/4 of Earth's radius, one way).
Nowadays it's hard to get that kind of round trip times even if goes
all they way around the globe, 400 ms (round trip) probably isn't
enough for geostationary orbit (I tried a few commercial sites in
Taiwan, from a commercial ISP in Norway, not that it actually makes
much difference any longer). And Germany isn't especially useful for
this kind of things either any longer...
Which on the other hand should make it easier to spot genuine
long-range transmission using traceroute, unless they have FTL
communication that is... If the ping time jumps 1+ seconds between two
hops you have a smoking gun, or an really overloaded link :-)
--
--
Torbjörn Lindgren
Network Manager, FairPlay International AS
E-mail: t...@fairplay.no
Andrew Plotkin
> Which on the other hand should make it easier to spot genuine
> long-range transmission using traceroute, unless they have FTL
> communication that is... If the ping time jumps 1+ seconds between two
> hops you have a smoking gun, or an really overloaded link :-)
No, a smoking gun for FTL is when the ping time *drops* 1+ seconds between
successive hops.
--Z
(Sudden random thought: What if Redmond WA turns out to be a bubble of
Low Beyond? Microsoft *really is* producing the most advanced, powerful,
intelligent software on Earth. But as soon as they ship it out here into
the Slow Zone, it starts to degrade, and they can never fix it or
understand *why*...)
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Matthew Hunter
I agree; it is by no means a perfect analogy. However, it is better
than "a college education" or "enlisting in the military", which were
the analogies proposed in the message I responded to.
Those two analogies are hideously wrong; "addictive drug" at least
begins to approach the right idea.
--
Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
Mary K. Kuhner
Torbjorn Lindgren <t...@dahlin.fairplay.no> wrote:
>Which on the other hand should make it easier to spot genuine
>long-range transmission using traceroute, unless they have FTL
>communication that is... If the ping time jumps 1+ seconds between two
>hops you have a smoking gun, or an really overloaded link :-)
The real smoking gun is the ping that can be shown to have travelled
FTL....
ObSF: short story, author and title forgotten, about the inverse
relationship between how fast (snail) mail propagates and how far
it goes. The protagonist extrapolates this relationship outward
to make contact with the Galactic Federation (and incidentally prove
the possibility of FTL communications).
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Andrew Plotkin
> On 15 Mar 99 01:47:46 GMT, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Lydia Nickerson <ly...@ddb.com> wrote:
> >mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu (Matthew Hunter) writes:
> >>A better analogy for Focus would be an addictive drug that provides
> >>consciousness-boosting effects; the addiction may be reversible, can
> >>cause damage, etc, etc.
> >There is no drug, used on a voluntary basis by people with reasonable
> >economic means, that has anything like the same destructive potential as
> >Focus.
> I agree; it is by no means a perfect analogy. However, it is better
> than "a college education" or "enlisting in the military", which were
> the analogies proposed in the message I responded to.
It was not, when I posted it, a proposed analogy.
However, the thread has drifted on, and I can only take the long cozy
teatime nap of regret.
--Z
Wayne Throop
::: In any event, computers are starting to get close to being able to
::: actually augment one's ability to think clearly and with focus about
::: most EVERYthing, day-to-day, not just a few narrow niches like
::: solving the 3-color map theorem. Indeed, the wearable rememberance
::: agent starts looking really good to me, given my cognitive style
::: deficits.
: Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu>
: [.. augmentation for chess ..]
: I'm imagining something that could bookkeep my mental "I go here, he
: goes there, I go here" for me, give me a picture of the board at the
: end of that variation, and keep track of my search tree so I don't
: look at the same variation more than once or miss any important
: continuations. This would take a rather intimate meshing of my
: thoughts and its thoughts. Accurately bookkeeping my variations for
: me, given how fragile the thinking-about-chess process is in the first
: place, would almost require it to be able to subtly and coercively
: prevent me from thinking down erroneous lines (say, ones involving a
: mistake about the position on the board). This seems to be heading
: back towards either Focus or some more intellectual counterpart
: (ruling out extraneous thoughts directly).
Yes, you've skipped several orders of magnitude in sophistication
between a heads-up rememberance agent, to direct cognitive augmentation.
Some intermediate points, would be a direct rememberance agent, so that
"book facts" and calculation results are simply "remembered" when you
wonder about them, automagically. To you, it'd be nigh
indistinguishable from your own memory, so that you'd know the square
root of 2057 as if you'd memorized tens of digits of it.
But even that is child's play compared to actual augments of human
mental processes. Reminding of intermediate board positions and such
doesn't come close, because the intermediate states of thought about
such things aren't available to introspection, memory, or anything
else known. Studies I've read about show that we *confabulate*
a rationale for our thoughts after-the-fact, but that the actual
process is profoundly unknown and maybe unknowable. Thus, there's
currently no idea on where to get your "hands on" the intermediate
thoughts about chess position as humans do chess.
Now, improving focus in general might help, and remembering what
you've already considered might help. But I doubt rememberance
agents or any close descendants of them would help chess ability very
much at the tip-top of human capability. In that context, as mary
pointed out, they'd become distraction agents instead.
But for those people who just can't keep track of an agenda more than
three items long, or a subtask nesting more than one or two items deep,
or who remember the face but can't call the name to mind, remberance
agents would improve things tremendously. Not to mention all that
reference material just as available on accounta being *always*
"on the web".
: There's some limited evidence that strong female chessplayers are more
: likely to compute variations verbally, and strong male players
: visually: I wonder if the verbal method would be easier to computer-
: assist? (I think we will be able to tap into speech patterns in
: the brain before visual imaginings.) That would upset the chess
: community a bit.
Hmmmm. Very interesting. Such an interface *might* exploit the
external form so "near the surface" compared to visualization.
If it sufficed to capture subvocalizations and whisper hints
subliminally or some such, it'd even be within reasonable grasp
of near-future technology (though it still sounds prohibitively
distracting to me).
Hmmmmm. I myself do most of my thinking visually or kinesthetically,
and end up confabulating the rationale in language after the fact.
Or, so it seems to my introspection, from external evidence
(if that's not an oxymoron...).
Andrew Plotkin
However, people are able to adapt to new interfaces. A machine can't read
word-choices out of my brain, but I can touch-type without thinking about
it.
(...he said, making three typing errors in the word "about", and four more
in this parenthetical comment. I didn't say I was *good* at it. :-)
Anyway, what about an interface in which you could (learn to) "touch-type"
chess positions as you think about them? It wouldn't have to be complete.
You'd enter a move or two to start an entire result tree, and mark it as
either "this is bad", or "please apply some brute force to this and add it
to my bookmarks when you're done", or "push previous state on the stack,
assume this move, and let's think about *this* position." Add some notes
about how you *feel* about the position, in some simple and stylized way.
Repeat on a second-by-second basis.
To some extent this is what you meant by a "direct remembrance agent". But
a really good interface plus practice can start to look like magic, even
at our tech level. If there's room for the human brain to push data out,
reflexively, and still make decisions about the gestalt -- you're starting
to get into genuinely useful augmentation.
This oughta be someone's CS research project.
Jeffrey Soreff
> On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 15:25:38 -0500, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> wrote:
> >I thought that Vinge's Focus virus was perhaps the single most
> >interesting idea in _Deepness_, which is saying something.
> >
> >Minor spoiler space follows:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >la
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >la
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >la
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >la
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> >I think the first priority in controlling it would be to develop a
> >vaccine against the Focus virus. Spread that around first. This would
> >prevent the emergence of more Emergents. Then you can start using
> >Focus, carefully, on unvaccinated volunteers...
> >
> >My take on it is that the thing has just too much potential to be left
> >alone.
>
> I doubt it will be left alone, if anything remotely close is possible.
> I dearly wish that it would be.
>
> --
> Matthew Hunter (mhu...@andrew.cmu.edu)
You may want to see
http://pobox.com/~sentience/algernon.html
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky thinks that something close is possible.
-Jeffrey Soreff
Michael Brazier
>
> aber...@princeton.edu (Aaron Bergman) writes:
>
> > >When Vinge let on what had actually happened, *then* I decided he was sly.
> >
> > That's weird. I thought "ah -- now we see some transcendent tech".
> > Of course, I missed the counterlurk entirely. Dangers of
> > reading the last third post 3AM, I suppose.
>
> I missed the counterlurk too. Which leads to an interesting question:
> what clues did we have? In retrospect, I can think of two:
> -- Sherkaner's reaction ("even the---") when he first learns
> that the antigravity dust is real.
> -- Anne's belief that someone was interfering with the Focused.
When Ezr tells Trixia she isn't a machine, and she responds ten seconds
later with "Really? I'm not?"
--
Michael Brazier
Christopher K Davis
> ObSF: short story, author and title forgotten, about the inverse
> relationship between how fast (snail) mail propagates and how far
> it goes. The protagonist extrapolates this relationship outward
> to make contact with the Galactic Federation (and incidentally prove
> the possibility of FTL communications).
"Mail Supremacy", Hayford Peirce. Cue ISFDB:
1. Best SF Stories of the Year 5, Lester del Rey, (year unknown)
2. Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1975, Ben Bova, 1975, $1
3. 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, Isaac Asimov+Martin
H. Greenberg+Joseph D. Olander, 1978, Doubleday, hc
4. Analog Anthology #4: Analog's Lighter Side, Stanley Schmidt, 1983,
Davis Publications, $2.95, tp
5. Imperial Stars, Vol. 1: The Stars At War, Jerry Pournelle, 1986,
Baen, 0-671-65603-1, $3.50, pb
6. 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories, Robert Weinberg+Stefan
Dziemianowicz+Martin H. Greenberg, 1996, Barnes & Noble Books,
0-76070-142-3, hc
There's also a sequel adventure of Chap Foey Rider, "Doing Well While
Doing Good":
1. Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1975, Ben Bova, 1975,
$1
2. Imperial Stars, Vol. 2: Republic and Empire, Jerry Pournelle+John
F. Carr, 1987, Baen, 0-671-65359-8, $3.95, pb
The _Imperial Stars_ anthologies shouldn't be too terribly hard to find
in used bookstores. V1 also includes "Herbig-Haro" (the sequel to
Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken") and (obSubjectLine!) "The Whirligig
of Time", an older Vernor Vinge. V2 includes "Conquest by Default",
another Vernor Vinge short.
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>