rewarding those who present relevant information is a great idea.
an awareness of media manipulation, manufactured consent and the private ownership of public opinion creates a market for honest information.
as a mechanism for rewarding those who produce relevant information, steemit is building self-supporting, intelligent neural pathways for communicating public opinion.
opinion is valued for its ability to resonate with others. what echoes is a shared internal narrative, a mythology. both fact & fiction, our mythology is the model in our mind for how the world works.
immutable public memory is an important step toward the goal of achieving intelligent collective thought.
Bucky had it right when he said:
"Intelligence is the discrimination between relevant and irrelevant feedback."
- R. B. Fuller
his definition implies intelligence as a system of input, process, output and feedback. as nodes on a network, from birth to death, we process information into "outformation." our processes of discrimination often operate without relevant feedback, conditioned by consensus trance, with little objective observation of internal processes.
through language and experience, neural pathways connect and stiffen the edges of the story. the boundaries are set and the narrative begins to produced fixed responses. cultural maturity emerges as it becomes hard-wired into our limbic system. a contrary opinion becomes an insult, a punch in the gut to our intuition.
confirming our beliefs through others makes us feel good. we discard or ignore information that doesn't fit the mind's model - regardless of it's relevance. cognitive dissonance is our mind's defense mechanism that repairs the short circuit or blown fuse caused by information that might damage the wiring or challenge the deeply held belief.
I think this is the hazard that a young steemit will endure before it grows more objective neural pathways: as an immutable record of irrelevant opinion.
but I expect this to be only temporary.
my goal with steemit is to help create tools for creating objective data to support rational analysis that builds honest conclusions into relevant opinions. My contribution is the scientific instrumentation and conventions that can present the Internet of Place - the relevant purpose for the IoT.
the brain is not the mind
I'd like to carry the metaphor of "web as collective mind" a little further and add that coherent thought requires a sensory connection to the body.
the web today is a massive brain with no shared homunculus, no public somatosensory cortex and a lot of irrelevant opinion, disconnected from the body. the web's objective connection to the physical world is scattered, incoherent and attenuated - but it's improving.
my work is an attempt at improving this connection by building instrumentation shared over the web. my focus is building tools for submitting objective data to a blockchain, an immutable public record - very much like steemit.
introduceyourself
I work for a small company that makes battery-operated wireless sensors that report to the web. this is my tenth year with Aginova. for an IoT company, a decade is a long time in the business.
my 35 year career in applied cybernetics began as a helmsman on a Coast Guard cutter, then as an electronics technician on nautical communication/navigation equipment. I spent decades working in research laboratories and industrial plants as a process control & instrumentation engineer.
about 20 years ago, I was trained and certified to practice hypnotherapy and biofeedback with an emphasis on sEMG and neurofeedback. my only client is me.
applied cybernetics is the only term that fits most of my interests & vocations.