Feeling Illustrated

Inspired by David's posting on Trust Metrics, I present below my "buddy graph" that I've been working on but hadn't published yet. Seemed as good of a time as any to do so, even though it's "out of order" for the blog.

Like/dislike and good/bad are the domains of the Feeling mental function. In the people browser that is Mu, every person encountered is automatically graphed on a two-dimensional "buddy chart" (a misnomer, since it includes 'enemies' and not just buddies). Once a person is encountered, an opinion of said person is registered (even if it is 'no opinion') by a private 'tagging/reputation' protocol.

If the individual has access to others' opinions of himself (via a P2P profile/reputation system), all people encountered can be graphed in two dimensions, making it much more robust than most friendship circle diagrams (a simple yes/no Thinking approach to a Feeling function). People who haven't been 'encountered' yet begin at the center point. A simple viewing of one's profile begins their migration over the graph over time.

So while a simple list of 'yes' people is the default view of an IM program, this encounter graph is the default view of Mu.

A third dimension can be illustrated if reputation scores are publicized to the global communal, or peer (individual communal) group, and I'll show that illustration tomorrow.

Andre Durand - Federated Identity Management : Identity in Motion

Andre Durand - Federated Identity Management : Identity in Motion

This blog post articulates the some more identity issues with Personas. Note the use of dependent and independent identity, and substitute Extraverted and Introverted.

Personas

Personas

Jung had other contributions to psychology other than Personality Type. His concepts of Ego/Shadow, Self, Psyche, Conscious/Unconscious, Archetypes and Personas still resonate to this day, but in today's vernacular we use them in very different ways, just like Introvert/Extravert . Some of it can get pretty esoteric and spiritual, but since we're in using all of these as analogies and metaphors anyway, there's no reason why we can't borrow some of his ideas when structuring our view of the theoretical Internet psyche.

Persona, Greek for mask, is the "I," usually ideal aspects of ourselves, that we present to the outside world. The Persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is (Jung) Originally the word Persona meant a mask worn by actors to indicate the role they played. On this level, it is both a protective covering and an asset in mixing with other people. Civilized society depends on interactions between people through the Persona. Essentially, it's the interface between the Extraverted and Introverted worlds as seen from the outside.

[The opposite of the Persona is the Anima/Animus, just so you know.]

Identity and Personas

We're constantly creating Personas online, every time we register a new name on a new site, create a new profile, or keep a cookie in our cache. Social networking is the epitome of Persona building, but we're suffering from registrationitis on the Internet - constantly trying to get our ideal name (protecting it like a trademark) and filling out profiles with the same information again and again. We're in the throes of the ultimate personality disassociation neurosis- Multiple Persona Disorder.

Efforts like OpenID are an attempt to solve the problem, but if every social networking site attempts to become an OpenID service, we're right back where we started. It's too late for OpenID - I already have hundreds of Personas out there. Additionally, there's a danger to using *one* OpenID for all my web browsing (One Ring to Rule Them All)? I don't want my online sexual proclivities to be associated with my social chatting profiles, with my D&D and WoW profiles, with my business profiles, or with my banking.

I need Persona management, consolidation and compatibility with everything I've already got. I need to be able to organize, group, sort, separate, tag, control and craft my Personas. I need to know what web service contains what information about me, what other people have gathered about me, as well as controlling who gets said information. Server-based Persona management like OpenID only provides one aspect of my total Internet self - that of validation by a recognized authority (said authority varying in degrees of reputation). This validation process falls under Extraverted Feeling (Fe) - what is my communal status. Everything else falls under Introverted Feeling (Fi) - the intimate revealing of details of myself to those I trust to those who request it, or to whom I volunteer it. A server based system can't do this without dealing with bogged down buddy list databases.

P2P Profiles

When I want to find out something about somebody, usually the easiest way is to just ask. If I'm chatting with someone online however, the repeated "ASL" (age/sex/location) questions can get pretty damn annoying. Profile were created to solve that problem ("Please read profile before pvting")- but it created other problems: profiles can be read by *anyone* who knows they're out there; I have to create a new profile every time I join a new social network; some profiles ask 'inappropriate' questions and I'm seen as hiding something if I don't fill out that section. Additionally, multiple profiles violate the principles in database and hypertext theories of 'write once, then refer' . Since the Mu system is P2P based, there's no reason why Persona management cannot be as well. Let me fill out my profile once, store it on my computer (securely encrypted) and then only share that information with those who ask for it (via public/private keys).

A Persona managment system would allow me to create multiple Personas for different situations (personal, business, social, erotic, gaming, anonymous, medical) and allow me to organize and use them at will. Information can be shared to others via P2P queries (using MySQL). This activity can separated from the ongoing active dialogue with a sidebar (or scrolling status bar), and some parts of it can be automated depending on varying reputation and relationship indices (there are some things, like 'ASL', which are extremely Extravertedly obvious, automatic and can be available to 'everyone').

Secondly, referring to somebody else's profile information requires 1) that their profile be public, 2) that the service be up and running (how many times have you heard in a chat room "Profiles are down"), and 3) that the information hasn't been changed by said Persona. I should be able to store what information I query from someone on my computer (or storage service if I so choose), so that I can refer to it whenever I want, regardless of my connectivity, the service dependability, or which social network they're a part of.

P2P profiles are THE MySpace killer app. Social networking sites are just fancy profiles, and nothing more. The early pioneers of the social web created personal webpages on Geocities.

Some example Persona categories (or tags):
• Social
• Erotic
• Romantic
• Commerce
• Professional/Business
• Friends/Family
• Gaming
• Student/Educational
• Domain Specific
• Hobbies/Interests
• Entertainment
• Cliques/Groups/Clans
• Tags
• Personal
• Popular
• Temporary

There's lots of overlap between many of these types of Personas, and that's ok. A previously asked question/data item will already be filled out in a 'SuperPersona' database. What's more important is they're completely customizable by the end-user, and that the interface to such a database be dynamic and graphic (by default, a Venn diagram with drag and drop field markers)

What's most important is that a Persona is a measurement. A Persona is not built without interaction between the Introverted and the Extraverted - the Extraverted world demands a role for us, and we choose to which degree to fulfill that role. Therefore, a Persona is a measurement of that relationship. And once something is measured, it's 'real'.

Type and GUIs

Personality Types from Mental Functions

Now that we've defined the eight basic mental functions, let's put them together. Everybody has all eight functions, but we all prefer them to different degrees, in different combinations. Some theories (such as Myers-Briggs) hypothesize that there is a regular pattern to their preference, and others, like Singer-Loomis, hypothesize that they can exist in any order of preference. The first theory (the MBTI), constructs 16 basic Types; the second theory allows for up to 40,320 (8 factorial, or 8!). Temperament theory breaks it down into 4 Types, with an eventual extrapolation into the MBTI 16. I personally see merit in all of them, as they are just variations of the other, and each attempts to explain different aspects of the greater whole. It's not necessary at this point to get into the individual descriptions of both for the purposes of this blog and the idea of Mu, and there are a tons of sites and books that provide descriptions of the basic 16 and Temperament 4.

Personality Type essentially attempts to describe everyone's personal bias to Perceiving and Judging information. When we're talking about the mental functions of Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and iNtuition, what we're really talking about is the nature of the Ego and Shadow, two opposites within the greater Self. The Ego is the collection of the Mental Functions we prefer, and the Shadow is those mental functions we do not. The Ego can be thought of as a dynamic lens through which we perceive the world and ourselves, much like a kaleidoscope, reflecting and refracting. So really, the definition of Ego-centric is 'identifying with one's biases to the exclusion of the ones we reject' as opposed to self-centered, or selfish, as it is commonly used today. Sometimes egocentricity can be useful - and of course it can be equally hindering.

Type and GUIs

A computer interface that rewards the Ego-bias of a particular user is going to be comfortable and useful, but far too often we're presented with few options in regards to our GUIs, and it's usually computer software engineers of a select few types designing those GUIs for the masses. Most software engineers definitely do not match with the greater population in terms of Type, and changing from one Type of GUI to another is pretty well impossible with today's commercial platforms. Most engineers are Ego-centric, as are most people, and GUIs reflect that (compare the NT interface of Gates' GUI to the NF interface of Jobs' GUI). As an example, the early Internet and Web was definitely T leaning. The second revolution of the web, Web 2.0, or the Social Web, is definitely a response to that overwhelming Introverted Thinking (Ti) bias, a response that has gone to the opposite extreme of Feeling (of the Extraverted variety - Fe). But the Social Web 2.0 experiment is equally Ego-centric - all social networking is done very publicly, and everything is shared, by default, to the entirety of the Internet. You actually have to manually check *not* to share things. As someone who prefers Fi as opposed to Fe, I find most social networking sites embarrassingly public. [See my post about Personas for more about public/private profiles]


So what's a solution? It would be pretty wasteful to design 40,320 different GUIs, or even 16. But 8 (the number of basic mental functions) is a lot easier to handle - and they don't have to be complete GUIs for each mental function - merely lenses that affect the 'default' GUI. If we rank and sort these 8 to our particular subjective idiosyncratic makeup, we can easily create 16 distinct GUIs, and a sophisticated GUI system can conquer all 40,320 in a nicely dynamic system of views. An ability to switch or emphasize one function over another temporarily can make a GUI adaptable to our needs at the time - sometimes I have to work in list-making, detail-oriented mode. Other times I'd like to operate on a project in metaphorical dynamic mode. You may prefer the reverse. When we can share (or imagine) another GUI Type, we've achieved one pole of the Four Views - Theory of Mind (seeing how another sees). Sometimes we need to compromise our subjective biases into one collaborative space for the purposes of clarification - the Global View. Unless we're capable of illustrating the Personal Subjective view though, none of the others are possible, and we're stuck with an arbitrary Absolute view dictated by a GUI engineer of a particular Type bias.

So yet again, we have a triumph of the subjective.

Blogs and Comments

When a comment on a blog is longer than the blog post, there's a problem. At what point does a comment on a blog become its own commentary that deserves its own blog post? There's an 'event horizon' somewhere between a short response and a lengthy response, and an event horizon between a comment that doesn't intend a dialogue and one that invites one.

I recently posted a very short comment to a blog - an anecdote that needed no response - and my comment was lost 5 screen heights down because some guy "went off" on the topic at hand with his overly lengthy comment. Comments "should" (dreadful word) be shorter text pieces with no intention of response invited. If you want to write a reflective, lengthy argument to someone else's piece, write your own blog entry via linkbacks. But then, your response is removed from the object - the first blog post. There's an objective middle space shared between the first blog post, comments that don't need a response, and comments that are blog posts of their own.

How do I comment on a comment left on my blog? Do I post a comment of my own? At that point, it looks like I'm another reader, and not the author/owner of the blog. Do we display it as threaded conversational commentary after the blog post? At what point does a blog become a forum ala Usenet? What if I want to create a private commentary conversation about a blog post? Do I then revert to email, or IM (asynchronously or synchronously?) Why do we use so many different technologies to do any of these, when all that is needed is a way to organize and visualize *one* technology - Extraverting?

Forests and (falling) trees

Journaling is an Introverted activity; blogging is an Introverted activity with the intent of Extraversion. A unread weblog remains in the 'Land of I' until read by someone - at which point it becomes shared and therefore Objective. A private blog is intimate (I) Extraversion (this blog is an example). A comment on a blog is Extraverted, while a blog post in response to another blog post falls under dialogue - a theoretically healthy mixture of I and E.

One of the basic principles of hypertext (and database) theory is that something is written once, and then referred to via linked references - the Intimate E. When we 'leave' a comment on someone else's blog, we're violating that principle, because the comment is no longer with its source - the Persona responsible for the comment. It becomes graffiti. A response to blog post also loses this principle - the original post is on that other page, and you're not seeing directly what they're referring to, unless the quote is dynamically displayed within the confines of the Response Blog.

There's a fundamental lack of structure to online conversation, and while this represents freedom, it also leads to miscommunication. One part to clearer communications is that what is said by the speaker should remain with the speaker. I envision a 'VoxBox' where the output (E) of a Persona on the Internet is collected within a boundried 'space' Another would be the ability to visualize the objectively shared space created by a conversation.

With a VoxBox modified via reputation systems and relationship measurements, I can subjectively control the volume of said Persona no matter where the Extraverted output ends up. Perhaps I want to get a better idea of the Persona responsible for the comment, so I could view the VoxBox to see everything said Persona is putting out there.

If it's my VoxBox, I can control who gets to see which 'face' of the box, or which E output. In order for me to put a Twitter badge in my blog, I had to make my Twitters completely public, even though my blog is only read by four people by permission, one of whom is my mother (hi mom!). Thus far I only use Twitter for 'work' and only four people know what work I do (which is how I like it right now). But in order for me to put a badge on a private blog, I had to go completely public on a website filled with strangers, and now I have to watch what I say via Twitter, because anyone can read it on the Twitter main page, and I don't want to give anything away.

So I'm left with IM, which is what I was trying to avoid, because it's intrusive to Introverts and gives an obligation of dialogue or a sense of 'pay attention to this *now*' to anyone receiving one.

Twitterings are already developing a sense of 'asynchronous directedness' on their own - with the @ symbol. While the Twitter may be completely public, it's intended audience is indicated with @papadavo or @critt. Wouldn't it be nice if the @ was 'hot' and directed the Twitter to *only* be read by the @tted Personas or Groups, or those within a certain level of intimacy [@Everyone, @Friends, @ProfessionalRep>=75, @DnD Clan, etc] It's like an IM (b)cc with no obligation of response or attention.

System Overview - Croquet Consortium

System Overview - Croquet Consortium


David Brin pointed out this group to me awhile back, and their p2p architecture is nicely summed up on the system overview,

It's not scalable to think of objects that must be distributed across a planetary-scale network as though they were Platonic Ideals, existing in some master form within a central communications server. In this rejected scenario, individual users would be sitting at their computers manipulating (dumb) proxy objects. Like Platonic Shadows, these proxy objects would get their statefulness sent to them by a central server. And since the conversations between this central server and the machines on the network concerning the state of all objects are going on continuously, it can really tax the bandwidth of the WAN.

(Failure of the objective)

A user's change change-message will travel round-trip across the network to its farthest reaches so that all the replicas in the system independently commit to the change order. Only then will a new screen display be generated for everyone on the network, one that incorporates the change (viewing processes are only allowed on stable versions of the object).

(Creation of the objective through the interdependent subjective - i.e., an objective compromise and the personal communal)

Consequently, the TeaTime approach is to provide an architecture that is synchronous to the degree that I/O is synchronized, but at the same time allowing for adaptation of computational strategies. The key idea for I/O coordination is that input and output events (to interactive devices) are synchronized with global universal time, which is coordinated among all sites involved in a computation.

Time is perhaps the one absolute we share objectively, despite our varying subjective abilities to pay attention to that absolute. Attention is the limited natural resource of the Internet. While OpenCroquet seems to have achieved that absolute objective nirvana through ultimate subjectivity (P2P), I'm not seeing any rewards for the subjective point of view in the system.

More later.

Aesthetics - An Se Question

I've been continuously tweaking the interface to my blog, so if you've encountered a strange layout, you'll know why. I always appreciate constructive feedback and if you have any readability issues with the text, text background colors, layout, etc., please leave a comment here. I know how *I* see the page, but I don't know how you do.

Noun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Representing nouns in a muspace

Mu is primarily interested in representing People in a shared environment. But we can't neglect the rest of the categories of nouns

Noun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, or idea, etc. This is a semantic definition.

These can all be seen as layers, or filters. Allow for only the People layer to be visible, and the Things layer to be translucent.

Add to that further filters:

count nouns
mass nouns
collective nouns
concrete nouns
abstract nouns
pronouns
substantive nouns (predicate adjectives) (qualities)

Nuclear Sledgehammer » Blog Archive » Twitter vs Jaiku vs …

Nuclear Sledgehammer » Blog Archive » Twitter vs Jaiku vs …

In this blog entry about Twitter and Jaiku, the author makes a very good point:

So, I’ve got an idea. Rather than hopping from third-party service to third-party service, let’s look at the facts:
1. Twitter, Jaiku etc are just short, single-user comment walls with an RSS feed.
2. RSS aggregators are everywhere.
3. Distributed services are more resilient than monolithic, centralised ones.
So why not create hundreds of installable Twitter-like services, optionally with SMS gateways, certainly with a simple XML-RPC interface that lets you write to them with a standard set of clients, and link them together with RSS?
That way you get everything you get from Twitter, in a distributed model that doesn’t have a single point of failure. It’s simple and ultimately would be easier for everyone than flitting from service to service to service.

He makes the point for the triumph of the subjective by arguing for the peer-to-peer version of twitter, which can also be used as the source structure of the ultimate multi-user peer-to-peer synchronous platform. I previously told someone that Twitter is like playing a trumpet in a crowded room full of trumpets. Server based twitter services are like having a conductor of the trumpets with strict control - if Twitter fails, nobody can play, and everything played on Twitter is by the approval of the conductor. I want a freeform jazz trumpet section, with a remote control that controls everyone's speaker volume - Trumpet (sm)?

Back in my Usenet days, I subscribed to about 40 different groups. For some of those groups I received a daily digest, others I read in strict chronological order, and others I read via thread. Wouldn't it be nice to enable a Trumpet interface that sorts and groups them into meaningful (to me) patterns, or allows me to view one persons Twitters as a daily digest, or high alerts, or review a resultant conversation from responded @twitters?

~

Thoughts Illustrated: Logic+Emotion

Thoughts Illustrated: Logic+Emotion - moving the needle on the Experience -O-Meter

All of the slides in this presentation seem to parallel jungian mental functions!

The author labels it emotion, but if you substitute the jungian mental function name Feeling (which in modern language would be labeled Values), he's applying Thinking logic and Feeling values. This supports the notion that both are needed, and that some people will prefer one over the other but all need a little bit of both.

He also parallels the difference between Sensing and iNtution in a few slides.

[is there a way to privately comment on slides?]

Slide 8:
plan/improvise = agile creativity
Je/Ji = transcendent judgment

facts/ideas = agile planning
Sensing/iNtuition = transcendent perception

Jung called the union of polar opposite functions the 'transcendent' function. David calls it 'agile'.

Mental Functions Table

Mental Functions Table

---

Below are the eight mental functions in one table, comparing their Extraverted and Introverted versions in two columns.
The top two sets are those of Perception (S and N), and the bottom two sets are those of Judgment (T and F). And there's a bonus set at the bottom.

Extraverted (E)	Introverted (I)
forward	backward
active	reflective
superficial	deep
expend energy	conserve energy
external	internal
talk to think	think to talk
public	private
speaking	writing
same	different
Perception (Pe)	Perception (Pi)
State of being	Recalled/imagined state of being
Sensing (Se)	Sensing (Si)
present, and next and next	present to past
simultaneous	sequential
actual, factual, present and real	past, history, 'always been' and impression
realistic	caricature
tactile and sensory	visceral
terrain	map
Intuition (Ne)	Intuition (Ni)
present to future	eternity, past and future, unpresent
patterns between	metaphors within
possibilities	could have beens, once upon a time
Judgment (Je)	Judgment (Ji)
cause-and-effect	analytic
compromised	fundamental
rule	principle
active	reactive
rule	exception
	system
group	sort/rank
executive	legislative
Thinking (Te)	Thinking (Ti)
if...then	...else ...else
compromised	fundamental
standard	unique
notation	denotation
Feeling (Fe)	Feeling (Fi)
custom/tradition	free will
community	individual
social mores	social liberties
harmony	solo
group	self
stereotype	archetype
sympathetic	empathetic
clarificiation	connotation
Server (e)	Client (i)
synchronous	asynchronous
client/server	peer-to-peer
server computing	grid computing
rss	http
ftp	bittorrent/bittyrant
IRC	IM
AIM/Yahoo/etc IM	Solipsis
push	pull

If you'll note the color choices for the function headers, they're from the traditional colors first assigned by Jung. There's strong evidence that Jung was slightly synesthetic (as are many of his particular Type), so he labeled Sensing as green, iNtuition as yellow, Thinking as blue and Feeling as red. I assigned Purple to generalized Judgment (red/blue) and a yellow/green color for generalized Perception. I'm going to change the shades slightly, making the E versions slightly darker and the I versions slightly lighter, giving E 75% grey and introverted only 25% grey. Since orange was the only color not used in his system, I've reserved it for computers and the Internet.

The Jungian Mental Functions

Well, there's a bit of jungian synchronicity in the air today. While I was composing my morning email stating that I'd be describing the Jungian mental functions much later today, I get a Google alert to an excellent article doing just that, saving me the pressure of writing so much. But it still requires a bit of set-up:

So far, we have Perception and Judgment

Perception

Perception also contains its own dichotomy, and therefore exists in two flavors - Sensing and Intution. We can abbreviate Sensing with S, but we have to use N for iNtuition, because Introversion already uses I as its abbreviation.

Quickly, Sensing involves the five senses, the somatic senses (temperature and pain) and vestibular senses (orientation and balance) and visceral senses (bodily states), and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

Intuition involves the world of ideas, patterns, meaning, metaphor, insights, relationships and possibilities.

Judgment

Judgment also contains a dichotomy, that between Thinking and Feeling. Thinking and Feeling are both rational functions. Feeling does not mean emotion or emotional.

Thinking is making decision using logic and is devoid of value. It is the gesellschaft. It's abbreviated as T.

Feeling is making decisions using values, either of the personal variety (liberties) or the societal (social mores). It is gemeinschaft. It's abbreviated as F.

I'll be describing much better these four mental functions later.

Below, we have another mandala figure, squaring the two poles:



These four functions all exist in Introverted and Extraverted versions, so you end up with 8 basic mental function-attitudes - a three dimensional matrix.

Extraverted/Introverted Sensing (Se, Si)
Extraverted/Introverted iNtuition (Ne, Ni)
Extraverted/Introverted Thinking (Te, Ti)
Extraverted/Introverted Feeling (Fe, Fi)



I'll be posting some tables comparing these functions later (and their applications to a communication system), but for now, we have some descriptions of all of these in the the article I mentioned in the context of a book review, written by a secondary school student:

"Fifth Business" – The Jungian Personality Types by Vaneet S.

~

Finally, Jungian mental functions

Here we are, finally discussing Jungian mental functions.

After Jung realized the dichotomies of Introverted and Extraverted were not enough to explain all differences in Types of people, he eventually realized that all people basically have two mutually exclusive modes of operation, or mental functions : Perception of information and Judgment of information.

Perception

Perception is the psyche's portal for perceiving information in the external and internal worlds. Perceiving is 'the process of becoming aware of things, people, occurrences [events], [meanings,] and ideas' [Isabel Myers, 1980]. In other words, perceiving is the cognitive process of gathering information and bringing it into our consciousness. Perceiving can be thought of as the modem and the monitor of the mind. Perception is called an irrational process by Jung because it is not controlled, it merely is.

Judgment

Judgment is the psyche's answer to using the information gathered by Perception. Judgment provides structure and valuation to information. Myers describes judging as "the process of coming to conclusions about what is perceived" Judgment can be thought of as the processor and programming of a computer. Judgment is called a rational process by Jung because it is controlled

Another dichotomy squaring

These two functions operate in a bipolar model - one is either Perceiving or Judging, but never both simultaneously, just like one can either be Introverting or Extraverting, but never both - you're either being loud or quiet.

If we square the P/J dichotomy to the I/E dichotomy, we end up with another four-point mandala like the subjective/objective and personal/collective mandala.

In the 8 point mandala of these two poles, we end up with four modes of operation - Introverted/Extraverted Perception and Introverted/Extraverted Judgment. We can abbreviate these four points as Pi, Pe, Ji, Je.

I'll be re-editing this post and adding more to the descriptions of P and J and Pe/Pi/Je/Ji later, so check for updates.

An Online Type Indicator

If you're curious about your own Jungian Type, there's a version of an indicator online that's free to take. It's not the "official" Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, but I've found it to be a pretty good version.

Remember, the MBTI (and other versions) are an objective attempt at a subjective psychological system. Jung only intended his system to be one of empirical description, not causal prescription. The MBTI is a tool like a compass is to the terrain (actual psychological processes) and a map (the description of said psychological processes), and ultimately only you can say where you are.

If you *do* take this indicator, please don't tell me your results! I'm pretty good at Type watching and try to guess others' Type as I get to know someone before it's revealed to me. When you get your results, note both the numerical 'score' as well as the polarity preference somewhere. I'm providing the link now to give everyone a personal reference to the general discussion.

If we were in one of my lectures, you would have taken the indicator beforehand, then picked your preferences after the descriptions were presented, and then you'd be given your results to compare. It's suggested you take the indicator before you read any further about the mental functions to prevent any confirmation bias in the results. Ultimately, only you can truly know your Type, no matter what any 'objective' indicator says.

Reputation Systems and 4 Views

original post date:6/11/07

The Room with Four Views can be applied to reputation systems as well.

• Personal reputation (your own rank/score for somebody else)

• Peer Group reputation (what you and your friends collectively think of others)

• Empathetic reputation (asking what an individual friend thinks of third person)

• Global view (what everyone thinks of everyone, regardless of how intimately they know them)

Gradations can be applied - I know that my friend Stephen is very poor at judging the character of others, so my opinion of his opinion (the venn point between personal to peer to empathetic), despite being a close personal friend, is very low. I can almost bet that if Stephen trusts somebody, he's been conned (he's an obvious mark).

Another close personal friend knows very little about computers, so his geek reputation is low despite a high personal reputation. In my tagged buddy lists of (geeks, computer), he wouldn't even appear in the formula, but he does appear in my reputation formula for (geeks, D&D).

Yet another friend has very different tastes in a mate than I do - I'm not going to ask him if somebody is pretty, but he may know my tastes very well (empathetic view), so if he wants to 'recommend' somebody to me, I'll pay attention - with a grain of salt, because no matter how empathetic he may be, he can never truly know what turns me on (the ultimately triumph of the deeply subjective).

And I don't really give a damn what Joe Bloe thinks of the presidential races - he's distinctly average and so is his opinion. I don't really know him anyway, or any of his friends. But it may be necessary to compare my peer groups opinion to the average objective stranger 'wisdom' of crowds.

The challenge to reputation systems remains to enable this kind of complexity. Server-based (extraverted/global/collective) reputation systems ultimately fail in this scenario when compared to peer-to-peer reputation systems (triumph of the subjective) because the mathematical formula is going to be different for every user. If a reputation formula is to be meaningful to the end user, it must be easy to understand *how* a reputation was derived, and therefore it must be transparent, and customizable.

When the formula for reputation is recognized and designed as a completely subjective system, it can't be gamed - you can't game a system unless you know all of the rules of a system.

Once this complex reputation is calculated (via grid computing), it is easy illustrating the resultant reputations of everyone in my encounter list (the objective version of a buddy list). This is where the Holocene tools system comes in - adapting objective communal muspace to the personal subjective user interface by adjusting word balloon size/font size/volume/transparancy/gist level/bitrate/bittyrant/twitter frequency/avatar complexity/etc.

Table of E and I attributes

Below is a table that compares the attributes of I and E.
These attributes can be applied to both people and functions, and the internet.

This list will continue to grow and change, as I recall more aha!s

Introverted	Extraverted
subjective	objective
self	group
reflective	active
from present to past	from present to future
internal	external
representative	actual
private	public
conserve energy	expend energy
think to talk	talk to think
deep	broad
writing	speaking
focused	broad
map	terrain
asynchronous	synchronous
fundamental	compromised
unique	standard
archetype	stereotype
sort	group
peer-to-peer	client/server
abstract	concrete
unregulated	regulated
unmoderated	moderated
analysis/correlation	cause-and-effect/execution
liberties	mores
systems	taxonomies
circumstantial	absolute
personal	collective
empathetic	sympathetic
pull	push
http	rss
exception	rule
intimate	stranger

Take any Internet technology, and apply the adjectives from the list: reflective/active web page, internal/external server, public/private profiles. A multi-user interactive 'space' must contain *both* versions of any technology in order to satisfy 100% of the users.