Author: Christopher Berry

Cultural Industries

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Cultural industries are an ideas business. They sell ideas. The Canadian cultural industry, since just around Confederation, sells the idea of Canada. Is Canada a good idea? Does anybody want to buy it? Is there a market for it? What is? All businesses rely on networks of channels. There’s power in networks. There’s power in distribution networks. The Canadian state, since its inception, invested in networks. There were promises of network connectivity built right into Constitution. It had to then. It has to continue to do so now. There’s just too much physical geography to ignore. And not a lot of that geography it is helpful to the social geography of the country. Look at the place: The rockies run[…]

The Generative Era

Posted on by Christopher Berry

I want to believe that the current generation of applications powered by Large Language Model (LLM) don’t represent the height of the state of the art for prediction machines and that no single firm will reach 80% market share and go onto dominate the generative era. I want to believe that the future is quite open, and that these early returns we’ve made in applied machine learning can compound. It’s because I want to believe so much that it’s worth questioning the assumptions. What might cause the future to become closed? Does OpenAI scan its API logs for good ideas? In 2023, a surge of founders developed skins for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Some based their startup on enabling a user to[…]

How Social Entrepreneurs Search

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This story begins in a lecture room on an upper floor at Temple University in Philly on a pleasant summer day in 2018. John Hauser is delivering a cracking talk on recommendation engines. He launches into an aside about how the best real estate agents on earth facilitate their consumers’ own discovery of their own preferences. He’s challenging conventional doctrine. The grizzled grizzlies fold their arms and lean back in their chairs. The students from KU lean forward. I catch Luo’s eye and exchange smiles. We’re beaming. I got my popcorn ready. This is gonna be good. He tells a story about how an excellent real estate agent will listen patiently as you state preferences, and then they go onto[…]

What if some people don’t learn from losing money?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

I heard a belief on September 10, 2023 in Singapore: ~”When people lose money, they learn, they become more intelligent.” And I thought – huh. That’s kind of neat. I want to believe that. Is that true? Why do I want to believe that? I want to believe that it’s true because that would be awesome! It would mean diminishing returns for the wolves. Sure, a sucker is born is every second, but maybe a hundred are converted into skeptics every minute? If it was true, the world become progressively better. The population vulnerable to raiding, to fraud, to injustice, would be diminishing all the time. Sure, collectively, we would never get to zero, but it would approach some asymptote,[…]

Red Queens and Ant Hills

Posted on by Christopher Berry

I’m sorting out much of what I read of Gregory Bateson (1904-1980). And in his tradition, I’m going to make connections and then try to stand above it. Come and play. My entry point was Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), then I shot off into A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind Edited by Rodney E Donaldson (1991) and then Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Circles (2016). I’ve been thinking a lot about the question David Graeber and David Wengrow asked in The Dawn of Everything (2021): why do groups of people differentiate? Bateson’s observation of schismogenesis – a combination of the word schism and genesis – is “a process of interaction whereby directional[…]

Protection as a Virtual Good

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There’s a tension between the desire of some politicians to protect the population from harm, the desire of some in the population to be free from regulation, and the desire by some to have the freedom to harm. The idea of protection as a good is interesting because it has a lot in common with a risk pool. I reckon that protection is virtual good because protection is an idea. There’s this idea that the state provides protection from threats. Most threats, not all, are imagined, aren’t they? The state organizes protection from external forces: against intruders, looters, raiders, hordes, and parasites that pose threats to agriculture and aquaculture. The state organizes protection from internal threats: against murderers, organized crime,[…]

Moderation and Moderate Communities

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Moderation is a difficult good. Which is why I watched, curiously, amused, mystified, at Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s behaviour in June, 2023. NBC News reported: “Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he’ll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’: Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.” Reddit has a system that creates a system by which moderators, creators, and lurkers learn about their preferences, share knowledge, and share knowledge about sharing knowledge. It’s delicate. It’s reddit’s core asset. Which is why I’ve been mystified by Huffman’s behaviour. Let’s zoom out and look at Moderation and the[…]

The Tools That Shape Us

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Paul Graham wrote on May 9:  “Observation suggests that people are switching to using ChatGPT to write things for them with almost indecent haste. Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it. Within a year the median piece of writing could be by AI. … I warn you now, this is going to have unfortunate consequences, just as switching to living in suburbia and driving everywhere did. When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think. I don’t have the slightest hope of averting this switch. I often tell startups it’s safe to bet on laziness, and this is one of the biggest bets on[…]

Web3’s Relevance Challenge

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Assume that not all Need-Solution Pairs [1] have been discovered and that the diffusion of new solutions is Bassian [2]. What is going on with Web3? By Web3, I mean the set of technologies that includes decentralized applications (dApps), distributed ledger, protocols, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and related cryptographic technologies. It’s a superset that doesn’t just include decentralized finance (DeFi) and regenerative finance (ReFi), decentralized science (DeSci), memecoins, shitcoins, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and oracles, but all the things rooted on Peer to Peer, decentralized technology and the general concept of trustlessness. Web3 suffers from the same accessibility problems that the World Wide Web suffered from in early 1990s. It was brutal to dial up and log[…]

On Synthetic Media, Synthetic Audiences, And Facts

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) have captured the public’s imagination. There’s a lot of fear. The relevance of that fear, as always, depends on who you are. The technology first caused a surge of panic in December 2022 among some communications professionals. They fear a surge of supply, a massive increase in synthetic media, along with all of the misinformation that goes along with it. Because attention is inelastic, the price for content will collapse, and it’ll take their wages down with it. They aren’t the only ones likely to be affected [1]. It’s kind of curious that you aren’t reading too much publicly from developers and their experiences with the technology. GPT’s are a tool. A good GPT is capable[…]