In pursuit of a thread through my work

Lots of ideas

It turns out that I have a lot of ideas and that it's hard to make a choice for the final project. To look for a common thread in my previous work I made a distinction between natural and technological. I was also able to make this devision in many of the ideas that I had for the coming year. This was not very helpful since I was looking for a way to narrow down. I presented almost all my ideas to the group, but I will not describe them all here. Instead I will focus upon the ones that were commented upon.

Rude vs. Social

My perception is that technology is making us more rude than we are when we interact naturally. I wanted to work with this by gathering rude comments on the net and make people say them to each other when they are close together. Rene pointed out that rude behavior is also natural behavior. It would be good if I could prove that people interact more rude when mediated. Simon pointed out that we are less polite because there is no immediate thread and that we will be rude when there is no thread whether there is mediation or not. I think that this is a valuable point to take into account. I want to add that a lack of facial expressions may also be the reason why we become rude as pointed out by Frans de Waal. Simon also said that shame culture can have a negative effect, like when Turing was condemned to a medical treatment by a judge for his gay behavior that may have worsened his depression and let to his suicide. While this is a valid interpretation I understood that he was excepted as a gay in Cambridge and that he "confessed" to the judge because most of his immediate friends thought it was ok to be gay. If you view the events like this it is much more the institutionalization of shame culture than shame culture itself.

Categories vs. Probability

I also pointed out that I think that human intelligence comes from categorization even though this can lead to prejudice while computer intelligence from a large part comes from probability even though this can lead to treating everybody the same. For some reason this opposition fascinates me endlessly. How can it be that the one in it's worse form leads to discrimination while the other in it's worse form makes everybody equal. They have opposite effects, but I dislike both. I should be careful though not to interpret the inner workings of computer systems too much since there is no way of knowing exactly how these often secret algorithms operate.