Life & Research Notes

Flores and Winograd’s Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986):

Meaning is fundamentally social and cannot be reduced to the meaning-giving activity of individual subjects. The rationalistic view of cognition is individual-centered. We look at language by studying the characteristics of an individual language learner or language user, and at reasoning by describing the activity of an individual’s deduction process. Heidegger argues that this is an inappropriate starting point—that we must take social activity as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility, and even of existence. A person is not an individual subject or ego, but a manifestation of Dasein within a space of possibilities, situated within a world and within a tradition. (p33)

I left Symbolic Systems frustrated that I was only getting one side of the story. The core assumptions of the program didn’t sit well with me, but I was unable to create or find a convincing alternative that satisfyingly rejects the cold, depressing objectivity of cognitive science. Six years later, working on the background section of my thesis, Hiroshi encouraged me to look at this old, classic Flores/Winograd book, mostly because of its use of speech act theory. I’m not far into it, but so far this book is a gem, and a really interesting introduction to Heidegger, who I never read in college and probably should have.

There is a debate brewing over a proposed blogger code of conduct. I’m particularly concerned about the clause to ban anonymous comments.

Anonymity is one of the cornerstones of the web. It is, as Lessig puts it, built into the architecture, the low level protocols. This architecture, the code, imposes the rules for how the internet works, and for how we live and work on the internet. Lessig discusses some other ways to impose rules: law, the market, or social norms.

So this blogger code of conduct proposal is an attempt to set rules via social norms. They want to bring order to their corner of the web by adding social norms. They want to patch what they see as a hole in the architecture of anonymity. At first it sounds fine, like a nice, dynamist approach in which community, common sense rules layer on top of the underlying architecture rules.

But we have to be careful. These rule mechanisms don’t layer so neatly; they interact. Social code influences the other types of code. An appealing and effective way to enforce social norms is to leverage other regulating forces, like law or code. It’s like how a group parents concerned about their children’s exposure to graphic imagery can so quickly turns into v-chips (code) and arbitrary, mandated rating systems (code). Before you know it, code of conduct becomes software code, or even legal code.

I don’t want uptight blogger social norms infiltrating my software code, limiting my (or others’) choices. Or, more specifically, I don’t want future versions of blog systems to outlaw anonymous comments. I like anonymity. Opening up to anonymous users, you risk getting junk, but you also open up the possibility of submissions that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Look at Tiny. It works only because it is anonymous, making the barrier to entry as low as possible. If people had to login they wouldn’t bother with it. Sure, we get penises and swastikas and hate speech, and we struggled with that for a while. But we also get amazing little drawings, animations, and even the occasional secret message. We get noise, but we also get gems within the noise. And that’s what search is for. Search plus common sense.

We just have to be careful to keep this in the realm of social code. The comments on my site aren’t anonymous, but wordpress lets me allow them if I want. Code of conduct or not, let’s make sure we continue to allow architectures for anonymous participation, on blogs as well as future net platforms.

See also Kottke’s treatment of this, as well as the Times article.