Trip Report

So I went to Burning Man for the first time, and it was quite as amazing and overwhelming as I had hoped. I don՚t think I՚m going to go into details here. But I have to note that the fundamental thing about this event, which everybody knows but is not often made explicit, is that the whole thing is conceived, designed, built, and populated by people who are tripping balls most of the time (with exceptions). Black Rock City thus mirrors one of the more interesting phenomena of drug use: that a mind (or city) can be completely fucked up and yet still manage to perform most of the necessary operations to sustain daily life. I can՚t quite explain how this works, but in both cases it seems to say something about the robustness of the system architecture, for lack of a better term. A normal computer, by contrast, can՚t tolerate even a single component going wrong.

So having BM in an extremely hostile desert environment is something of a feature. Normal routines of survival are broken down, creating the necessity and opportunity of inventing other ones, that are more improvisational and more distributed. people or things getting fucked up are an occasion to fix them. There are always paths forward, generally not the ones you intended five minutes ago.

Here՚s the calling card I designed for myself beforehand (which, like me, may be a little too intellectual-jokey for the scene):

In that vein, my favorite moment (not the most beautiful or awe-inspiring, but the one that seemed most attuned to my own personal idiosyncrasies) was when I was out riding around with some friends, and we came to a small public square with a large purple phallic sculpture, climbable of course. So I climbed up and poked my head out and started dancing around, yelling look at me, I՚m a sperm. My friend shouted at me (from 30՚ away at least) to “stop dancing ironically, dance for real”. I have no idea what that meant, yet I successfully complied.

On the other hand, the heat, the nonstop electro-rave-whatever music that made it impossible to sleep, and the undertones of hippie self-satisfaction would occasionally combine to make me hate the place. I was hanging out with some much younger people and trying to follow their party schedule did a number on my aging body that՚s going to take a while to recover from. I think it was worth it.

I had multiple camera failures so have no pictures of my own, but on the other hand there is the upside that I didn't spend the whole time viewing things through a lens. A couple of good photo sets here and here. But (and I apologize to my readers for saying this) none of that captures the actuality of being there.

Report from Inconsistency Robustness 2011

This was a small but very interesting and spirited gathering. Like many interdisciplinary events, many of the people weren't quite sure what the meeting was actually about or why they were there, but that just made things more interesting. The instigator, chair, and chief agenda setter was Carl Hewitt, known best for developing the Actor model of computation, which is something that seems deeply important but has never quite set the world on fire the way it promised to. Actors, for the uninitiated, is a radically distributed model of computation at the most basic level, replacing the Turing/Von Neumann model that is essentially the basis for everything in the field. The somewhat metaphorical extensions of this approach (eg, in The Scientific Community Metaphor and Offices are Open Systems) strike me as very fruitful ideas whose potential is yet to be realized.

Carl's recent efforts have been in the direction of remaking logic in much the same sort of way as he tried to remake computation. The linkage is clear; distributed systems that contain representations will naturally and necessarily end up with conflicts and inconsistencies. The real world is both distributed and inconsistent; it is only the useful but ultimately misguided vision of a single centralized processor (with its its implied objectivity) that creates the illusion that there can be a formalized, complete, and consistent representation of reality.

However, this foray into logic does not strike me as a very fruitful path. I think logic is simply the wrong approach; it brings along too much baggage; it is something that needs to be discarded along with the rest of the centralized view, rather than reformed. And I have not really been able to make sense of his recent work in direct logic. This may be a prejudice or failing of mine; I studied mathematical logic in my youth and eventually had an allergic reaction to it, to the point where using the kind of typographic symbols logicians use causes me to break out it hives or at least stop reading.

Nonetheless, there seem to be important and good intuitions there. Hewitt cites Latour and some of Latour's followers (Annemarie Mol, John Law), and the Latourian part of his approach (which seems to be underemphasized, but its there) is to foreground the importance of arguments over deduction. He says: "Since truth is out the window for inconsistent theories, we need a reformulation in terms of argumentation". This is good, but in his formalism arguments are still inferential chains, just like in standard logic. He still wants to achieve "precision and rigor". This seems like a mistake. To capture real-world reasoning in argumentative form, you need to include all sorts of fuzzy and unformalizable forms of evidence and reasoning. In some of his writing Carl seems to say the same thing, but his use of mathematical notation obscures this, I think.

The other attendees included a smattering of people working in AI and law (makes sense, law is an inherently argumentative form of reasoning and has long-settled technologies for being robust to inconsistency), some security people, some Media X people, Hugo Mercier, a bunch of programming language/runtime people, a sociologist, and assorted unclassifiables and luminaries. The most straightforwardly technical talk was by David Ungar, whose earlier work in prototype-based object systems and environments was an influence on my grad-school work. He presented a system for dealing with very large datasets used in business query systems by allowing some inconsistencies to creep in in a controlled fashion.

The most interesting thing I learned about there had pretty much nothing to do with inconsistency and was not a formal part of the conference; it's that Mark Miller, who has been working on capability-based security models for 20 years (a promising Actor-like idea, that never seemed to take off), is now at Google Research and has successfully gotten his ideas into the revised JavaScript standard so that in the very near future it will be part of everyone's everyday computational environment. This is amazing in several dimensions; JavaScript seems like the last language environment on earth capable of being made elegantly secured, but apparently he's pulled it off. And it means that while the desktop OSs will clunk along with their security model that hasn't changed since the sixties, the browser will have one that actually might be capable of dealing with the challenges of 21st century computing.

My own talk went pretty well (paper, slides). But outside of letting me get some ideas and complaints out of my system, not sure what it really accomplished now that I'm back at my day job. I would love to work on reinventing computing from the ground up, but unlike Hewitt or Miller, I don't really have either an obsessive devotion to my ideas, nor the patience to navigate the politics required in order to have large-scale effects. Still, if anybody wants to fund me to work on this stuff, please do drop me a line.

I also participated in the panel on the Singularity, and pretty much gave the same quasi-theological argument I did here (slides), having determined that yes in fact I could get away with it. And afterwards, much to my astonishment, somebody said that my presentation was one of the more lucid ones of the day.

I think that the issues raised at the workshop are pretty much the most important things in the world. Some seriously powerful design ideas are going to be needed to manage the computational objects in the increasingly distributed, embedded, always-on world we are creating willy-nilly. Something like a coarse-grained version of Actors would be a good start. "Inconsistency" seems like too weak a word to name the processes of merging and reconciling divergent representations that must necessarily arise once everything is talking to everything else, but it too is at least a step in the right direction.