Preston Wescott Sr.

Dispute resolution and avoidance of POV wars

There have been several informal discussions about avoiding unproductive conflict on Wikipedia. I'd be interested in your perspective, and if this is a current research interest of yours.

You might find it interesting, if you haven't done it already, to trace back the commentary on the problems surrounding "unconventional warfare", certainly going back to the notification of intended change on April 14, both on the article talk page and the Military History Project talk page. In this case, one of the dispute resolution mechanisms that helped was the Wikiquette noticeboard.

This particular case does have some interesting semantics, if that's quite the right term. The anon editor seemed to seek out conflict, but, when we finally decided it was fruitless and forked the article, he seemed, for the first time, to become conciliatory. Perhaps the loss of attention was of concern?

In 40-odd years of working with computer-enabled communications, I have found little to make me believe that general anonymity is useful or desirable. Verified pseudonyms address many of the privacy concerns, but total anonymity brings total lack of responsibility and accountability, leading to a tragedy of the commons. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

In my line of work, we are sympathetic to the reality of the individual. Your view of the editor who identified his Torrent symbol as ZS is perfectly reasonable from your frame of reference, while ZS's argument is perfectly reasonable from the perspective of his measures as well. Neither of you were seeking conflict, but both of you were willing to fight for an article consistent with your slightly differing realities. You were both victims of a computer-enabled communication facilitator completely inadequate to the task of creating an equitable global encyclopedia. If you want to create an environment where conflicts are minimized and cooperative productivity comes naturally, the solution is not in changing your fellow editors but in improving the core software engine.

The issue of anonymity is central to the next generation of P2P served social networks and resources. As you pointed out, lack of accountability leads to a tragedy of the commons, but so does an attempted system of hierarchical punishment. The solution is to take the opposite approach of Jimbo’s Randian implement and assume no global trust or absolute truth. A significant upgrade from the Wiki would see tools for judging trust and truth provided by the engine, but selected and combined exclusively according to the preferences of individual editors. In such an environment, every editor would be God of his own lonely encyclopedia fork and could gain communal recognition by demonstrating acumen and sociability to one’s peers. Because punishment would be counterproductive to such a system, there would be no need or desire to tie an avatar to a warm body. Integrity would be achieved on a purely intellectual basis.

If you were to code such a system, you would find dispute resolution to be enlightening and POV wars so naturally unproductive as to be virtually nonexistent. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 03:48, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

First, I am confused by your reference to Torrent; my interactions did not use Torrent software.

Second, forty years or so of electronically assisted collaboration tells me that he was seeking conflict, if only in the form of negative attention. He repeatedly ignored requests to look at other articles, such as insurgency, or even to consider that there might be means of resolution other than making personal and political attacks.

Third, I have no desire to work in a "God of his own lonely encyclopedia model". I prefer the model of the Internet Engineering Task Force, with the motto of "We don't believe in kings, presidents, or voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." That environment is completely non-anonymous.

I did not see his and my realities as slightly different. I saw them as totally incompatible, with his major desire being attention-seeking. He only started being mildly conciliatory when I began to withdraw, and still made sweeping assumptions that his concept of goals for Wikipedia were mine.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:52, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but that's his reality, not yours. He doesn't have any power in your reality. You control your universe completely. The tragedy of having the brilliant concepts and integrated knowledge in your head subverted, especially in the area of network engineering, is not the fault of your peers. It is the systemic design flaw of trying to balance a global resource on the puny Wiki engine. In this environment, you have no method of demonstrating the overwhelming superiority of your entire system because each concept is destroyed before the beauty of the connections with other concepts can be shown.

You cannot solve this by trying to make other editors behave. This problem requires a technological solution. The Wiki engine is grossly insufficient for this scale of a project. Wikipedia cannot receive the full benefit of your knowledge until the Wiki engine is replaced. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 05:54, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Then do you have a specific proposal on an alternate venue that does not use the Wikipedia engine, or a politically feasible way to change the Wiki model and have it stay Wikipedia? As to network engineering, I do not consider some of the materials even to be destroying concepts. The Internet Engineering Task Force is authoritative on its own peer-reviewed specification. By the basic rules of Wikipedia sourcing, it makes no sense to claim a tertiary textbook overrides a formal specification, as well as published peer-reviewed IETF material that explicitly describes the context used for specification, which has no apparent relationship to the textbook.

I am interested either in alternate places that use a better engine with less anonymity and more editorial controls, or a way to establish very specific axiomatic material in technical articles. Respectfully, I am not interested in a meta-discussion here about what is broken in Wikipedia. I am also not terribly interested in having anything to do with a model where all, regardless of knowledge, can decide their opinion is as good as anything else. --Howard C. Berkowitz (talk)

What I hear you saying is that even though you know you have a superior network engineering method that could benefit humanity greatly, you are willing to kill that knowledge because conforming to established protocol is more important. I agree with that premise except for one word: "established." If a new protocol can free up your information and the demonstrably superior information of millions of other editors, it behooves us to work toward that end. --Preston Wescott Sr. 15:52, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

If that is what you hear, you are attempting to impose your view onto mine. This is not a matter of killing knowledge, but being sure it is presented in an appropriate context with appropriate background being established? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

The last thing I would want to do is impose my view onto yours. Judging by the quality and information of your work, your view is far too valuable. What I am trying to do is bring the benefit of your knowledge into my reality. Some translation is required for our disparate beliefs to be useful to each other, but your knowledge base it too vast to ignore.

For example, from your point of view, there is apparently some objective measure of "appropriate context with appropriate background." From my point of view, there is not. Our disagreement over objectivity vs. subjectivity need not limit our ability to work together and benefit from each other's knowledge in other areas. With an open mind, we can even compare the usefulness of your objective appropriateness model to my communal peer subjectiveness approach and evolve our ideas as a result. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 16:54, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

As I'm sure you realize, peer to peer networking is the model of communication for the future. --Preston Wescott Sr. 15:52, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Might I suggest that you stop assuming what I am saying, and ask me to explain? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you might suggest that, but it wouldn't keep me from assuming what you are saying because interpreting your meaning is necessary for communication. If my response didn't have any of my own context, it would be nothing more than a parroting of your assertion. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 18:23, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

You framed the argument about "killing knowledge" in a provocative manner. As far as peer to peer networking, not only do I not see it as the future of communications, but, while it is useful in specific contexts, it presents enormous security, reliability, and traffic engineering problems that can more easily be solved by other techniques. A great many universities have cut off or restricted student peer-to-peer communications not part of the academic mission, due to a tragedy of the commons problem. Music downloads have, at times, so choked the campus connections to the Internet that there is not enough bandwidth for the academic and research mission to coexist. This has been reported extensively in venues such as the North American Network Operators Group (http://www.nanog.org). Providing more bandwidth does not appear to do anything except increase download demand.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I stand corrected. You obviously do not believe that peer to peer is the communication model of the future. I, on the other hand, believe that the only way to stop peer to peer from becoming dominant on the Internet is to destroy the Internet as we know it altogether. Even turning the Internet into a despotic hierarchy would not keep people from direct communication, however. My expanded neighborhood grew so tired of AT&T and Comcast limiting the bandwidth of Torrent protocols that we wired ourselves directly. Neighborhoods all over the United States have started doing the same thing. Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't communication be free? --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 18:23, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Literally, I do not know if we think of the Internet as the same thing. To me, it is the set of addresses, autonomous systems, routers and routing policy that share reachability information using the Border Gateway Protocol. The autonomous systems are just that; controlling their local resources and the way in which their resources are, or are not, made visible to other autonomous systems.

Let me know when your neighborhood puts in OC-192 or so pipes to other neighborhoods in Australia. Communications is never "free", unless it is meatperson to meatperson. Your neighborhood may have installed its own routers, or implemented pure software routing on general purpose PCs. Those routers, however, were not free, unless your neighborhood has a fab that produces all necessary integrated circuits. Self-organizing networks are not at a level of technology, other than in specialized cases such as SO-TDMA used by the marine safety Automatic Identification System, that they can operate without administration and configuration unless they attempt only trivial communications.

I have no idea how to answer "why shouldn't communications be free", since communications requires physical resources that have to be manufactured. "Why shouldn't communications be free" comes across as an emotional demand rather than any recognition of the mechanisms of large-scale communications. Given your rhetorical flourishes of despotism, "destroying the internet" and free communications, I fail to see that you have enough understanding of actual IP communications to even have a discussion. I am fairly sure that I regard the Internet as something completely different than you do. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Central servers are nothing more than a transition phase between television and complete interactivity. The near future will see a forked version of this project served on the P2P Torrent where (as you say) "all, regardless of knowledge, can decide their opinion is as good as anything else." Freedom of the press is an extremely good thing as long as we have a way to differentiate the crap from the useful information. --Preston Wescott Sr. 15:52, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

There haven't been "centralized" servers, in critical Internet functions, for years. Decentralized servers play a critical role in protecting resources and making the infrastructure work with extreme reliability. Routing policy, address assignment, and DNS resolution require a non-intrusive hierarchy, because there will otherwise be collisions between inadvertently duplicated identifiers. There may appear to be a limited number of DNS root servers, but the number is actually higher given that they operate in an anycasting mode. In a totally distributed model, how is address uniqueness to be assured, which is needed for reachability? In a totally distributed model, who has the responsibility of stopping malicious hacking?

You may have routing experience with neighborhood Torrents. Excuse me if I consider it a rather different problem to make routers work, with literally millions of routes, while securely forwarding multiple 40 Gbps streams. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

When I refer to "centralized servers," I'm talking about servers of information that can be controlled by politicians or corporations because they have enough of a centralized location that they can be shut down. It's kind of like painting information on the side of a building in Ancient Rome as compared to printing documents later after the printing press was invented. It didn't matter that thousands of people could potentially read the message either way, the side of a building was a central location that could be changed at the whim of a leader, but once the Constitution was distributed, for example, it couldn't be changed. The printing press and library are still superior to the Internet for that reason. One thing we can count on with technology is that people will only accept the upgrade when it replaces all advantages of the old system.

The other thing we can always count on is that technological evolution will never cease. The library and the printing press will be replaced, but only after we can count on our information being just as secure and easy to disseminate without censorship over a global network.

The technical details of this evolution are not my area of expertise, but I have been told that while scalability problems will be difficult, they will not be insurmountable. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 01:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Torrent has quite a number of technical problems. I do not use it, nor recommend it to my clients, certainly not on the public internet. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Torrent and other P2P service models are in their infancy compared to centralized service. Many services such as video streaming and email will have to configured radically different than with a central server, but the demand is so great for uncensored communication I see no way for global communication to avoid freedom of the press. You and I can disagree over whether that is a good thing, but I have yet to hear any argument for how we can suppress it. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 18:23, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

When we trust a magazine to deliver useful information, we do not need it to be the opinion of a singular warm body. The magazine name is the avatar we judge via the usefulness of its content. The fact that any magazine can print anything it wants without conforming to authoritative protocols combined with the users ability to recommend or dismiss any magazine we choose makes the system of magazine distribution of information extremely useful. When you compare the free press of the United States to the hierarchical controlled press of China, the reason Jimbo's hierarchical controlled Wikipedia resource cannot benefit from the knowledge of your superior network engineering system becomes evident: you have no method of comparing the integrity of your entire system with that of the imbeciles currently controlling the network engineering model at Wikipedia.

If I went into a bookstore and saw your model in a magazine on the left and saw the imbeciles' magazine on the right, I would compare the two systems to see which produced the most useful output. Because the imbeciles' system has huge gaps in logic, it would produce garbage and convoluted self-referencing crap that would make my network crash as often as MSN. Your design of perfect integrity, on the other hand, would create a solid system that, if followed, would rarely if ever crash.

If everyone had the ability to print a magazine, and readers had the ability to compare content by their own measures and easily associate reviews and forked improvements, your superior system would become evident by virtue of the fact that people who used your system would have more uptime on their networks.

This is far from just a meta-discussion about what is broken in Wikipedia. We are actively creating the next generation of social networks, resources and economies on the P2P servers of the Torrent. Your expertise would be invaluable and I invite you to join the revolution. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 15:52, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I have absolutely no interest in enabling new P2P services, without a thorough impact analysis and very controlled introduction, pausing when things break. I don't know your background in network engineering, so I don't know the level of detail at which I should comment, but, without better information, call me a counter-revolutionary if unlimited P2P is considered a good. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:30, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

If something is inevitable, the "good" thing to do is to try to maximize its benefit to society. As long as humans are intelligent, freedom of communication via the latest technology is ultimately unavoidable. We chose to use the Internet as long as we didn't feel censored. Now that many of us feel censored, we are pursuing private physical P2P networks that are growing at rate relative to their current size hundreds of times faster than the Internet. We can ignore the technical ability for people to string wires across their property to their neighbors' houses. We can pretend that citizens don't have the ability to communication wirelessly with PGP encryption. We can fantasize that folks will continue to choose the Internet over other options as it rapidly turns into a virtual police state, but as someone who has made it my life's work to study human nature, I'm here to tell you that while you may know the technical aspects of this revolution better than I, no technical hurdle is going to stop people from contributing to our emerging global brain in the best way they know how. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 18:53, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, as long as you think P2P is inevitable, I don't think we have anything to discuss. Whenever I've mentioned an objective technical reason your approach is not scalable, you talk in terms of censorship, conspiracies, and feelings. No, thank you. There are ways to enable general communication, but P2P is not it -- roughly speaking, its resource demands, for N users, are on the order of N!, while well designed networks grow resource load exponentially but provide N-factorial connectivity between endpoints. I do not want to connect to everyone in the world.

I'll leave it you and the people to solve the technical problems. Good luck. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:58, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Some things are not self-evident

It happens that I am working with some people in developing a proposal for a sustainable, niche biodiesel system. Now, many years ago, I majored in chemistry. Things that are intuitive to me for biodiesel processing, because I think of the various things that can go wrong, are not obvious to them, and I'm constantly listening to entreaties to "make it simpler".

The basic problem of a totally distributed knowledge model is that some topics are not approachable without prerequisites. I'm always amused by the people on Wikipedia, especially in military context, that want "simple explanations". While talking heads on media may suggest everything has a 30-second explanation, that is not the case. People don't seem to mind if an article on some topic in mathematics has no simple introduction, because popular culture has it that "math is hard".

Last night, I had a housemate in an absolute fury at a pass-along email, which is a primitive equivalent of P2P, because it fit his political assumptions that a university, to be politically correct toward Muslims, had stopped teaching anything about the Holocaust. Within a minute or two, I found three reputable sources identifying this as an urban legend, and some idea of how it started. Unfortunately, as FOX News has demonstrated, if you tap into anger, a great many people either don't know how to do fact checking or don't care to do it.

I have a friend that argues that opinion polling cannot work, but he has had no training either in statistics or survey design. Now, many polls are badly constructed, but others are not. There's no common language to discuss Type I and Type II error, stratified random sampling, or when to use Guttman vs. Likert scaling.

An emergency physician friend and I were discussing disaster medicine, and the conversation drifted to inserting chest tubes. Now, I know the anatomy and indications. I've watched them inserted, and I've had them in me. While he agrees that, in a wilderness environment, I would have a considerably better chance of not killing someone, his general experience is that it takes about seven years, starting with gross anatomy, to develop the motor skills for many medical interventions. I know, for example, that once I've made the incision and spread the muscles, there will be a "pop" as the tube just enters the pleura. Students and interns learning the procedure generally have the instructor's hand over theirs, feeling the tissue resistance. If one doesn't know how much pressure is needed to enter the pleura, but then stop pressing before driving the tube into a lung or major blood vessel, you might just as well shoot the patient.

I remain unconvinced that if an infinite amount of information were available, that most people would use it cautiously until validated. I remain unconvinced that the widespread belief systems about how things "ought" to be will withstand a collision with reality. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:07, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a hierarchical controlled resource. The local library is controlled by the combined disparate value systems of its users and the freedom of the press to print anything it wants. If I want information about a medical procedure, network architecture or anything really important, I go to the library because I want the prerequisites for a topic to be consistent with the conclusions. I've found that at the library, they are. The reason is that the books at the library aren't censored. Anyone can be published today for under $500 and I can request that my library purchase a copy of any book in print. A free market of information works. As you've pointed out, Wikipedia's hierarchy of control does not. The critical difference is that Wikipedia lacks the tools of peer review and recommendation that the public library system and national booksellers have. We should expand on those tools and take freedom of the press to the next level instead of model our newest technology on the Dark Ages. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 02:36, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Scalability

The technical details of this evolution are not my area of expertise, but I have been told that while scalability problems will be difficult, they will not be insurmountable. Would you concur with that assessment? --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 01:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Scalability problems of what? P2P? I see greater scalability of such functions neither feasible or desirable. I'm afraid you may be confusing the interpersonal dynamics enabled by a network with the engineering of the network itself, and the funding of the resources generated by inherently inefficient network protocols such as P2P, as opposed to multicast, cacheing servers, content distribution networks, and a variety of other techniques. Hierarchical network design is necessary not only for scalability, but for the containment of failures. It is not done for political reasons.

I am quite concerned with the social problems that come from excessively fast propagation of rumors. There is a value to communications modes that force deliberate communications. Unless there is a very clear need for them, such as sending alarms or maintaining a side channel during a teleconference, I will not use instant messaging services. My email client is always up, but if a correspondent cannot organize their thoughts well enough to send a formed message, I doubt I want to deal with them.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:58, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure hierarchical control is much easier to implement that peer control when it comes to network architecture. Hierarchies are easier to implement in any social situation, it's just that everyone wants to be on top of the hierarchy when that's the only model they have.

I like social activities where everyone is concentrating on maximizing their contribution rather than jockeying for control of the rules. The outcome of a football game is a simple example of a social activity where everyone focuses on contribution and the best solution takes the winning spot. The reason everyone can concentrate on contributing is that the tools of playing and determining the winning solutions are sufficient for the game, and they are also consensual to the players.

In my neighborhood, we have a network where everyone can concentrate on contributing. A person buys things from others using personal Time Dollars (signed and numbered notes worth one hour of his time). The exchange rate between dollars is tracked automatically based on what people are willing to trade for a particular note. The database for this operation is not centrally located or controlled. Rather, each computer connected to the network acts more like a neuron of a brain. We've been able to expand this brain ten-fold so far without any scalability issues. I'm told that the system was specifically designed to avoid the exponential growth in resources required by a hierarchical type network. Like the neurons of a human brain, participants act locally with those whom they are directly connected and think globally by strengthening connections attached to the most useful cumulative pathways, thereby avoiding the shallowness of concepts you were talking about. The distributed system is very desirable from an economic standpoint in that everyone using it gets five to ten times the compensation for the same work. I'm hoping, when you say indefinite scalability is not feasible, that you mean certain parts of a global system cannot be built using the old hierarchical design elements, but may require radically new approaches. You aren't implying that issues of scalability in a distributed model are insurmountable, are you? --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 04:36, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Scalability

Depends on what you mean by "scalability". For the record, I was on one of two Internet Engineering Research Task Force groups examining what came next when the current Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4) Internet-wide routing protocol reaches its limits of scalability. I have also been a panelist for the Internet Society about "what comes next".

Totally distributed models, including fully distributed routing information, are not scalable to the sizes required by the growth rate of the Internet. There are a variety of reasons for this, but start with the need to put millions of routes into small end-user routers, the inability to quarantine parts of the Internet that are under attack, the cost of equipment than can handle millions of routes, the lack of tools for automated administration, etc.

I am not implying that fully distributed routing models will not work. I am making a flat expert statement to that effect, with which I doubt you'd find any serious Internet researcher or engineering specialist dealing with the routing system proper, or network management, or directory service to disagree. The problem of routing scalability is a different one than allowing connectivity, at the end user level, between any arbitrary set of users.

"Radically new approaches", now at the research level, now accept a level of uncertainty about reachability that engineers had fondly hoped could be avoided. I still haven't determined if you mean "totally distributed" in the very specific way I mean it, but, with respect to the routing, no competent engineer would even try to make it totally distributed outside a very local area, because that would rapidly lead to extreme instability. There are special cases of "mobile ad hoc networking" that work with strict mathematically-derived limits, such as the SO-TDMA model used with the maritime collision avoidance tool, Automatic Identification System.

I have yet to understand if you know what the scalability issues are and rejecting them because they do not fit your political view, or you simply don't understand them, equating end user connectivity (any-to-any) which can work with a semi-hierarchical routing and transmission system. There are huge numbers of reliability and cost issues in going to fully distributed routing and transmission, and you haven't yet offered one specific reason why it is desirable that the infrastructure will work that way. Some of the things I design are life-critical, and, if your model was adopted, we'd build a separate network that doesn't work that way. I am not willing to give up a reasonable level of reliability in the interest of some vague collaborative metaphor. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:24, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much that I personally have rejected perceived technical limitations because of my political views, it's that a rapidly growing percentage of the population no longer trusts the hierarchical approach and demands an alternative. For many of us, the Internet has become our secondary network because we would rather do as much communicating as possible without AT&T listening in on our conversations and reporting them to the Fed with impunity. I can certainly see the advantages of a hierarchical approach, but most people are primarily interested in communicating with their circle of friends. The ability to access hierarchically approved information like drivers, official notices and army definitions is an added benefit to direct communication, but it isn't the primary reason people use the Internet. We want to interact. We want to print and be published without censorship. We want all the advantages of the printing press and library system with added speed and versatility, and without giving up any of our freedom. We don't want to give up the Fourth Amendment just because our papers and effects are electronic. We think there is a very good reason for being suspicious of an oligarchy that can see everything we do but is increasingly opaque to us, namely that such oligarchies murdered over fifty million people during the past century. We love the technology, but if the only way to implement it is to also give the government despotic power over us, I don't think it's worth it.

I understand that global communication is still a relatively new construct and that any technology in its infancy needs loving parents to nurse it along and immediately deal with unforeseen circumstances but as a technology matures, it takes on a life of its own, becoming increasingly subject to the market forces of its constituents. While the developer births an idea and requires hierarchical control for a time to keep the idea alive from an implementation standpoint, eventually the successful idea will dictate what it needs to the developer. When it comes to social networks, that idea is controlled by the people who use the network and we demand that our papers and effects be secure from unconstitutional searches and seizures.

You seem like an incredibly intelligent guy, someone who would be a real asset to the merging of the printing press, library and global network, but if you can't think of any way to keep our papers and effects out of the hands of the Fed, we'll have to limit ourselves to others who claim that the solutions are difficult but possible.

The funny thing is that our founding fathers and hundreds of the world's greatest philosophers wrestled with the same issues of dispute resolution and avoidance of POV wars for almost two hundred years during the Age of Reason. They came up with a proposed solution and put it to the test. That test was called the Great American Experiment, and it produced the richest and most powerful nation in the history of mankind. Nobody claims that it's easy to create a system at the consent of its users, but when it happens, it enables exponential growth and prosperity. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 21:10, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I am quite capable of keeping my communications secure in a hierarchical network. If, however, your ethos is to be totally decentralized, I do not want the grief of working with it, especially given that I distrust the tragedy of the commons just as much as I distrust certain politicians. Given you don't have any specifics of how to scale P2P to global levels, I will continue to be involved in bleeding-edge research in doing that -- not completely distributed, not completely hierarchical. I am concerned with networks that will be reliable under stress, not something characteristic of P2P. Going P2P makes this more vulnerable to the Feds, not less.

If you're going to insist, without any technical specifics, on how you are going to build totally decentralized networks that can be trusted to work, please limit yourself to others, as I don't want any part of what appears to be your social model. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that a totally distributed network would be the only type that the Fed could not identify participants and shut down undesirable information. We have a network that meets those specifications in the physical world so if we can't have it in the cyber world, it wouldn't be much of an upgrade.

You're wrong. I suspect what you are concerned about is much more a issue of distributed encryption than distributed data transfer. As far as the Feds shutting down, I was once at a classified communications symposium when an Israeli general was asked how he shut down a particular Soviet radar. His comment was that a 500 kilo bomb in the antenna did better than any electronic warfare.

My understanding of a global totally distributed network model is that each end user would keep track of the routes to his friends. The number of friends a user could have would be limited to the capacity of his hardware. The user could choose to give bandwidth preference to certain friends that have more equitable connections. When a user wants to reach a party outside of his circle of friends, he has to go through one of those connection pathways. If this sounds like a type of bandwidth economy, it was designed that way. When you add the concepts of Time Dollars and cumulative economic prioritization apps, the economy expands to encompass any type of goods and services. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 22:51, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

What you describe sounds simple in a manual system, but will not reliably scale to billions of users, a number of whom will grab all the resources they can, and others will try to break the network. I don't think we have the common concepts for me to explain the scaling resources. Bandwidth preference is not a remotely trivial problem. I've seen all too many people try to give the highest priority to real-time voice or video, and then have an unrecoverable failure because there's no bandwidth for invisible-to-users control and maintenance functions. Your "connection pathway" is an extremely complex device, which also needs some centralized assignment of identifiers so there are no "duplicate phone numbers".

Global networks are not remotely as simple as you think. Neighborhood wiring doesn't give me connectivity to Australia. If you want security, define explicit threats, not vague things about Feds. Sorry, I don't think this is a productive discussion. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:59, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the useful information. I've taken some time to become acquainted with it. The threat from the Fed is quite specific and nobody believes that expanding neighborhood peer-to-peer to the world is going to be easy. Increasing demand exists for a method of communication that physically cannot be censored. What is your solution to meet that demand? --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Is the demand realistic?

Consider that the U.S. military spends billions of dollars on communications security, resistance to jamming and other filtering, and other means of protection -- yet does not assume everything can be completely protected.

It is reasonable to use strong encryption to keep one's communications confidential against other than national-level attacks, and, in selected cases, even secure from that. As long as there is a physical network not under your control, it is subject to disruption. Now, if the communications are encrypted, it may not be practical to be selective in censoring: encrypted traffic could, in principle, automatically be blocked. There is also enough cost in censorship that it may not be economic for all controversial materia.

People would like immortality. There are some biological clues, such as telomeres, that suggest approaches. Severe calorie restriction also seems to increase lifespan. In general, we don't know any details of how to do this on a mass scale.

I don't know how to build a censorship-free network short of building a physically isolated military-grade system. I don't think anyone else does. The best we can do, for end users that do not have a great deal of specialized engineering skill, is help keep sensitive material confidential.

Frankly, I am not interested in what political groups talking about threats are saying; I'm quite aware of very real threats. Until those groups can describe technologies that are unknown to such groups as the service provider security workgroup of the Internet Engineering Task Force, I'm not going to bother trying to find solutions for problems I don't know how to solve, except in government systems costing many billions. Just wanting something is not enough, and P2P is no panacea. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:07, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

When you say "real threats," two possibilities come to mind: threats to our lives or threats to the Constitution of the United States. I have sworn an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." I will gladly lay my life on the line to fulfill that oath, as I believe millions of other Americans will. When it comes to prioritizing threats to life or threats to the Constitution of the United States, any red blooded American who loves his children and wants to keep the nation they will inherit from falling into despotism will choose to protect our country from threats to its Constitution.

As per the United States service oath of enlistment, two distinct enemies of the Constitution of the United States exist: foreign and domestic. Foreign enemies are currently a threat to our lives, but not to the Constitution. The current threat to the Constitution of the United States comes from domestic enemies. For example, President George Walker Bush did on May 9, 2007 direct the National Security Administration (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to levy war against the United States via a National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive posted on the White House website at address http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html.

In addition to the treason against the United States inherent in the document itself, NSPD 51/HSPD-20 references specific programs that are not significantly detailed on the White House website: Continuity of Government (COG), Continuity of Operations (COOP), Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG), National Essential Functions (NEFs), and Primary Mission Essential Functions (PMEFs). Section (23) refers to "classified Continuity Annexes… incorporated into and made a part of this directive." Congressman Peter DeFazio, a member of the United States Congress DHS Oversight Committee, demanded to see the specifics of this military coup in the secure "bubbleroom" of the United States Capitol, and was denied access by the DHS. Websites that try to distribute additional information about this and related topics are harassed using the court system and shut down via corporate blackmail. AT&T and Comcast have taken a novel approach to censorship by pretending that their networks are bad whenever they find something objectionable). I don’t know what your definition of a "real threat" is, but these examples certainly fit mine.

They don't fit mine, they don't fit the Constitutional definition of treason, and, for the threats I do consider real, I see the solutions either as political, or the use of hierarchical mesh routing. I see anonymous full distribution as unlikely to work, and as likely to crash the Internet as anyone lacking constitutional responsibility. You apparently are unaware that Continuity of Government has been around at least since the Eisenhower Administration; it's not that the issue hasn't been discussed in detail. I am not going to get into detailed discussion of some of the programs you mention, but they are not unique to Dick Cheney, and some need additional work, to avoid such things as massive electrical blackouts. We were lucky, in 2003, that the Ohio Valley blackout didn't propagate farther.

Many of the people I’ve talked with about these threats see the solution as an expansion of existing completely decentralized global peer networks like Usenet and FidoNet. With Sun’s recent acquisition of MySQL, we will soon see the world’s most popular database engine integrated with JXTA, the world’s most mature general purpose P2P framework, both of which are open source. As you mention, there may never be a completely secure way of sending data from any location to any location without it being read by an unintended party – those who suppose it can be done through quantum entanglement don’t understand quantum entanglement – but private mail is a tertiary concern.

Our primary concern is that of publishing and making that published work available worldwide. Our secondary concern is that of making the author of a published work completely anonymous (unable to be tracked in a physical sense) while simultaneously enabling the tracking of an author’s perceived value to his readers. The distributed pathways of the Internet made the first goal possible, but without an Anonymous Distributed Networking Protocol, the Fed can simply target the source of the information without regard to its distribution. To some extent, we are overcoming this limitation to the free press by copying videos and websites before they disappear and redistributing them, but it’s a cat and mouse game and we would rather turn our attention to more productive pursuits than evading domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States.

As you’ve pointed out, global solutions require a different approach than neighborhood solutions. With an increasing number of people feeling censored by international corporations that will do anything to remain in the Fed’s good graces (even Google, sadly), Anonymous Distributed Networking Protocol projects that we saw no need for a few years ago are now starting to look very attractive. One of the more ambitious of the lot is ANet, which was well into its low level design in 2002 before its authors put the project on hold because too few other coders saw the need for it. If you would take a look at anet.sourceforge.net and tell me if you think this is the path we should resurrect and pursue, you would have my gratitude (in the form of an equal number of Time Dollars). --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 19:55, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

No, I do not see it as something I want to explore. If I am dealing with the problem of security and distribution, one of the last technologies I would consider appropriate is routing. An anonymous distributed protocol is impossible to troubleshoot, and trivially easy to attack.

Harry Truman once wrote of Richard Nixon, "I don't think the SOB ever read the Constitution. If he did, he didn't understand it." I'm going to put my available time into the political process, rather than putting effort into networking solutions about which you and I have no common vocabulary to explain why anonymous routing is potentially catastrophic to Internet survivability.

I will try saying this one more time. After having been directly involved, at the research level, in work about what comes after the current Internet technology (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-routing-history-05. I was a member of Team B), fully distributed routing goes against everything routing specialists have reasonable confidence will work. I have zero interest in reading your material about distributed anonymous routing, which, at best, is a solution in search of a problem that can better be solved in other ways.

You keep insisting there is a need, but your arguments brush over any technical issues and routing, and you keep repeating yourself about the eeeevil Feds. Military networks have to operate under expected, national-level attack, with content storage turning into fireballs, and distributed anonymous networking has never been discussed as an option in any network research group in which I've participated. There are solutions of working around censorship, but anyone with a solid understanding of large-scale networking would treat full distribution and anonymity as the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. If anything, I want to keep anonymous sources out of my networks; I have almost given up on Wikipedia specifically due to the belief anonymity can coexist with responsibility, and that the Tragedy of the Commons will not take place. Increasingly, I'm leaving Wikipedia discussions because I'm tired of the trolling, vandalism, and arguments from people that clearly are unfamiliar with the subject in question. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:14, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Now you really have me curious. You say that there are solutions that work. You say that Wikipedia does not implement solutions that work. You say that anonymity is the wrong direction. What, pray tell, is the right direction to cure "arguments from people that clearly are unfamiliar with the subject in question?" Is it to give these people the power to blacklist others for life? --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 18:10, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Frankly, I'm not sure if you are talking about Wikipedia or routing. For myself, a solution may well be to find a more congenial venue and let Wikipedia do what it will. If you prefer to be conspiratorial, however, We of The Elite Shall Have The Power to Blacklist. A way to avoid such a Horrible Fate, however, is to learn a bit more of the subject, or at least don't go on and on about how there is a demand that you don't know how to solve, but you want others to solve for you. People who realize they don't understand a subject, go off and study some, and at least post a stub article about a solution, tend to be heard a lot better.

I can't fix Wikipedia. I've been reducing my participation, and finding more interesting ones, that are generally characterized by non-anonymity, recognition that expert opinion is sometimes appropriate rather than finding everything in secondary sources, and there's some enforcement of civility -- much of which is easier when people are not anonymous.

I've been active in various study forums, and the people that get a lot of assistance are those that say "I don't understand X. I've tried Y and Z and they don't work, but I think the problem area might be A an B. Where should I go next? Are there other things I should explore?"

Do we really have anything to discuss? You keep bringing up anonymous distributed routing, and I keep giving both an opinion that, for good technical reasons, it's neither scalable nor reliable. I have, I thought, quite explicitly said I have zero interest in exploring it further, because my knowledge of the details of routing do not give me the slightest confidence that it is a viable direction. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:25, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I’m still on the subject of “Dispute resolution and avoidance of POV wars.” To me all of this is the same subject because it all comes down to the basic question of which method of determining and conveying useful information is more viable: suppression or liberty. What I keep hearing you say is that liberty is better when it is liberty of the “experts” to suppress the “trolling, vandalism, and arguments from people that clearly are unfamiliar with the subject in question.” For the sake of discussion, let’s call that the “suppression method” since it involves suppression.

The only problem with the suppression method is that there is no objective measure of who the expert is and who the troll is. As a book writer, you may think that being published should be the measure, but what happens in cases where another published author disagrees with you? What happens if other editors disagree that being published is a sufficient measure?

Inside every human exists a fantastic system of relative measures. Each neuron of the brain strengthens the relationship it has with its associates per its own qualifications. When we compare the output of individual neurons, we see disparate incompatibilities with no way to determine the cell providing a correct direction, but a large combination of such cells, each processing reality from a different perspective, combine to create a remarkably intelligent system.

In a best case scenario, the abstraction layer above the brain operates in a similar manner. Human beings, relatively stupid by themselves, combine their incompatible measures to create a remarkably intelligent civilization. Alone in the veldt, an individual would not be smart enough to survive the elements, let alone the other animals, but when we combine our intellect in certain ways, we can visit the moon.

There is only one civilization that has visited the moon, and that’s the country founded on the principle of “consent of the governed.” The United States is the richest and most powerful nation in the history of mankind because we build on a foundation of liberty, where every neuron is valued and plays a part, even if that part is to act as a vital comparator to the path eventually chosen.

When we set ourselves up as experts with a mission to suppress trolling, vandalism and people we deem to be incompetent, we suppose that our personal intellect is superior to that of the group. A day alone in the veldt will cure any man of that notion. Dispute resolution and avoidance of POV wars requires a communal approach managed by no individual or small group of neurons. Creating the environment where a neural approach can happen on a global scale will be no easy task, but I recognize with absolute certainty that it is the next step in human evolution. I know this because I see a neural approach in my extended neighborhood and it produces something a million times more intelligent than any comparably sized hierarchical structure. Unlike suppression, the more it grows, the smarter it gets. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 20:48, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I gather we have nothing useful to say to one another. Oh -- and I have spent time in wilderness or highly hazardous situations, among which are Biosafety Level 4 hot labs. Unless I know that someone has the same or better survival than mine, yes, I will trust my personal intellect over an arbitrary group. On the other hand, I don't have absolute certainty about topics with which I claim no familiarity. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:45, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

You initiated a conversation about dispute resolution and avoidance of POV wars. I gave you my opinion on the subject. I'm sorry you didn't find it useful. I, on the other hand, found your opinion on the subject to be very useful. It confirmed for me a long standing belief that some things cannot be learned through text, but must be learned through experience. Thank you. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 23:59, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Undoing my recovery of "Integrity"

I want to ask you what is the depth and the breadth of a value system? Are they measured in centimeters? Why value systems should be congruent "with a wider range of observations"? What does that mean? Does it mean that the subculture having those values has to generate realistic behavior (as opposed to idealistic behavior)? Does it mean that they have to behave as they preach? Why do people are required to account for the discrepancy between parts of a value system? Does it matter at all how they construct such account? Or they are simply hypocrite, regardless of how they account for this discrepance?

I remind you that "This article is about the ethical concept. For other uses, see Integrity (disambiguation)." So, I suggest to move the contributions about mathematical integrity elsewhere, or start an article Integrity (mathematics).

Further I do not understand what those titles Testing via... mean. Do they mean that one tests (measures) integrity? A scientific theory is falsified or not falsified, it is falsifiable or not falsifiable. So what is that discussion about testing (measuring) integrity? How does one measure how much scientific integrity some theory has? The scientific integrity means "The integrity of science is based on a set of testing principles known as the scientific method. To the extent that a proof follows the requirements of the method, it is considered scientific. The scientific method includes measures to ensure unbiased testing and the requirement that the hypothesis have falsifiability." I.e. integrity is specific to the scientific community when it operates 100% as it should (as in Merton's norms). It is not a characteristic of scientific theories.

A reader cannot understand what psychological integrity tests are about, as the article looks at this time. It writes: "Testing via Psychological Tests The pretension of such tests to detect fake answers plays a crucial role in this respect, because the naive really believe such outright lies and behave accordingly, reporting their past deviance because they fear that otherwise their answers will reveal it. The more Pollyannaish the answers, the higher the integrity score.[1]" This is too elliptic to be understandable. It does not say what these tests measure and what their use is.

Further, I know of no (serious) consistent values system. The more serious and respectable a value system is, the more contradictions it seems to contain. This is because the accuse of hypocrisy is itself hyppocrite, since nobody lives at the top (height) of his/her moral and political ideals, so it is hypocritical to blame others for not living 100% by their own book. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Besides, General Relativity is not a value system (see the definition there), since Einstein was a scientist, not a moral preacher. He did not preach moral values in the General Relativity.

What does it mean "A system with perfect integrity yields a singular extrapolation," when speaking of moral values? Does it mean anything at all? How can one extrapolate moral values? Or is it simply nonsense? It uses a scientific jargon, but here stops the good I see in it. I remind you that you are not Spinoza, constructing a moral system more geometrico demonstrata, using your own definitions. Where these definitions come from? Can you show their sources? I could find nothing like that in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Just some congruence between consistence of moral values and integrity. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:44, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Here is the list of users who agree that integrity (ethical concept) cannot be measured or tested, and to assume otherwise is a hoax:

User:Sortitus User:216.36.186.2 User:J-Star User:Pedant17 User:Tgeorgescu

Otherwise, start an article about Integrity (mathematics) with mentioning how scientific theories are said in the philosophy of mathematics to have integrity, what that means, and what is the source for that meaning in mainstream scientific-philosophic literature. I cannot immagine that there are nummerical measures or tests for such integrity (mathematical concept), since the philosophy of mathematics operates with concepts, not with nummerical measures.

To put it bluntly, it is a lame thing to say that integrity (ethical concept) could be measured or tested. It is sheer nonsense, and you should not mix the philosophy of mathematics with ethics and psychological tests.

I also support censorship of this article by moderators, and I affirm that persisting in this version of this article is an exercise in confusion and nonsense. Tgeorgescu (talk) 13:36, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Unfortuately for you, my friend, you disqualified yourself as an unbiased editor of the article on integrity when you made the edit summary comment: "Recovering the article from massive vandalism committed by a cult called 'Psycans'."

You and your little friends go take your war with the Psycans somewhere else. We're trying to write an encyclopedia here. An encyclopedia has information about a concept, not moral judgments about whether a concept is good or true by an editor's personal standards. --Preston Wescott Sr. (talk) 04:00, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

User:Preston Wescott Sr./Power listed at Redirects for discussion

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