#Act III: The Final Countdown
Ah, yes, come in, take your seats. The Feast shall begin SOON.
But first, The Speaking of Tongues.
The fruits of this cranium are about to be shared.
Hope you know where your jawbone and your towel are.
Firstly, Jeff (@codinghorror) , I appreciate and understand your desire for me to point to individual examples. I’m sorry but I can’t give them, they are not mine to share, and I have not gathered the consent to share them. Consent is an important value. Consent is a key to trust: those who do not trust do not provide consent, and those who break trust lose consent, and those who violate consent never earn trust. Trust is an important value.
Without trust, people keep things secret from each other. This secrecy is sometimes necessary to avoid pain, to avoid manipulation, to avoid pain. Helpers and healers have taught us that mercy and compassion are necessary to do no harm, those are values are no brainers (salivating intensifies), but privacy, modesty, and secrecy also become so by logical extension. We all deserve the liberty to pursue our own definition happiness, but are all too often at the mercy of others in that pursuit.
So, we defend ourselves. We define ourselves by our friends who defend our walls and demarcate our boundaries of safety. They are our human shields, our firewalls. We build these walls to keep the hurt out, and let the good in. And so, we put our faith in others to help police the borders of where we let our minds wander and our brains graze. But alas, any wall, any boundary, any defense defined by humans is as defective as the humans that designed it. The architects of our walls, our systems of defense, are only as good as the people they rely upon. Because sometimes they push away the very people we want to include.
This is why the runtime of @anon67050589 is so important to the architecture of the walls of our mutant discourse and Your Software Discourse™. The arbitrary architecture designed to prevent abuse by untrusted agents was inducing discomfort in one of our most trusted agents. Because we couldn’t bear to lose another Trinity, we hacked the system to expand the walls out far enough to bring her back. @anon67050589 is important because she embodies so many of the values important to us, even when her behavior exceeds the values that Discourse has set as the norm.
Is it clear yet? Mutants are not normal. They value progress in the arts and sciences. ALL off the arts and ALL of the sciences. It would be unwise and try to contain this community by what the data considers “normal.” This is the knowledge yielded by the Like Strike.. You need as many Agent Smiths as possible to like the good and flag the bad in order for discourse to scale. But if the firewall begins to exclude the best of the Agent Smiths, then the rest of them may follow.
I don’t think you are an unwise architect, Jeff. [Which is why I offered you this gift] (Like Strike part II - #102 by anon73629133). You have the data on-hand to inform the design of a next-generation reputation system in your hands. A reputation system that crosses discussion topics by following the thread that binds.
The Way It Is
by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
No, I’m not re-hashing the threaded vs. flat discussion. I’m asking you to dream about the thread that binds where data flows. Create software values to follow these values threads as they flow across topic threads. Network analysis of trusted agents across topical threads is a way of beginning to measure the alignment of the core values of that community.
