Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember... First: An all-in commitment to weblogging has been extraordinarily successful for Cory Doctorow. But for most of us the connections between the current flow, the past stock, and the larger projects that he has managed to maintain have eluded us. We can either manage the flow, curate the stock, or ship large projects—only one at a time:
Re: " have a quite capable although sub-Turing instantiation of an imago of ..."
I think this is a conceit, but there is a way to try to test this idea. For the experiment:
1. pick a living person that you think you know well and can instantiate a mental model to talk with.
2. Pick a topic, and start with your comment or question. You can record your side of the conversation. After the conversation, try to remember the replies and possibly take notes.
3. Now start the conversation with the living person using the same initial interrogation. Whatever the responses, try to keep your replies as close as is relevant to the responses you made in your mental conversation. The order need not be the same.
4. Now check the responses of the live person to your mental model. Just how similar were the responses? Did the conversation stay on track or rapidly veer off. Were the aggregate responses essentially a reproduction of the mental model?
You can then gauge how "sub" your Turing complete your mental model is. ;)
Correction: Theda Skocpol is a woman.
Re: " have a quite capable although sub-Turing instantiation of an imago of ..."
I think this is a conceit, but there is a way to try to test this idea. For the experiment:
1. pick a living person that you think you know well and can instantiate a mental model to talk with.
2. Pick a topic, and start with your comment or question. You can record your side of the conversation. After the conversation, try to remember the replies and possibly take notes.
3. Now start the conversation with the living person using the same initial interrogation. Whatever the responses, try to keep your replies as close as is relevant to the responses you made in your mental conversation. The order need not be the same.
4. Now check the responses of the live person to your mental model. Just how similar were the responses? Did the conversation stay on track or rapidly veer off. Were the aggregate responses essentially a reproduction of the mental model?
You can then gauge how "sub" your Turing complete your mental model is. ;)