N8chz at 14:39, 22 April 2004

2004-04-22T14:39:44Z

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This is offered in the spirit of "compare and contrast,"
as was AnewGoAndPubWan at WikiWorld.

Consumerium seems to focus primarily on matters of conscience,
whereas pubwan seeks transparency
for its own sake.

normative criteria

This is offered not as a suggested Consumerium activity,
but is a red herring.
It is a well-known fact that authoritarian concepts
such as norms and competitive concepts like criteria
are decidedly off-topic for Consumerium.
It is hoped, nevertheless, that this feeble attempt at
elucidation of the concept
of normative criteria can provide
some insight on the nature of Consumerium.

The word "normative" in this context
should be taken as
"normative as contrasted with positive,"
NOT
"normative as contrasted with abnormative."<a href="#eno">1</a>
The concept of a normative/positive
dichotomy is lifted from Langham's
mercilessly preachy, mind-bendingly boring, but nevertheless
pregnant tome ''Price Theory''.
It's uncertain from whence he lifted it, but it seems
to be in common use in numerous disciplines.
Maybe that means we can blame trolls.
In any event, without further adieu...

To distill my (mis?)conception of the normative/positive
dichotomy in as few words as I can, I would
venture that "normative" is to "positive"
as "[[w:de jure]]" is to "[[w:de facto]]."
As I recall, Langham in his characteristically pugnacious
style compared "normative" to something
along the lines of "wishful thinking"
and "positive" to "empirical."
The present author, of course, wishes to remain Agnostic.

The apparent cultural tendencies of Consumerium,
like those of the present author, seem to indicate
an admiration for many ideas some would
regard as normative.
If normative is (?) to subjective as
positive is to objective, this might
explain the tolerance, or even encouragement,
of factionalization.

The idea that selection (or design) criteria
can be normative may have applications to [[EFA]].
The MOO (multi-objective optimization) method
roughly fleshed out in the EFA piece
seeks to "rank order preferences"
in two dimensions which we might
call "signum" ("more is better" vs. "less is better") and
(high vs. low) "priority."
In the Consumerium EFA piece, we denote
degrees of signum as "min" or "max,"
and degrees of priority as "hi" or "lo."
[[User:N8chz|I]] have dubbed this (WLOG?) the "maxhi schema."
"Maxhi" corresponds roughly
to the [[w:Newspeak]] expression
"doubleplus good."

The idea that norms are subjective would seem to
imply that different people assign both
different signa and different priorities to
different selection objectives.

It is the present author's guess that
disagreement over priorities would
be found to be more common than disagreement
over signa, were a population of people
to encode their personal normative preferences
using the maxhi schema.
Correspondingly, one might expect
controversies over signal (adjective form of signum?) issues
to be more along "factional" lines.

[[User:N8chz|I]] propose considering
a "user template" for coding normspecs
(normative specifications).
This template should have certain qualities...

* A blank one would be simply a list of variables.
Hopefully variables with ordered domains
are not too classicalist a concept to be palatable to egalitarian-ish factions.
In the spirit of MOO, variables in this context can
also be called "objectives."

* The master template should encode all
equations describing relations between
variables. Since Consumerium implements
Media Wiki, which in turn (at least in Wikipedia)
implements a TeX-like representation of
mathematical notation, this could be(?)
implemented in the short run, no?
Can we assume mathematics is palatable to Consumerium?

* It should be possible to submit large amounts
of subjective (personal) normative information
into the public domain in a way that does not
compromise people's legitimate demands for
privacy. Database "views" may facilitate
this process, but a more vigilant form of
data security may be needed.

* The database schema should facilitate
detection of certain patterns in normative
data points, especially areas of consensus.
For example, a broad consensus on a "min" value for a signal
dimension of several objectives might lead to
a tentative list of "social bads."

* In the event that a modicum of (expletive deleted) classicalism
is palatable, areas of non-consensus
may have potential for what economists call
"[[w:gains from trade]]."
An interesting question is whether there is
a non-cynical way of "exploiting" such
discoveries.
Another is whether non-analytical methods
already in use by "everyone"
(i.e. the amoral but superintelligent Invisible Hand)
represent a "[[w:Pierre Marie Arouet de Voltaire|best of all possible worlds]]"
solution to the aggregate MOO, in which
case Consumerium and pubwan alike are
mere exercises in intellectual masturbation.
Is it true that Consumerium is based on a
hypothesis that such solutions, while
optimal, may be "unhealthy?"

* A primitive [[taxonomy of factions]] may be
derivable through distance vectors or
some other quick and dirty (and SQL-friendly?) method.

* Hopefully such normspecs can be
used to define selection criteria
for EFA-based database queries from
databases that are both empirically
researched and incomplete-information-aware.

<a label="eno">1Actually the present author delights in the abnormative.</a>

Consumerium and pubwan - Revision history

N8chz at 14:39, 22 April 2004