Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

A general theory of empathy builds a kind of Maslow hierarchy of needs with regard to empathy. Could there be a “rachet effect” which elevates people to higher levels of empathy? Is this a kind of scale against which we can assess people’s capacity for empathy?

Interesting paper about how 200,000 nearly blind ants can organize themselves into a 100m long column capable of transporting 3,000 prey items per hour:
“Self-organized lane formation and optimized traffic flow in army ants” by I. D. Couzin and N. R. Franks:

“In summary, the combination of our new model and observations of ant behaviour demonstrates how individuals follow trails, and how direct small-scale interactions between individuals can lead to sophisticated self-organized structures, such as collectively selected unidirectional flow and multiple, minimally congested, traffic lanes.”

How do we create small scale uplift interaction which will self-organize into large scale uplift? It seems to me that there are positive core values that are intrinsic to humanity which can be used as the basis for this kind of interaction, and the Internet provides us with a new form of connectivity to trigger this kind of self-organization for generalized uplift…

Chrysanthos Dellarocas of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, in Efficiency and Robustness of Mediated Online Feedback Mechanism: The Case of eBay writes:

“The advent of the Internet introduced two important new elements that renewed interest in the
study of word-of-mouth networks: The first one is scalability. Online feedback mechanisms enable the collection and dissemination of feedback information on a worldwide scale with very
low cost. Bakos and Dellarocas (2002) show how such effects might, under certain conditions,
make reputation networks a more efficient mechanism for sustaining cooperation than the threat
of litigation and state enforcement. The second aspect is controllability. In contrast to
decentralized, ad hoc word-of-mouth networks of ?brick and mortar? communities, online
feedback mechanisms are mediated information systems that precisely control (a) what type of
information is solicited from community members, (b) how it is aggregated and (c) what type of
information is made available to them about other community members in the form of feedback
profiles. Their operators therefore have the opportunity to properly engineer these design
dimensions in order to build mechanisms that induce efficient and robust outcomes in the
presence of boundedly rational players and strategic manipulation.”

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