Steering Humanity\'s Future with the Dialogic Web by Ray Luechtefeld

Ray Luechtefeld

Hi Vladimir,

I thought I had responded earlier, but didn't see it here. My apologies.

Yes, I agree on the need for self-organizing systems that reflect the real state of the society. I would add that there is a need to incorporate reflective feedback, as a system that can help society learn and change.

I also agree on the dangers that face humanity. To me, dialogic means taking into account the many perspectives that are relevant, which includes those related to global warming, the disenfranchised, and the powerless.

Thanks,

Ray

Don Limuti

Hi Ray,

You have a most interesting and thought provoking essay. I liked it a lot and voted accordingly. I will also try to give it some PR on my blog, because I am concerned that you may not have enough total votes to be considered a finalist. Like Marc above, I am bewildered about how I missed your essay. Even Georgina did not comment on it (I usually look for Georgina's posts as a personal guide). Have you developed an over the ether cloaking device?

Your concept of using wiki concepts to promote meaningful dialog and understanding would be very useful. I think of it as an alternate to what we know as spam.

Wishing you much success,

Don Limuti

Ray Luechtefeld

Thanks Don,

I'm an electrical engineer by training, but I'm not that good. :)

Besides, I thought that Michelson-Morley disproved the existence of the aether. :)

I appreciate the mention in a blog. I'm also looking for potential collaborators to take the prototype system I've developed (as part of a NSF CAREER award investigating approaches to team skill development) and move it to a more structured "dialogic web" platform - like has been done with the semantic web. So if you know of any potential collaborators who might add value, please send them my way.

With much appreciation,

Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

Robert de Neufville

I think you're right that we need to improve the way we communicate with one another, Ray. Better communication won't eliminate conflict over our different interests, but it would certainly help us navigate those conflicts. Much of my graduate work was on looking at political and social behavior through the lens of complexity theory, so I was excited to see that you use the theory in your essay. I admit I wasn't sure from your essay how specifically--after listening to their users--dialogic agents would facilitate communications. But your essay was very thought-provoking. I'll definitely rate it before the deadline. Good luck!

Best,

Robert

Ray Luechtefeld

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your comments. To respond to your implicit question, the personal dialogic agents actually "talk" using text to speech, and "listen" using speech to text, to their users. The prototype I developed used only very basic computational intelligence to interact with users, but was still able to produce some significant changes in behavior, including, for example, in one study nudging teams using the system to ask more questions of their team members than teams in a control group. The expertise lies in developing the intervention approach, which is why psychologists, organization development experts, facilitators, etc., are needed to contribute.

Ray

Edwin Klingman

Hi Ray,

I found your essay fascinating. In many instances it seemed that you are calling for an enhanced 'political correctness' (which would be horrible in my estimation) but then other statements seem to indicate just the opposite.

For example "little acts of disrespect" impede success, and "their ephemeral nature makes them hard to prove (or even to detect) without skilled observers...". I'm not sure I think it's worthwhile to try to uncover "little acts of disrespect" if it requires skilled observers to do so. There seem to be enough "big acts of disrespect" to go around.

You clearly are aware of the problems with utopias, as you quote Karl Popper: "the attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell." And you mentioned the tensions between freedom and the controls needed to "maximize long-term public good."

I did enjoy your discussion of Kohlberg, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Argyris very much, particularly Habermas' three points. While I am all for the concept, the critics do have a point about effort and time.

The above reflects my confusion on what exactly is being called for. On a technical point, I use 'Dragon' voice recognition software to dictate (such as this comment) and, while it is almost miraculous in its ability to understand the words I speak, I have very strong doubts about the possibility of understanding the *meaning*of my words. Is the technology you propose supposed to understand conversations, or simply look for patterns based on data mining, and the fact that so much of our speech is redundant and habitual?

Thanks for reading my essay and commenting and thanks for your participation in this contest. I will make sure you have the necessary 10 votes needed to qualify for finals.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

[deleted]

Hi Eugene,

Thanks for your comment. "Little acts of disrespect" refers to the micro-inequities that are a result of hidden bias. However if they are recorded and viewed together, the bias is apparent. A personal dialogic agent can be set up to capture a record of these micro-inequities, and then guide users through a conversation about how they occur, and even develop indicators of how they occur that can be used to prevent them in the "moment of action".

"Meaning" is indeed a slippery concept, since as Bakhtin pointed out, it depends on context and history as much as connotation and denotation. For example, in a dysfunctional organization to treat someone "with respect" may mean putting on a facade of friendliness while plotting to sabotage their efforts. This may be moderated by the setting in which the phrase is used as well as the personal experiences of the participants with others. The personal agents in a dialogic web would guide the user to capturing his or her meanings associated with critical events or phrases, recognizing the polysemous ("many meaning'ed") nature of interaction. (I remember discussions with many people in the early '90's for whom "business process re-engineering" meant "management wants to fire us".)

For my prototype I used simple pattern-matching and boolean logic. This was sufficient to produce some significant improvements in group function, though it would have surely been better with some more sophisticated techniques. But, I was pleased with the results I got while just using CSci undergrads to do most of the programming. (Unfortunately, the last "real" coding I did was assembly language in the late 1980's. I just didn't have the time to keep up while I was doing other work.)

As far as I can tell in the future, computational "understanding" of polysemic / polysemiotic language is not possible. There are, however, many resources, such as AffectNet and WordNet that can help with the detection of patterns through data mining. Taxonomic approaches, as I believe Google and Siri use, are also very helpful for the broad strokes of capturing semantics. However the dialogic web relies on pattern matching and data mining along with user-supplied meanings which supplement the data mining. Sharing this information between personal agents can be very powerful.

I hope this clarifies things. Let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Ray

Ray Luechtefeld

Hi again Eugene,

Sorry, my last post appeared as "anonymous". I'm re-posting here...

Hi Eugene,

I hope this clarifies things. Let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Ray

Cristinel Stoica

Dear Ray,

Very inspiring, well documented, profound and well written essay! I find interesting the idea of a dialogic web, and I think someday it will become reality in one form or another. Good luck with the contest!

Best regards,

Cristi

Ray Luechtefeld

Dear Cristi,

Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I am going to make the dialogic web a reality, I just need to find the right support to help design and build it. Way back in 1973 Mark Granovetter wrote a paper on the "strength of weak ties", illustrating how connections between minimally connected groups can lead to novel information flows. I'm hoping that this forum will lead to some connections to help with architecting and building the dialogic web. If not, I'll continue working to find some connections that can do that. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Ray

Peter Jackson

Ray,

Nice essay. I note your comment about M&M and ether above. Interestingly the later Michelson Gore Pearson experiment, larger scale with better equipment (1926 I think) firmly concluded an ether frame. That result has been as well censored and subjugated as Einstein's 1954 paper which is actually consistent with it.

We'll never really advance understanding while science remains led by myth and belief. History shows what really steers the future id scientific advancement.

I've found Millers experiments far more interesting, supporting a hypothesis I postulated applying J D Jackson extinction distances through the atmosphere; he found decreasing birefringence at lower altitudes, and the (still non-zero) M&M result at sea level.

I hope you get a chance to read mine (the previous ones prepare SR's interpretation consistently for the unification).

Best wishes. I feel your views are more forward looking than cataloguing our errors, though shouldn't we really better study and learn from the feedback?

Peter

Ray Luechtefeld

Thanks Peter.

James Hoover

Ray,

This must be a rather general vector from your doctoral thesis, steering the future with your obvious organizational skills and learning. Quite an impressive and extended development of an apparatus for collaborative steering. Most essays are heavy on what. Yours is heavy on the how, the most difficult part of this exercise. We know what needs to be done, but entrenched forces and their benificiaries -- though becoming less plentiful -- who now control, make it rather difficult to accomplish. You fill in the details quite neatly: education, internet medium, dialogic web, and a comparative endeavor that works -- Wikipedia.

My essay is heavy on what needs to be done and the forces that need to be neutralized. My how is not so detailed -- looking beyond (the orthodox) and within the mind -- the neural universe.

I would like to see your coment on my essay: http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2008

Jim

Eckard Blumschein

Dear Ray Luechtefeld,

Since you were developing communication hardware, you might hopefully appreciate my intention to advocate causality. May I ask you to check at topic/2021 my recent reply to Toth where I am defending my claim that ethics needs an inclusion.

I didn't derive this from Juergen Habermaas. Instead I refer to other as I consider rational thinkers like Alfred Nobel, Claude Shannon, Karl Popper, and Galileo Galilei.

Curious,

Eckard

Ray Luechtefeld

Thanks Eckard, I'll check that out. We have benefited from many great thinkers, and they share many connections. For example, Popper's demarcation criterion of falsifiability is also connected to Argyris practice of "Action Science", which emphasizes the search for disconfirmation over confirmation.

Ray

Thomas Ray

Ray,

What a breath of fresh air to see moral science philosophy take a front seat. Our essays are based on the same theme that you nicely summed up, "In an ideal society the self - management of individual interactions would be achieved by the citizenry through free will, rather than through the imposition of law ..."

I agree that high level networked communication is integral to any system approaching that ideal; in addition, though, I think that the web of physical resources plays an equal part.

I am grateful for the extended deadline that allows me to rate you with a deservedly high mark.

Best,

Tom

James Blodgett

Hello Ray

I wonder if it would be possible as an experiment to implement a human version of your dialog web in some discussion space. By human I mean that volunteer moderators simulate some of the role of your dialog agents. Or is the software ready?

We have some dialog space used for Lifeboat Foundation discussions that might work.

Ray Luechtefeld

Hi James, (sorry, for some reason this was posted as "anonymous" below")

It is possible, but would require a considerable effort. The question of whether the effort is worth it depends on the purpose of the experiment.

erformance-an-experimental-design-and-intertextual-analysis/

). I've also done some other studies that used various versions of the prototype software - see for example a few of them at:

Ricardo Romero, Richard Savage, Paul Figueroa & Ray Luechtefeld, "A Quantitative Study Of The Impact Of Automated Facilitation On Engineering Student Dyadic Task Completion," Presented at the 2011 Frontiers in Education Conference, October 2011 Rapid City, SD (refereed). (Available online at http://fie-conference.org/fie2011/papers/1276.pdf ).

Paul Figueroa, Richard Savage, Ricardo Romero & Ray Luechtefeld, "A Qualitative Analysis For The Facilitation Of Innovative Problem Completion Amongst Dyads Of Engineering Students," Presented at the 2011 Frontiers in Education Conference, October 2011 Rapid City, SD (refereed). (Available online at http://fie- conference.org/fie2011/papers/1278.pdf ).

Ray Luechtefeld, Steve E. Watkins, & Raj Kanwar Singh, "Expert System for Team Facilitation using Observational Learning," paper presented at the Frontiers In Education Conference, 10-13 October 2007 Milwaukee, Wisconsin (refereed) (Available online at http://fie- conference.org/fie2007/papers/1530.pdf ).

These three were done with the web interventions in a discussion board. I still have to complete write-ups on studies with the prototype that uses spoken interventions and speech recognition via mobile devices, and which is capable of crowd-sourced interventions.

That alpha prototype does not capture my latest thinking about the architecture of the "dialogic web", which is roughly similar in scope to an architecture of the "semantic web", though of course based on some completely different assumptions. While the semantic web is about working with clearly defined meanings, the dialogic web is about working with the multiplicity of meanings that compose everyday life.

If the purpose of doing the experiment is to prompt thought and build exposure, I might be interested in doing the human run-through, though it might make more sense to just do the programming. Since most of the conversational interventions that the dialogic web will use will be crowd-sourced (like Wikipedia) a human actor run-through will not necessarily reflect the final system. My goal in participating in this essay contest was to connect with others who would be interested in furthering the development of the dialogic web, so I'd certainly like to engage in conversation about that. You can best reach me at the IEEE email address on the papers linked above if you want to talk about it.

Does this respond adequately to your post? Let me know if I can provide more information.

Thanks,

Ray

Laurence Hitterdale

Hello Ray,

Thanks for your comments of May 29. Unfortunately, work requirements have not allowed me to reply before now. Your proposals for personal dialogic agents and dialogic web have merit. Best wishes for the finals judging and for future implementation of your proposals.

Laurence Hitterdale

Ray Luechtefeld

Thanks Laurence.

[deleted]

Hi James,

It is possible, but would require a considerable effort. The question of whether the effort is worth it depends on the purpose of the experiment.

If it is meant to be a "valid" experiment (by which I mean, one that meets acceptable standards of scientific rigor, I have already done something like what you are proposing in my dissertation (see http://phdtree.org/pdf/25409619-model-ii-behavior-and-team-performance-an-experimental-design-and-intertextual-analysis/ ). I've also done some other studies that used various versions of the prototype software - see for example a few of them at:

Does this respond adequately to your post? Let me know if I can provide more information.

Thanks,

Ray

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