Stippled red striated speckles buttered deep
In cocoa, aloe; the slide of cloth on skin
Searing scars of sun and sand.
Skin in sheets, shed sly like sidewinds
Scrubbing rocks, sloughing like cicadas,
Scattered food for mites.
So starts the metamorphose, stretching
To a higher self, a sentience sophisticated
Now for SPFs of sixty-plus.
I have written about The Wisdom of Crowds before many times (see here, and here, and here…). In short, given a problem with a fully objective, quantifiable answer, taking the average of many, diverse people’s estimates will give a more accurate answer than the estimate of an expert.
Now there’s a new study that shows that you can provide multiple estimates yourself, by putting yourself in a different frame of mind — then average them. And that average is likely to be more accurate than either of your two guesses, though not as accurate as involving another person. Neat mind hack!
…participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.
Lots of events have been happening in Metaplace lately, but this one, you might guess, is near and dear to my heart: a poetry open mic. 🙂 It is happening in WritersForumWorld in about half an hour (1pm Pacific time).
The WritersForum guys have been working to try to get a virtual workshop going as well.
We’re gearing up soon for even more events, so it’s worth following along with the events calendar. In the meantime, stop by for this one!
State of Play VI is coming up June 19th and 20th, and I will be keynoting there and doing lots of Metaplace demoing.
I’m looking forward to this one — I haven’t made it to a State of Play conference since the first one, and it was incredibly stimulating. A great group of folks is gathering there this year, and the topics are nice and meaty: kids’ worlds, whether virtual worlds have reached a plateau, recent policy developments, and even government worries about terrorism. There’s also a Graduate Student Symposium where students will present their research.
Here’s the press release:
The Guardian is reporting that David Eddings has died.
I stopped reading Eddings long ago, but for me mention of him or The Belgariad (books 1-3, books 4 & 5) will always conjure up sundrenched days in Barbados, where I lived when I first read him. We haunted Cave Shepherd (a duty-free department store) on Broad Street searching for imported American paperbacks, because most bookstores in Barbados carried just “beach reading” at the time, and that meant almost nothing a budding geek would read.
They were sunny books, in the end, part of that wave of light fantasy in the late 70s and 80s when there was a lot less gore and a lot more humor in your swordplay (well, except for the Thomas Covenant books, which I read at the same time). I remember a frisson of awe when I thought that The Prophecy that guided the action in the novel (unusually, a speaking character in the books) was actually the author himself talking straight to his protagonist. I also recall my disappointment when it became clear that the book wasn’t nearly as gutsy as that. By the time we got to The Malloreon (books 1-3, books 4 & 5), my writerly mind had started mapping the action chapter by chapter, noting that there was actually the same set of characters and even broadly the same set of actions occurring in the same order — talk about a formula!
But it doesn’t matter — like so many other books, they were perfect for an age, and an ageless time in this case — 15 years old and bicycling around, hacking away at some game programming, a light introduction to metafiction and a paperback in my back pocket.
