Anders wrote:

No, nutters are common. It is just that most of they do not matter. (proud recipient of two crazy missives today)<

Since 2001 it's been very difficult to determine who may be nutters and who may not. Someone mentioned the likelihood of people on this group being on enemy lists (can't find the post now but I know I read it.) I can say from experience it doesn't take much to make them. After the U.S. invaded Iraq I began writing some unflattering essays on U.S. foreign and domestic security policy and published some of them in a book of essays released in 2005 in Canada. It was then that I began to notice some unusual traffic on my .ca website -- U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, were regularly crawling it. Hardly anyone read or bought that book, but someone apparently noticed it. I took the site down eventually. A few years later when living in California I became friends with an infamous gay pornographer who had been called by a Tuft's University professor in a lecture on 21st century morality "the embodiment of the post-human." Because of this friendship, I again went on the U.S. intelligence radar. I am now the proud owner of an FBI file. I would not even have known this much if I hadn't been introduced in San Francisco to an ex-FBI agent who was a friend of a friend. I really don't understand the world of intelligence and enemy lists and national security anyway. The lines between what is considered subversive activity, and even thinking, and what is civically acceptable are so blurred that the whole thing has become one big, sinister mess. It was easier in the old days, when you could be black-listed for carrying a copy of Das Capital across the border but the kind of sex you preferred would only affect your chances for getting elected to public office. Darren On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders@aleph.se> wrote:

Eugen Leitl wrote:

...

It's pretty well known that TLAs do FOAF network clustering, and of course if persecution level is dialed up sufficiently high such lists act as a self denial of service, which would be self defeating, unless you're into tabula rasa approaches a la Mr. Dzhugashvili. And these typically take some setup time, so there's plenty of warning.

I wonder how sensitive these algorithms are to salting? Suppose each of us joins a randomly selected sinister group/mailinglist, or a random group in general, what would that do to the network clustering? From what I know of network clustering algorithms, this could mess up statistics with noise fairly well. Of course, TLAs and network sociologists are working on robust estimators and pattern finding. But even against robust algorithms, in some data mining domains it is known that an aware enemy can mess up classification (even when the algorithm is unknown).

It is fun to run this kind of network analysis. One can use it against one's enemies too - I am somewhat worried about "DIY illuminati software" making it so easy to mine and attack social networks that we get a lot of social noise.

So apart from nutters, which are rare, I wouldn't worry too much

...

No, nutters are common. It is just that most of they do not matter. (proud recipient of two crazy missives today)

-- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

-- "In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." - Remembrance of the Daleks _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE