The social graph is...

"...neither social nor a graph..."

...provided you redefine the words "social" and "graph" to mean something other than what they mean to everyone else.

M. Ceglowski is just being deliberately obtuse, or more precisely he is taking a wild excess of rhetorical license in order to make his statements seem more profound and unconventional. For example, he writes:

We nerds love graphs because they are easy to represent in a computer and there is a vast literature on how to do useful things with them. . . . In order to model something as a graph, you have to have a clear definition of what its nodes and edges represent.

Well, that's actually bullshit. In a dynamic Bayesian network, you don't have a complete definition a priori of what nodes and edges represent. Well, you do, in that the nodes represent variables and the edges represent relationships between those variables, but the weights on the edges are learned statistically from data. An edge may represent a meaningful connection, or it may mean nothing at all. The graph precedes semantics, not vice versa. Likewise with the social graph. People are connected, and you don't necessarily know what each connection means. But it's still a graph.

The labels on the social graph's edges may be subtler and more multidimensional than the simple weights you put on Bayesian network edges. And we don't have a good handle on how to learn those labels, or even what the labels should be. However, calling for the abandonment of a useful mathematical construction in an emerging field of science because it's incomplete is something that you do when you want to convince people that you're smarter than the people working in that field. It's not something you do when you want people to become better-informed.

Ceglowski also writes that the social graph is "not social" because... well, actually, I have trouble even locating a coherent argument in that part of the essay. He seems to be confusing "social" with "sociable". The social graph is social, since it describes relationships between people. Perhaps some activity involved in digitally reifying the social graph is anti-social (Note that anti-social is not the opposite of social — anti-social behaviors are social behaviors!). But that doesn't make the social graph "not social". By that standard, sociology is not a social science because sociologists spend a lot of time by themselves in libraries.

Incidentally social scientists have been modeling social connections as graphs for decades.

Here is a short list of the valid points Ceglowski makes:

1. FOAF relationship labels are kind of dumb and embarrassing.
2. Manually maintaining anything other than a very coarse-grained digital reification of a social graph is a tedious chore.
3. Making your social network and behavior the property of a company whose revenue model is not aligned with your long-term interests is a bad idea.

And here is a short list of other, non-terminological points that Ceglowski just gets wrong:

1. Social networks do "[g]ive people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other". It turns out that sharing photos, videos, and links is one of the most broadly appealing online activities, and social networking sites seem to do this better (along some dimensions) than dedicated photo-, video-, and link-sharing sites.
2. Judging communities by the outward-facing cultural artifacts they produce is a radically inadequate measure of value. The vast majority of communication is point-to-point, not broadcast, and the vast majority of interpersonal interactions are social grooming. Social grooming is a deep-seated primate instinct which nerds devalue at their peril. Social networks have made online social grooming far easier than their predecessors did.
3. People on WoW, Eve Online, and 4chan have healthier social lives than people on Facebook? Really?

Note that I write all the above as someone who dislikes Facebook and is skeptical of reductive approaches to modeling social relationships. And I've been advocating* an end to proprietary social networks for years — long before I started working at Google, and in fact before Facebook was even the predominant social network. So I'm broadly sympathetic to Ceglowski's aims. But I don't like at all the way that he goes about explaining them.

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*Incidentally, rereading this old post, I realize that I completely missed the possibility that the dominant social network site would simply become a huge platform for third-party applications. I guess it never occurred to me that serious companies would bet their livelihoods on being sharecroppers in the walled garden. Go figure. I could speculate that this willingness can be traced directly to the Valley vogue for building companies to flip rather than to create sustainable, decades-long sources of enduring value — if you're just holding on until your "liquidity event" then it doesn't matter that your business is built on the fickle forbearance of your platform landlord — but I'm not sure how right that is.

On internationalized TLDs (a contrarian opinion)

The Timberites rejoice. I'm obviously revealing my North America-centric roots but I think that this is a huge amount of cost for insufficient benefit.

Great civilizations leave their stamp on the conventions of world culture. The Romans gave us their calendar; the Indians gave us the modern numbering system; the Italians gave us terms and symbols used throughout the Western world in musical notation (piano, fortissimo, crescendo, ...). The global recognizability of these signifiers is part of what makes them useful.

In the modern era, American culture predominates in computing. In practically every programming language, English words like begin, define and integer (or abbreviations thereof) have special meanings understood by every programmer in the world.

With respect to TLDs, there are two alternatives before us. Alternative one is to make everyone in the world simply learn to use ASCII TLDs. Alternative two is to make everyone in the world learn to use, or at least recognize, TLDs in every Unicode script. Alternative one is actually the simpler alternative, even for non-English speakers.

Imagine if numbers were subject to the politics of modern i18n. We would have the modern positional decimal numeric system, but also the Roman numeral system, and the Babylonian numeral system, and so on, and nobody would ever have asked anyone to standardize on any of them. After all, we have to be sensitive to the local numeric culture of the Romans!

It's not like I'm saying people should communicate in English all the time. I'm only saying that people learn to type and to recognize ASCII TLDs. This is a relatively limited set of special-purpose identifiers. There are only about an order of magnitude more ccTLDs than months in the year or decimal digits. And I would claim that it's useful for everyone in the world to recognize that, say, .uk and .com look like the end of a domain name, whereas .foobar123 does not. Pop quiz: which one of the following is a new Arabic ccTLD, مص or مصام? The reason you can't recognize it is not just that you're an English speaker — people who only speak Mandarin or Spanish or Russian are in exactly the same boat as you. And when ICANN unveils the Chinese Simplified or Cyrillic or Bengali TLD scripts, Arabic speakers in turn won't be able to make heads or tails out of those.

But, whatever, my opinion's on the losing side of history, so it's almost pointless to express it. I just thought I'd get it out there that there was a real benefit to, and precedents for, the status quo where a convention originating in one culture diffuses and becomes universal.

Pretty close to how I feel about human social interaction these days

The symbols differ but the sentiment is similar.

The strange thing is that I really like all my friends and co-workers but I still have this strange and inescapable distaste for "people" as a category.

Shorter Tyler Cowen

"If you adopt a fringe philosophical view on interpersonal versus intertemporal welfare comparisons, then everybody who disagrees with me about health care is wrong."

Cowen enjoys this kind of rhetorical maneuver, I suspect largely because there's nothing that pleases his ego more than to think of himself as not only smarter than liberals, but smarter in a much more unconventional way than liberals. By this standard, Cowen's post of this morning probably caused him to spontaneously ejaculate on his keyboard.

But anybody with an iota of ability to connect abstract ideas to the real world should intensely question a definition of welfare by which a "typical 23-year-old lower-middle-class immigrant has a higher real endowment than does Warren Buffett". In fact, I think you can find this sentence in the dictionary under reductio ad absurdum

And yes, I know what Cowen's referring to when he talks about McKerlie and egalitarianism. I do not find McKerlie convincing. It's the height of arrogance for Cowen to blithely assume that those who disagree with him are either confused about his argument, ignorant of the background, or irrationally rejecting a sound argument for emotional reasons, rather than simply disagreeing about the highly arguable philosophical conjecture which provides the foundation of his argument. Cowen's usually worth reading, but every once in a while all of his personal and intellectual flaws come crashing together in one horrible post that makes me want to get him banned from every restaurant on the planet.

What's your encore? Do you, like, anally rape my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?

...the illuminating aspect of the source of this expostulation being that Dante, after suffering nonstop abuse from Randal up to the point of the outburst, remains his steadfast buddy for the remainder of the film.

The relationship to the conversation related in this post of Ezra Klein's is left an exercise for the reader.

Intentionalism is obviously a fallacy

Oh, Mr. Werewolf, how you disappoint me.

Imagine that you get a job as a semaphore operator: one of those people who runs around on the runway signaling airplanes with batons. One day, you send the signal for "turn right" when you mean "turn left". The airplane turns right, and as a result, crashes into the terminal. Dozens of people are killed and hundreds injured.

The port authorities conduct an inquiry. Multiple witnesses, from the pilot to the airport control tower to semaphore operator on the next runway over, testify that you signaled the semaphore for "turn right". There is even video evidence that you signaled "turn right."

"But --- but --- I'm the author of the signal! And what I meant is to turn left!"

"Holy shit," says the interrogator, "how stupid are you? It doesn't matter what you meant. What matters is what you signaled. Your arms signaled turn right; the sticks signaled turn right; the visual image telegraphed by your action was to turn right."

You are summarily fired.

Language is a communicative medium --- a system of signals. The meaning of an utterance is not determined by the intent of the author, but by the meaning that the interpretive community applies to the relevant system of signals. Ink on paper has an objective existence outside of the author's head, just as a semaphore signal does, and the patterns of ink on paper acquire meaning in the context of an interpretive community (viz., English speakers, or whatever) independently of any vaporous and transient firing of neurons in their originator's head.

This is not a postmodernist idea. It is not even a modernist idea. It is trivial common sense. To claim otherwise is to support Humpty Dumpty's contention, in Alice in Wonderland, that "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less." If you believe in the intentionalist fallacy, you deserve to be one of the people who dies when the airplane crashes into the terminal.

Tune in next time for the explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent and reasonable people think that, for example, a novelist's intention towards his or her work has any special authority.

To the Critical Asses who interrupted my commute today:

My shuttle home today was halted, idling in traffic and burning fuel needlessly, for over 20 minutes today because of you self-righteous assholes. Congratulations, fucktards, you just made an enemy!

Streets are mixed-use facilities. In normal conditions, cars, bikes, pedestrians, rollerbladers, Segway riders, and all kinds of other uses share the public space. Critical Mass doesn't inspire people to respect the streets; it comes across as a bovine herd out to spitefully annoy others. The moral equivalent of Critical Mass would be a bunch of car drivers parking on the sidewalk to make a point about obnoxious pedestrians. Do you think such an action would cause pedestrians to reform their behavior? What makes you think your gesture works any better?

And I love how this movement's so big in San Francisco. Because there's such powerful opposition to mass transit, renewable and alternative fuel sources, and liberal do-goodery in general here. That point really needs to be made in the most confrontational way in this district, doesn't it. Why don't you take your shit to Los Angeles, or better yet to Bumfuck, Utah or someplace where everybody drives all the time and votes Republican? Oh, that's right --- your stunt only works here because San Francisco is already really dense, and therefore energy-efficient.

So, I got off the shuttle and actually laid myself down in the path of the bicyclists at Larkin and Golden Gate... for about thirty seconds, before I concluded that nobody else was going to join me, and therefore my gesture was futile. Resigned to this folly, I stood up and walked home.

Although, now that I think about it, maybe I should have stayed lying on the street longer. The moral status of a pedestrian one-ups that of a bicyclist, and if I stayed long enough then maybe other people would have gotten out of their cars and laid down too.

Maybe. Next year.

I suspect this post will make me some enemies. Well, it's been a while since I wrote something flat-out obnoxious. Back to form once again.