How Promise Theory tells us trust is really an economy of attention — “Trust is one of the most commonplace ideas in our lives, at the root of almost everything we do, and yet it remains an elusive idea that we hand-wave about and even dismiss as part of the moral mystique of the human condition.” So begins a summary of the Promise…

Has the myth of impartiality reached critical mass? — Science, journalism, and democracy are tools of trust. Each employs methods by which we presume to assess a kind of “impartial truth” on a matter, either by majority or by a consensus of opinion. Each method begins by gathering material or evidence and curating it into a form with contextual…

How a misunderstanding about logic dominates IT thinking, when we should be thinking space and time… — Knowing things, as an individual, is the most important part of being alive. Where do we get food and find kin? How do we navigate the terrain? How can we repeat procedures that are successful and avoid repeated others that aren't? We learn, and learning is often a lengthy process…

Some blunt retrospective notes from the front line… — You have a good idea, and you want to make it your life's work, or perhaps you want to change the world. You never did anything like that before. Where to go? What to do? Here are some notes, based on my own experiences, about the startup landscape and commercialization…

Why data consistency is a problem of promising semantics alongside dynamics. — So, you bit the bullet. You’ve broken up your software or organizational monolith into a number of departments or services. Let’s call them microservices. Your seat reservation system performs a reservation in four steps: i) access a user profile, ii) select a seat, and iii) make a payment, then iv)…

How Promise Theory and Semantic Spacetime help to uncover weaknesses from monitoring to comprehension — (This essay is a summary of the authors research papers) Most of us make the tacit assumption that the purpose of language is to enable communication between individuals: either by speech or by writing. Moreover, humans are typically upheld as the sole possessors of a language capability. Like the Victorians…

What does a model of network spacetime have to do with understanding meaning and intent? — (Based on talk given at Kavli Foundation Salon, Oct 2022) Neuroscience overlaps with networking in a number of ways, and on a number of levels. Let me discuss one case that concerns the way we model space and time in cognitive phenomena. By treating space and time as a network…

Chimerica calling — You walk into the unknown, then you do it again. After the tribulations of CFEngine, I was itching to get back to some research — some fundamental research, not the half-assed kind of incremental paper that is the norm in computer science. I wanted to resuscitate my inner scientist. Nothing…

What can Promise Theory tell us about cognitive process? — Space and time play central roles in almost everything that happens in the world, but they are also subjects that are designed to be overlooked and suppressed as background issues. Thanks to popular science, we often think of space and time as something to do with the outer space of…