OK, I know I'm a geek, but most of the time I forget it because most of the time I don't have any other geeks to talk to, I get impatient and then I put on my conversational skin - which can be quite charming given enough bourbon. This evening in Columbus where it's 19 freaking degrees, I am hovelled up in my hotel room with Neal Stephenson's latest book and feeling geeky for the time being.
NS reminds me rather of the reasons I've always thought that the coolest job in the world would be to be a philosophy professor at Harvard. I've never told that to you have I? It's because I forgot and it's somewhat incongruous with my blogging skin. Be that as it may, I have been reminded that one of the things I've always wanted to build or see built was what I am now calling a 'Lorite Interrogator', which is essentially a factotum with an attitude, perhaps one of slight exasperation....
Since this afternoon I have been thinking of a way to come up with a cool name for the program that would express the Lorite Interrogation, and the answer that came to mind was unsatisfactory. That name was Fidel - which is, as everyone knows, the name of the Lurch-like but incredibly brainy assistant (who actually called himself a factotum) for Jack Nicholson's devlish character in 'The Witches of Eastwick'. Nor could I find an appropriate anagram for 'factotum' or 'lorite factotum' or 'bowen factotum'. But after this frustration I realized that I was making a mistake that a Lorite would point out to me.
Lorites, as you should know, are those people whose knowlege of philosophy and the history of philosophy would be sufficiently complete to give them the conceit of being able to prove that anyone's 'new' ideas were actually old ideas. And so a Lorite Interrogator would ask you several hundred questions and figure out if you were reasonably consistent in what you actually believe to be true about the world. A suitably advanced Lorite Interrogator could devine this accurately without asking so many questions, or by taking a sampling of your writing sufficient enough to nail you within a reasonable distance to some previously understood weltanschauung.
Such an algorithm, bot or facility in a system would be terribly useful in setting the odds for democratically elected candidates amongst populations of reasonably consistent thinkers. As such it would be rather valuable, and an interesting way to hack elections of sufficiently small size. At the very least, it would give candidates an edge. I had something of this in mind when considering the prospects for XRepublic, which is itself a rather old idea I came up with a decade ago, at least, I guess.
I've been considering learning Java for a variety of reasons. My current job may put me in a geeky enough position, long term, to accomplish that. I don't think that a Lorite Interrogator has ever been built, but it could start off as an expert system. Then again, I'm just happy about the idea itself. Now back to the book...
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