Okay. I'm a gossip slut. I like to hear about your steamy anxieties and torrid affairs and the events that actually shape your world. I think there are many different types of gossips... Many like the journalistic reporting aspect of having news and pushing it through the grapevine. Some appreciate the shared social psychoanalysis of the people that you know. While I don't pretend that I am above such hobglobinish pleasures (and really, neither are you), my personal deal with trudging through sensitive information is that I just don't like being left in the dark.
Maybe it's something of a neurosis, but I don't like it when people hold information back from me. It's not even so much as a voyeuristic tendency, so much as a "you and I are having an interaction in the here and now, why are you not in the here and now with me?". But I digress...
One aspect of social interactions, inevitably is trust - not just the trust of one person, but the trust of many interconnected people. With the constant pull and tug of many daily emotional, financial, and physical transactions, I occasionally ponder just how much of the drama and disharmony that comes out of these transactions come from an imbalance of information. To a large extent, I think that power imbalances in personal relationships stem from blocks in communication and information transmission between the values that people carry and their relationship between these goals.
Inevitably, a person who is involved in multiple people's lives will play the part of a Trusted Third Party -- a person which 2 separate parties will confide their secrets in.
In the financial and political worlds, we are seeing a slow but nonethless important rise in the value of Trusted Third Party intermediaries. And example of the intermediary flow of information would come into play of smoothing out the transactions between a potential buyer and seller. Let's say Alice is in negotiations with Bob over the salary at which Bob will be hired.
Bob is willing to be hired on as low at $90k/year (but doesn't want Alice the hiring manager to know to know that), but wants to shoot for nominally significantly more than that. Alice is in an HR crunch and knows that Bob could walk away. She is willing hire Bob for as much as $150k (but doesn't want Bob to know that), and of course would prefer a much cheaper worker. Alice and Bob can turn to Trent, the Trust Third Party for some help with negotiations. Alice can tell Trent her range of salary reqs with an opening bid, and Bob does the same. If there is a match, then Trent proceeds to reveal the acceptable bids... However, if Alice low balls and Bob high balls, Trent simply returns with a "No Match Found", and the negotiation process can reiterate... with a much less stressful negotiation than if it were head to head.
Real life can get much more complicated: What happens when you become the intermediary of information in a big pile of gossip between feuding parties? What are the ethical routes of action in pursuing best interest? This is something of a repeating quandry in my life, and has occured relatively recently again. Here's a more grounded example:
Alice and Bob are having a public feud. They are having a personality clash and it's obvious that they don't like each other. You, however, are friends with both Alice and Bob and both of them trust you.
In a conversation with Alice, she tells you:
"I don't like Bob because he's so insensitive. The other day he was rude to when we were talking about topic x... He doesn't realize that I am very lonely and have social issues because of this Dark Secret I have. Ever since I was 12 I have had a medical disorder y due to drug use/eating disorder/etc. and it's very tough to me. But you can not tell ANYONE about my Dark Secret." (implied, of course, is that discussion of said Dark Secret with the feuding party Bob would be an overwhelming breach of trust.)
Sometime later, you are conversing with Bob, who you are also on very good terms with, and he tells you:
"Alice is such a bitch. The other day I brought up topic x and she freaked out. She doesn't realize that I'm just trying to deal with this Dark Secret I have. You see, I have social issues since I was 16 I have had a medical disorder y due to drug use/eating disorder/etc. and I feel very isolated because of it. But please do not tell anyone because my employment, family, etc. is on the line." Likewise, Bob does not like Alice very much at the moment.
While this is a seemingly contrived example, it actually stems from a real life interaction that I've had as an intermediary. Less clear cut, but similar feuds occur often when emotions run high and miscommunication is the norm.
From this we can think of a couple of scenarios that result from differing distribution of information equity. Currently, the lack of information on both parties side about the Dark Secret medical condition is causing strife for both of them. If both parties knew about each other's secret, you may be able to get a win-win scenario: both parties would not only understand why each other behaves the way they do, but they would also break the isolation. Getting to this point, however, would require the intermediary to break the rules of trust for both parties.
So what are the ethics of a gossip intermediary in these cases? I can see a range of possible actions for the Trusted Third Party:
1) Be conservative: Don't get involved. It's not your business, and focus on making your own life good. The fools who are involved in this drama can go hang themselves. I usually try to go for this solution... There are really 2 arguments going for this:
Ioerror is one of 2 Americans I personally know that have made the journey as civilians to Iraq (the other, of course, is the slightly infamous cypherpunk Ryan Lackey).
Our beloved Error has crossed the border into iraq from turkey and is blogging everything. It's a fun read and I'm super jealous I'm not there with him.
w00t! I have new muscles! I sat up this evening and felt my quadriceps and much to my surprise there were these new bumps and contours that weren't there before :) :). This is the second set of bulges that I have gotten (the first being my calves after what seemed like weeks solid on an elliptical), after weeks of biking.
It does feel like it takes an awfully large amount of work to get these contours -- perhaps being a vegetarian and being bad about downing soy protein shakes makes it tougher... But there is also a certain sense of happiness that comes from *me* *having muscles*! Who would have thought??
The Electronic Library of the Mechanical Math Faculty of Moscow State University contains a holy horde of useful online english books in mathematics and physics. Use babelfish to translate or click on Книги on the top nav for a list of all books.
Sublime Frequencies is an awesome small time house that has a great collection of modern compilations from Asia and North Africa. I discovered them accidentally while perusing the unusually eXperimental section at Ameoba Records. I bought the Cambodian folk music CD.
As a positive review, it's great to see that "world music" is rapdily expanding as the globalizing flood gate on the internet allow audiences not just to hear the megapop stars and the easy listening cross over genres that populate the club and hippy circuit world wide, but on the street real time culture.
The lack of WIPO presence outside of North America and Europe has caused a great explosion of archives of music available from Russian Punk (ПАНК, or пиздец as my homey Vadmin would say) to Thai Top 40.
The imbalance of WIPO is also leading to a strange but familiar situation where Intellectual Property can be "mined" by travelers from less restrictive countries, and the repackaged and commercially sold here. This not only applies to music, but of course everything copyrightable or patentable (the biopiracy arguments have been going on for a while). I generally think most forms of intellectual property are stupid... But how do the ethics of copying play out when the source material was in the public domain to begin with?