digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg.

There are two ways to look at this statement. One is to take it as evidence of 'folk theory' of the nature of the world. If Penrose and others are right, there is an infinity of phenomena that cannot be described adequately by an algorithm of the type that can be represented by a flowchart.

However, it is also possible to take this statement at face value and speculate that in fact there is a level of magnification at which everything (although we’ll need to be caution about what a thing is in the everything) can be actually shown through an algorithm. But that algorithm may not be very useful for most of the ways that ‘thing’ is relevant to us. A good example would be language and communication. At some level they are easy ‘to flowchart’ but these flowcharts are not easy to ‘zoom in’ on or if we can magnify them we find them not being accurate anymore or even resemble the data. Level of magnification, then, is the key (taken from fractal theory). Now, the really interesting question is how can we make the different levels of magnification interact and does the fact that a certain kind of description/perspective/looking glass produces ‘bad’/irrelevant/incorrect data/results/stuff when magnified (positively or negatively) mean that we must reject that perspective in its entirety? If not, and my vote would be for not, how can we marry two useful but incompatible perspectives that each produce results at only one or just a few levels of magnification? (Such as generative and cognitive grammar? or quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics?) My favorite example is the flat earth theory. Which is great (indispensable) for walking and traveling to Australia but breaks down once we zoom out (or go sailing or build tall buildings). Round-Earth theory is useless to us in 99.999% of our daily activities (although we might benefit from its consequences with radio, satellites, weather and such) but it is an inescapable fact (and we would consider anyone suggesting a flat Earth backward and simply wrong). In that same way, for instance, typical generative grammar doesn’t sustain the behavior of language in almost any normal communicative situation but at a certain magnification it may be just as real and relevant as other approaches to grammar (although, here I personally believe its sphere of relevance to be negligible). This certainly bears exploring further.