Troubling Statistics
The Adjacent Possible
Stuart Kauffman has a concept called the Adjacent Possible which I find incredibly useful in understanding the world. Simply put, if you think of the space of possibilities from the present moment forward and just concentrate on those that are achievable today — adjacent to the present moment — that’s the Adjacent Possible.
What’s interesting about possibility-space is that tomorrow’s Adjacent Possible depends on the actions and choices we make today; it’s not symmetric and it’s nonlinear. Certain actions generate more future possibilities than others. In my experience, those actions tend to be the cooperative ones, ones that produce...
Overcoming Bias
The title of this post is ironic. What is science/truth/knowledge if not picking one story over another, in other words, the creation of bias? Hopefully the bias we create is useful and allows us to predict and create a future that is better (in some agreed upon sense) than the past.
To get to “better” we have to be able to change our minds when we get stuck on locally maximal peaks. That’s why I love this post on the Rationally Speaking blog called How to Want to Change Your Mind. The techniques are simple, but profound, and harder to put into practice than they seem. Here they are in summary:
Divorce your belief from your self
Think of disagreements as...
More Fundamental Healthcare Solution Than You Hear
“Less expensive, lower-quality innovations abound in every economic sector—except medicine”
This is by far the most constructive article on healthcare, because it clearly identifies the fundamental issue in healthcare – our internal conflict. Here are the excerpts, but read the whole thing and forward it on. I dare anyone to challenge this of course; that’s the whole point of discourse:
“Those following the long march to health-care reform know that one of the few things beyond argument is that the old approach is unsustainable and threatens to bankrupt the country. Perhaps a little belt tightening and bargain hunting of this sort might make our health-care...
Science 2.0
I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality. It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality. Injecting randomness creates a sort of Boltzmann machine of the mind and increases my chances of finding higher peaks.
But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior. This part is scary. People around me don’t understand what I’m saying initially because I necessarily need new words, new language, to describe the new...
Web 3.0 Will Probably Not Look Like a Web
A way to browse the web using pattern recognition and abstraction as opposed to links. Is this how understanding and self reflection emerge in the first place?? Why not speed that up too! (via DataMining)
TED Feb 2010 – Live Labs Pivot demo
and the world beyond facebook:
One way to put it, is to say that Live Labs Pivot is “smarter” than a Firefox, but guns don’t shoot people… (unless of course there’s an accident)...
$100,000 Reward: Y Prize
Inspired by the X Prize, Y Combinator’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” and Kickstarter, I am offering a $100K prize in three parts:
$10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform
Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved
Allows anyone to pledge additional dollars to someone else’s already-offered prize
Uses crowdsourcing to vet which goals are worthy of public prize offer and which get top billing
Uses crowdsourcing to determine if/when a prize gets awarded
Has been used to award at least five prizes of one thousand dollars or more
Does not have any pending lawsuits alleging that the platform violates U.S. federal or state...
Gene-culture Co-evolution
A while ago, I wrote on the hypothesis that humans have essentially stopped evolving genetically, because of our cultural emphasis on keeping all humans alive, no matter how disadvantaged.
The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective pressure on our genes. This idea is known as gene-culture co-evolution, since although our genes and our culture evolve through separate processes (biological reproduction vs. sharing of ideas), these two processes interact and affect each other.
The Times article surveys how culturally evolved changes in diet, lifestyle, and social norms could have influenced the genetic evolution of our...
Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
In my post about The Process it turns out that I stepped on a pedagogical minefield when using describing the Anthropic Principle (AP). Two preeminent physicists had a very public argument a while ago in which one called the AP unscientific because it’s unfalsifiable. I will return to that in a moment since it’s the crux of what’s wrong with Science right now, but I need to get the terminology issue out of the way first.
Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability). I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same. Here’s why:
Normally natural selection...
The Idea of Applied Mathematics
Mathematicians occupy an odd place in the public imagination, as objects of great curiosity and also great misunderstanding. TV and movies portray us as anything from eccentric to insane, though sometimes we get to solve crimes. But there is rather little public understanding of what mathematicians actually do with their time.
...
The Process
Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite. There’s just infinity. Or if you prefer, nothing. There’s no space, no time, no matter, no energy. There’s no structure whatsoever, and nothing “in” any of the universes that make up the multiverse. it’s not even clear whether these individual universes are separate from one another or the same. But since our minds seem finite and we have to start somewhere, let’s imagine them as separate: an infinite collection of universes with nothing in them, no dimension, and no relationship between them.
Now lets assume there is some process for picking out universes from the multiverse. Since...
The Technium
Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68.
Kevin Kelly
View more presentations from...
TED Prize Wish: Teach Every Child About Food
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