The Emergent Fool

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure recently called for a back to basics approach in dealing with cancer.  In previous post threads I’ve discussed cancer’s complexity and in particular the confounding and scary implications of somatic evolution, which underscores some of the reasons we are not winning the “war on cancer.”  Here I will discuss some cutting edge approaches to treating and preventing cancer and how they might pan out in light of the complexities of the disease.  The categories below are not mutually exclusive, and the examples cited are nowhere near exhaustive, but this should give you some food for thought.  If you have ideas, questions or know of approaches that should be highlighted, please comment.

Target & Kill Approaches

Biris and Zharov are making some exciting progress in using nanotubes to tag and then track cancer cells inside the body as they move around.  They propose to kill the cancer cells by heating up the nanotubes using lasers, while others are using nanomagnets and still others siRNA. Glazier is in agreement with the target and kill approach and outines a number of such methods in his book, Cure, in which he also argues forcefully for the importance of taking somatic evolution seriously in our approaches to treating cancer.

One potential problem with target and kill, as Glazier points out, is that if you don’t get all cancer cells, you run a high risk of recurrence.  Which belies an even bigger problem: how do you detect which cells are cancerous and which are not?  Glazier calls for behavioral pattern recognition, i.e. looking for cells that are proliferating and also exhibiting invasive behavior at the same time.  But it remains to be seen whether such pattern recognition is possible in practice.  A possible way to keep tabs on cell behavior is to do continuous in situ monitoring or ultrasonic nanotech.

Enhance Immune Response

The immune system is really good at identifying and killing cells behaving badly (although the majority of the time the immune system’s targets are foreign invaders like viruses).  But what if we could boost the immune system so that it was better able to deal with cancer cells?  Essentially create a vaccine for cancer.

The difficulty with immunotherapies for cancer has always been that it’s not in the “charter” of the immune system to fight the body’s own cells; when it does we can get what are know as autoimmune diseases.

Reiter, et al are working on a clever hack of the a class of immune cells called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) wherin they extract TILs from a tumor, enhance their tumor-fighting potential and reinject the enhanced TILs back into the tumor.

The achilles heel of immune enhancement will always be comprehensiveness.  That is, if you don’t get everything, cancer can eventually evolves resistence by becoming too hard for the immune system to detect or by learning how to fight off the immune response.  And if you get overly aggressive, you risk harming the patient in other ways.  And cancer has proven to be extremely tricky in outwitting the immune system.

Genetic Modification Approaches

Modifying genes, either by enhancing tumor suppressors or reducing tumor promotors, has been a popular appoach in recent years.  Often the approach has been to focus on individually important genes or to try to find exhaustive sets of genes which, when modified appropriatly, stop cancer progression.

One problem is that genetic information is not organized into atomic functions or even sets of functions, but rather in complex, multi-scale functional networks with built-in redundancy.  In such networks, you can modify, add or delete many nodes and links without changing the overall network behavior significantly.  Still, recent advances do show promise, as with microRNA replacement.

Another confounding factor is genetic modification is that the genetic code seems to be organized a bit like a toolbox of mix-and-match parts that get shuffled around by evolution.   Thus if a trait or function is adaptive, it might emerge by more than one evolutionary path using different arrangements of genetic code and entirely different mechanisms (this is known as convergent evolution).  Theoretically the malignant behaviors that characterize cancer — unregulated proliferation and invasiveness — could re-evolve, just as happens in organismal evolution; after all, to the cancer cells malignant behaviors are are adaptive, it’s just us mulitcellular beings that view the behavior as bad.  What I mean by this is the following; vision has been achieved a number of different ways by organismal evolution with the genetic toolbox, so what’s to stop somatic evolution from achieving proliferation and invasiveness in different ways than is normally seen in human physiology?

Viewing the problem from a slightly different angle still, consider the following.  Cancer itself works by making massive numbers of changes to individual cells’ genetic networks.  This source of heterogeneity is what provides the grist for the evolutionary mill.  The vast majority of these mutations don’t work out and the cells die off or — more problematically — the mutations remain dormant in successive generations of the cell line.  But every once in a while you end up with a rearrangement of the network that is viable and which creates cells who don’t “play nice” with their neighbors (i.e. cancer).  Thus, if you have created a therapy targeted to a particular gene, there’s a good chance it won’t work anymore because the gene now sits in a different functional context; the original function you were targeting may now be served via different mechanisms.

A more harmonious variant of genetic modification is to replace entire cells with stem cells and allow them to differentiate into the appropriate cell type, effectively cleansing the genome.  This type of work is being done but is very preliminary and the stems cells themselves are prone to becoming cancerous, presumably due to their pluripotency and robust replicative potential.  Still, this line of inquiry seems promising to me, because it honors the body’s own developmental programming to replace badly acting cells with good ones, instead of just, say, killing bad cells and leaving a physical (and behavioral/ecological) void for surrounding cancer cells to exploit.  While currently solid tissue cell replacement requires surgery, down the road we can expect a veritable Cambrian explosion of nanobots that will be able to precisely navigate to targeted areas and do the work of cell replacement and genetic modification.

Prophylactic / Preventative Approaches

Aubrey de Grey works on the radical extension of the human lifespan and believes that there’s no theoretical limit to how long we can live if we hack our biological inheritance appropriately (BTW, many others agree, including Ray Kurzweil).  Organ replacement and regrowing failed body parts is a forgone conclusion (it’s happening already), and de Grey says that the only disease that presents a problem long-term is cancer, due to the relentlessness and “cleverness” of somatic evolution.  De Grey proposes therefore that the only real approach is one of indefinite prophylaxis, i.e. take specific steps to intervene on a regular basis so that somatic evolution stays in check and we don’t get the unregulated proliferation and invasiveness that is cancer.  His WILT approach argues we achieve this by regulating the length of telomeres which are critical to the proliferation process.

Carlo Maley says that the WILT approach should work, but the technology is a far way off and it’s hard work to go this route.  Maley believes that we may be closer on the prophylactic front with by boosting cancer-suppression genes, as in the super p53 approach.

Several months ago I started asking cancer researchers the following question: if we were somehow magically able to replace the DNA in every cell in your body with a clean copy at regular intervals, would that prevent cancer entirely?  While most who answered thought that in theory this would work, some startling research recently has me wondering whether it would.  The discovery of non-genetic forms of persistent heterogeneity (Brock, et al, Spencer et al, and Sigal et al), combined with the logic of somatic evolution and the genetic toolbox, leads me to be fearful that unregulated proliferation and invasiveness might re-emerge without genetic (or genomic) heterogeneity.  Even if non-genetic heterogeneity is not broad enough to provide an “escape hatch” from full DNA replacement, it might be broad enough to thwart a WILT or super p53 approach.

Other preventative approaches focus on detecting pre-cancerous cells — ones that are most likely to turn malignant at some point — and removing them either surgically or with more advanced technology like radio waves.

Hijacking Microorganisms

Then there’s the approach of co-opting existing viruses and bacteria (also here, here,and here) since these microorganisms have exquisitely evolved to be effective at targeting and dismantling individual cells and cell types in multicellular organisms like humans.  There are several issues with this approach though.  First is that in order to “repurpose” these critters to do our therapeutic bidding, we have to simultaneously help them outsmart our immune system while making sure they don’t harm normal cells; not such an easy task.  Second, there is a danger in messing with viruses and bacteria in that these are populations with the potential to evolve (despite whatever measures are taken to avoid this) and as such could get out of control.  Third, there are always unintended and unpredictable consequences when injecting a body with foreign substances, especially ones that are alive….

Fighting Evolution with Evolution

There are a number of ways to approach fighting cancer “with” evolution, one of which was mentioned already (the TIL approach).  Another is to use evolution as a mad tinkerer/designer to create sophisticated biological agents that empirically do the job well.

Maley and Pepper are looking at changing the microenvironment to shape somatic evolution so that there is less selective pressure for cells to compete with one another.  David Basanta and his colleagues at the Moffitt Research Center modeling various aspects of evolution in the hopes to be able to one day shape it’s direction.

David Rasnick suggests that if we are to really take somatic evolution seriously we need to recognize that normal human cells are vastly more robust than cancer cells and that most cancer cells die off with the smallest perturbation to their environment.  The problem is that they mutate and adapt very quickly.  Rasnick’s “perturbation theory” says we should look to induce stresses into the body that normal cells are equipped well to deal with and on a relative basis, cancer cells are not.  While one could think of chemo and radiation in this regard there are two problems: (1) they can damage DNA making the heterogeneity worse; (2) normal cells are not equipped to deal with these perturbations either.  Examples of perturbations normal cells are equipped to deal with include radical changes in various lifestyle dimensions (extreme exercise, extreme diet changes) or inducing natural stress reactions.  Rasnick notes that many cases of “spontaneous remission” occurred after prolonged periods of extremely high fever.  One thing that’s for sure, as technology advances we will have more and more ways to cleverly perturb cells.

Doing Less

In our “Just Do It” society we often forget that sometimes less is more:

• Surgery Not Necessary For Most Late-Stage Colorectal Cancers
• Chemo spurs some cancer cells
• To Survive Cancer, Live With It

The truth is out there. Finally. The NYTimes has a piece on the problems and differences between generic and brand name drugs. Think they are the same? Think again. The article is excellent and I recommend everyone read it. As usual, I will quote liberally, with some of my own commentary.

But there is a gnawing concern among some doctors and researchers that certain prescription generic drugs may not work as well as their brand-name counterparts.

I personally believe that many practitioners have been aware of this issue for decades. But, you can only obscure the truth for so long.

The problem is not pervasive, but it’s something consumers should be aware of — especially now that more insurers insist that patients take generic medications when they are available.

Generic drugs are for the most part great. But they are not all created equal. The real issues here are about awareness, understanding, knowledge, and truth.

Some specialists, particularly cardiologists and neurologists, are concerned about generic formulations of drugs in which a slight variation could have a serious effect on a patient’s health. The American Academy of Neurology has a position paper that says, in part, “The A.A.N. opposes generic substitution of anticonvulsant drugs for the treatment of epilepsy without the attending physician’s approval.”

Small differences matter. Why this is confined to a 2006 paper regarding epilepsy, I do not know.

But insurers tend to argue otherwise. On Thursday, ExpressScripts, which handles drug insurance for big employers, put out a news release announcing results of a study it sponsored that found no difference in hospitalizations or emergency-room visits for people on brand-name epilepsy drugs compared with those taking generics.

No surprise here. A company with a huge monetary interest in providing generic drugs has come up with a study to support their stance.

The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, says it stands behind generic medications and its methods for approving them.

The American Medical Association concurs. A spokeswoman for the group told me in an e-mail message, “the A.M.A. position is that as a whole generic drugs do work as well as name-brand drugs.”

Naturally, after years of advancing the opinion that all drugs are created equal, the FDA and AMA are not about to change.

According to F.D.A. rules, the new generic version must “have the same active ingredient, strength and dosage form” as the brand name or reference product.

Sounds pretty good. So what does it really mean?

Generally, the only test that a maker of a generic medication must perform to receive F.D.A. approval is one that establishes the “bioequivalence” of the product. This test is done on healthy volunteers and compares the blood levels of the reference drug to the generic one. According to Mr. Buehler of the F.D.A., to be considered bioequivalent, the generic drug must reach a blood serum level that is 80 to 125 percent of what the reference product achieves. But Mr. Buehler said that in reality the spread was not nearly that large. He noted that the F.D.A. conducted a large study and found that the average difference in absorption into the body between a generic and brand name drug was only 3.5 percent.

Interesting. So 80% = 100% = 125% I think I get it. Make something similar and you are good to go. I don’t believe the 3.5% from the study is representative or necessarily relevant. There is still a problem. The differences may be smaller than we thought but the message is still the same, we need better standards.

Some specialists, though, worry that the allowable range for bioequivalence is too wide, especially for patients who are taking medication to control problems like arrhythmias or seizures.

I’m no specialist, but I have a problem with 80%=125% What about you? And it’s not just for arrythmias and seizures. Many psychotropic and hormonal medications exhibit dangerous variability in their bioequivalence as well. Want to increase your hormone levels by 50% I didn’t think so. Even a 5-10% difference can be significant when we consider non-linearity in complex systems.

Stephanie Ford, 29, who spoke on condition that she not be otherwise identified, had been taking Lamictal to control her bipolar disorder. When a generic version came out two years ago, her insurer switched her to it.

Ms. Ford found that the generic drug, lamotrigine, worked just as well as the name brand and cost her just $10 a month instead of the $45 copayment she had been spending on the brand name. (For a person without insurance, Lamictal can cost about $300 a month, depending on the dosage.)

But when her insurer then urged her to order her medication by mail, she received another generic version of Lamictal and her symptoms returned.

“After about a week,” she wrote in an e-mail message, “I noticed a difference in my emotional state (and nothing changed in my life) and by a week and a half, I had digressed to the state I had been before being on medication.”

Ms. Ford has found a local pharmacy that carries the original generic. She now buys the medication directly from that store. Because her insurer charges her a $5 penalty for not using mail order, her copayment is now $15.

She says her condition has once again stabilized.

I believe there are countless variations on the story above. I think doctors need to come forward, share their experiences, and pressure the FDA for more rigid measures of “bioequivalence.” Individuals need to be careful and self-aware when switching medications, even when the medications are supposedly the same.

What do you know about Japan and their economy?  Their nominal GDP and stock market seem to be “losing” relative to other countries, but upon further examination you will find that the real GDP/capita has been quite reasonable throughout the period.  but what’s money got to do with it?  Success doesn’t lead to happiness.

Mobile internet in Japan has been years ahead of other countries, so it is reasonable to believe that their interactions are occuring at a much faster pace.  If there’s one trend that’s always been present it is the increase in frequency and abstraction of interactions (aka learning).  Isn’t it possible that we’re witnessing a transformation from the real to the digital world there first? 

1.  All iWant for Xmas is an android (via Marginal Revolution).  Make sure you click on the video
2.  Man Marries Virtual Bride (via Marginal Revolution):

Ultimately we cannot know if we’re a machine or not, it just not optimal to stop either way, but the only way to not be alone (”an expert is someone who knows more and mroe about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing”) is to bring others along with you.  Difference between parallel processing and whatever dr Singularity call the other type.  I’m not there yet.  We are all teacher and students at achieving infinite “flow“.  Our bodies can only get us so far.

That’s the title and conclusion of this paper by Jeffrery Goldstein et al which was presented at  this talk at the Skoll Foundation International Social Innovation Conference 2009.  Here’s a slide from that talk that I like:

If you like the theme of “Social Entrepreneurship, Systems Thinking and Complexity” — and I know that you do because that’s what this blog talks about a lot of the time — then you may want to attend (or even submit a paper/talk abstract to) the eponymously named conference at Adelphi University in New York (April 30 – May 2, 2010).  Hope to see you there!

hat tip: Jerri Chou: @jchou

I guess we already have the  “machine” built.  Its intelligence increases proportionally to # of people and time.  Next year we will celebrate it’s birthday :)  Time to get plugged in and kick out human politicians and decision makers.  Of course Rafe and Kevin have already asked the next question - which simulation do I choose?  BTS supplies the most common answer and hunch.com completes the circle by showing you the next common question.  you can follow people and topics.  I’m sure you’ll be able to meet people similar to you in certain beliefs. You’ll be able to learn the top X things your biological friends learned as well.

and to explore Kevin’s question of what the rational pursuit in life ought to be.  First let’s think about Superintelligence. – I am the human with AI and you can choose to not use it and evaluate whether it is a superpower in your simulation or not.  Have you ever discovered that cartoons are solvable.  That a video game has a weakness in that you can use a certain spin move or scheme to win that doesn’t work in real life. In that sense you have “beat” that level or world.  Your ideas can die before, at the same time, or after you die biologically.  And like I suggested here, we don’t choose to get unplugged from the Matrix, we can only try to choose to get out of “learning”.

In the mean time, can one argue that we shouldn’t change all our (political and economic) systems to use AI because it will bring more good to the group than any “old school” human or non networked organization could.  The non-AI supporters will argue that they’re not getting a fair share of the profits and we’ll have an illusion of choice for those who think they can live without it.  We will continue to lie and some will continue to believe that a steak is way better than a hamburger, while the unk”they” eat lobster.  The non-AI supporters will also win, because they live in the present and over time in the past, so their choices are a hedge on biological life.  I haven’t worked out what a fair allocation is between those who learn, create, and discover new patterns and those who benefit from it.  However if we wish to truthfully and rationally pursue a question, we now CAN.  I think Rafe merely suggest that some humans NEED that and can fill that void.  The more important question is that we can now redefine what “life” is.  you ideas can exist after you’re gone, so in a way your students will be alive and following in your footsteps.  We merely create simulations that we find interesting.  We are learners and by default we create simulations for those who want to follow and at any given level if you can choose to “get off the train”.  The real question you should ask is “when should i get off?”  you’re on the train by merely existing.  You don’t have to be Aristotle or Einstein, but don’t be a party Popper either :) (yes, intended).

I think therefore I am.  I am no more a human than i am a collection of cells who live and die.  I am no more than a human trying to pass on genes.  I am also a collection of ideas, questions and answers who fight for the right to live. I form hypothesis and test them with empirical data.  I live and die many times on many levels of existence.  We simply choose where we live and we kill Tyler Durden in others and take the pill to get out.  Or not so simply.  Primer is going to be the next Matrix/Fight Club, because it asks “If you always want what you can’t have, what do you want when you can have anything?”  That is the question of our generation.  We don’t travel in time, we “slide” to different simulations of reality, kinda like the 90’s show Sliders.  Tyler Cowen creates his own economy.  To the degree you help others, you get rewarded for it.  at some points you feel like you want to finally eat the marshmallow and you definitely can, but the only rule is that you cannot force someone to not learn.  So what should we rationally want?  Not to die.  I’ve achieve a little more comfort with physical death now.  I’m not comfortable with mental death at all.  If you stop believing in your existence in the matrix you die outside of it as well.  Woody Allen also explores this topic in his latest work with Larry David in Whatever Works.  This works for me on a biological level.  Primer is way more complex however and i’ll be re-watching it many times in the future.

The New York Times Year in Review section always has some good ones. Some highlights for me from this year:

• Does feeling like a fraud make you act like one? Researchers gave experiment subjects designer-style sunglasses from boxes marked “authentic” or “counterfeit”. They then put the subjects in situations with an incentive to be dishonest; far more of the subjects who were told they were wearing counterfeit designer glasses acted in a dishonest manner. Possible conclusion: wearing the “counterfeit” glasses (in reality all the glasses were authentic) made people feel like they were dishonest, and they acted accordingly.
• Battle-bots with a moral compass: A roboticist is collaborating with the US army on combat robots (e.g. predator drones) that can weigh military objectives against civilian harm, and adhere to codes of international law. Personally, I’d rather trust human beings with moral decisions, but seeing as we have robots fighting our wars already, putting some safeguards in them is better than nothing.
• Proof by blog: Fields medalist mathematician Timothy Gowers decided to run an experiment on his blog by challenging his readers to collaboratively prove a mathematical that he himself could not. Six weeks and hundreds of collaborators later, the theorem was proven, and is planned for publication under the name DHJ Polymath. This success inspired the creation of the polymath project, which aims to advance mathematics through “massively collaborative mathematical research programs”.
• Conditional microfinance: The website kickstarter.com matches prospective philanthropists with artists, journalists, inventors, and others needing funding for their projects. The twist: unless a project attracts enough funding to meet its needs, no one pays a dime. So you don’t need to worry about throwing money at something you’re not sure anyone else will invest in; just pledge and see what happens!
• SmartTrash Here’s a case where I’m not so excited by the invention itself (a garbage can that scans barcodes items as they go in to see if they can be sold for money) as with the general idea it portends: I’ve always thought of our trash system as one of the worst inefficiencies in our society, in both economical and environmental terms. Outfitting garbage cans with microchips is a possible first step in designing a waste management system that isn’t actually wasteful.

Finally, there’s one “idea” that involves a complete misunderstanding of evolutionary game theory, as far as I can tell. I’ll give this one a separate post when I get around to it.

How do we know what we know?

If you grew up like me you were brought up in a culture based on a dualist metaphysics, one that asserts that there is an objective reality outside of ourselves (whatever “we” are) and that we know about it indirectly through our senses and conscious reasoning.  This is the basis of the Western traditions of science, liberal arts and symbolic systems (such as mathematics and human language).  Essentially anything that can be studied is part of this metaphysics.  Gödel showed us that this metaphysics will never lead to complete knowing, though everyone agrees we can continually refine our knowledge and thereby at least asymptotically approach enlightenment.

Descartes proved to us that each of us individually do indeed exist, and he tried to argue further that the universe as we perceive it — however imperfectly — does indeed exist too.  But before you drink too deeply from the Cartesian well, keep in mind that his argument for an external reality depended on the existence of a benevolent God, one that would not deceive us with such an elaborate ruse as to make the world seem so real when it wasn’t.  His whole argument after cogito ergo sum is logically flawed.

There are other metaphysics that assert reality is entirely subjective, that there is no reality outside of ourselves.  This of course begs the question of who “we” are such that reality can exist or not outside of us.  But to even ask this question is to miss the point.  Knowledge is direct, we “experience” it; and if we have no expectation, no attachment, no judgement, then we can truly understand.  Anytime we engage in the act of thinking, we break from our direct, immediate, complete knowledge of who we are and knowledge of everything there is to know.  This of course is the metaphysics of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern traditions.

I am in danger of losing anyone reading this if I don’t immediately disavow this second way of knowing in favor of the first.  There are many who consider themselves intelligent — whose very self-image is based on intelligence — who will be saying to themselves right now that experience without thought is all well and good as a tool for getting to insight.  But ultimately insight (and knowledge and knowing) requires thought.  And in particular it requires thought that is self-consistent, which is to say rational and logical.  The worst things in the world to such a person are logical inconsistency and paradox.  There are fundamental laws at work, not just about the universe but also about knowing.  These believers will invoke the trinity of Occam, Bayes and Popper, but they forsake the word of Gödel: you can choose consistency, or you can choose completeness, but you can’t have both.

For those of us who have already cast ourselves out of the garden of completeness, all I can say is that it is never too late to reconsider how seriously we take all this cogitation.  I mean after all, what’s the harm in exploration as long as we always have our very capable minds to help us navigate?  With this in mind, I have begun to reconsider certain assumptions.  And for those of you who recall my very first post, the willingness to do so was the only rule that I imposed on myself and insisted of those who wish to engage.

Because we all have different experiences in life, we each have a different internal “language” with which we receive truth and gain understanding.  Those of us who come from the Western tradition — which is to say anyone who thinks of themselves as a thinker — we are in need of more practice in letting go of the map and experiencing the terrain directly.

Have you ever noticed that when someone speaks deep truth (no matter what “language” they are speaking) you get a sense of deep resonance that is beyond words and conscious thought?  I certainly do.  And another thing I notice about these experiences is that they only happen when I stop engaging my analytical mind to critique or compare what the person is saying to what I already “know”.

If we cling to faulty assumptions in the face of truth we feel discord of some form (anger, embarrassment, indignity, righteousness, etc).  But I view this as really another form of recognition of the truth before us.  It’s a sort of allergic reaction to the invading memes that would damage our internal edifices, the faulty assumptions that protect our egos and our ideas of who we are.  To embrace the truth often means a level of change we are not yet willing to undertake, and which we may never be willing to undertake.  In the face of such high stakes, we rationalize away the truth in order to preserve internal consistency and harmony.

As an experiment to illustrate this point, consider your immediate gut reactions to the following statements one at a time:

1. “There are ways of knowing that are beyond science, beyond analytical thought, and they are crucial for you to engage in if you wish to get past your limited understanding of the universe.”
2. “Think about that one thing you know with all your being to be true.  Got it?  Well, it’s not true. You believe in a falsehood, a convenient fiction that you use to deny the veracity of your deepest fears.”

Is it possible to not have a negative reaction to at least one of these two statements?  Most people would say no.  If you are comfortable with both statements, congratulations, you have broken free of the shackles of narrow-mindedness that bind most of the world.

If you are like me, you have no trouble at all with Statement 2, but feel at some level that Statement 1 is new-age horseshit, at best an opiate for the masses but at worst a very dangerous conceit.  So let’s take a deep breath and use this as an opportunity to explore what’s causing the negative emotion so that we can challenge those assumptions and thereby learn.

My reaction to Statement 1 is based on the denial of the value of my personal identity as a thoughtful, analytical, intelligent person, one that doesn’t do things that are irrational.  If Statement 1 is true, then my life is less valuable than I had presumed, perhaps even valueless.  Man that would suck.  If I take Statement 1 to be true then I will be forced to change who I am in order to once again feel as valuable.  I might even be forced to participate in a seance and other freaky and totally pointless activities.  Not gonna happen, I don’t have that kind of time to waste.  I could be making the world a better place or at least pursuing my own happiness.

Sounds a bit silly when I type it out.  After all, what’s the point in making the world a better place if we’re all dead anyway (on average a true statement if you are a stats geek).  And as for happiness, I know most of the literature, and I have to admit, as happy as I am there are some proven paths to happiness that I have yet to fully explore and they fit squarely in the experiential, non-analytical sectors of life.  So what could be the harm in turning off the analytical mind a bit more and experiencing without judging?  At worst maybe I’ll be a bit happier, and at best maybe I will become more effective at making the world a better place. But is this direct experience actually valid from an ontological perspective?

Even within the Western analytic tradition there are themes of experiential knowing.  Psychologists now speak (very analytically of course) about the state of Flow.  In Flow, we are so thoroughly engaged in the task at hand and so perfectly in sync that our experience of time changes dramatically.  We are able to achieve extraordinary performance, effortlessly and without thinking.  Gladwell popularized this concept in Blink, claiming that the vast parallel processing power of the human brain and nervous system for useful cognition is largely untapped (or masked) when we focus on conscious reasoning.  To tap into the full potential of the mind, we need to apply techniques to short-circuit our conscious thought processes.

Every professional athlete, musician and performance artist is familiar with Flow/Blink, and you’ve no doubt experienced it many times yourself.  For me, it’s usually been when engaged in a sport where there is little time to think (like ping-pong, volleyball or snowboarding).  In the mental realm, I have been able achieve leaps in performance and rely heavily on on my “blinking” ability — whether it be playing poker, brainstorming, writing, or just interacting in a positive way with those around me — by orchestrating a Flow state.

I’m still learning what best puts me into Flow, but it seems to be some combination of prolonged intense concentration, mild sleep deprivation and small amounts of psychoactive substances like caffeine, modafinil, marijuana, or alcohol (though I must say that too much substance, or combining it, always kills the flow for me).  Recently I’ve found that adding in physical movement or music also help trigger Flow.  On this last front, while most people would say “what took you so long,” it’s worth pointing out that every person is unique in terms of what works for them.  For instance, what most people refer to as meditation (i.e. eyes closed, absolute stillness of body and mind) doesn’t do much for me.  My mind somehow responds better to hyper stimulation than tranquility.

Early in life, learning is mostly the process of of creating new structure out of noise.  As our adult minds form, this structure creation that was once crucial in our learning process becomes a beast of burden and we lose our mental plasticity.  To counteract this imbalance we must consciously re-integrate those activities that we had no trouble jumping into as a child.  The challenge is not to let our egos and silly notions of personal identity get in the way of our beginner mind.  Ken Robinson makes this point as well as anyone I’ve encountered, and I invite you to sit back and enjoy for the next 20 minutes with your own beginner mind:

As for me, I’m off to my favorite yoga studio to participate in kirtan and tap into some good communal vibes.  Maybe I’ll even hit the Buddha along the way.

As I have written before, one of my goals is to resolve the differences between Arnold Kling’s and Scott Sumner’s views on macroeconomics. There is now some evidence that I may actually understand what is going on.

Will Ambrosini, wrote about a Blanchard and Gali paper that combines two standard macroeconomic models and then simulates various shocks to the economy.  The interesting bit is when they look at a “real” shock: a decrease in productivity of 1%.  This corresponds to one of Kling’s “recalculation” events where the economy has to figure out how to redeploy resources.

Well, the result depends on the monetary policy used by the Fed.  If the Fed targets just inflation, unemployment spikes almost 10 percentage points before gradually improving. Sound familiar? But if the Fed targest both inflation and unemployment, unemployment only goes up a little over 1 percentage point.

My intuition was that targeting inflation and unemployment is similar to targeting NGDP as Sumner advocates.  I sent him email to see if I was right and lo and behold, Sumner posted about it, acknowledging that my intuition lines up with his.  So I guess I’m getting a handle on this stuff.

In addition to the ego gratification, this also resolves the tension between Kling and Sumner.  Yes, real shocks require recalculation.  But monetary policy can make the recalculation easier or harder.  Think of money as the lubricant in the recalculation engine.  If you put more in, there is a lot less friction and waste heat.

Tim Harford has a good analysis of the latest research on micro-lending’s effect on poverty.  The basic result is that the near and medium term effects are extremely modest.  This isn’t too surprising given the relative magnitudes of the intervention and the problem.

But there was always hope that a small perturbation could shift people to a better equilibrium.  Alas, it looks like poverty is more robust.  Now, there is evidently a lot of research in the pipeline that should tell us more soon.  So maybe we’ll have better information for optimizing micro-lending in the future.  But don’t expect a silver bullet.

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary of how they all relate).  I’ve also touched on this “thing” going on with the system of life on Earth that is related to technological singularity but really is the emergence or (or convergence) of an entirely new form of intelligence/life/collective consciousness/cultural agency, above the level of human existence.

From The Chaos Point. Reproduced with permission from the author.

In a convergence of a different sort, many of these threads which all come together and interrelate in my own mind, came together in various conversations and talks within the last 15 hours.  And while it’s impossible to explain this all in details, it’s really exciting to find other people who are on the same wavelength and have thought a lot harder on each of the pieces than I have.  Just to give you a taste, here are the human players in this personal convergence and how they relate to the above themes:

Kevin Carpenter: Heard him first talk at LA Idea Project on the concept of Convergence and how it’s critically different than Kurzweilian Singularity and much more similar to Superorganism.  Ran into him again at a party last night and he was excited to have given more cogent shape to his thinking in this area.

Steve Omohundro: I went to check out the H+ Summit this morning and he was speaking matter-of-factly on so many areas of interest and dropping research-backed evidence to support all of this pontification.  While the details aren’t in this slide presentation, you should glance through it anyway, especially if you have been intrigued at all about things that I’ve written about.

Dan Miler: Spoke right after Omohundro on cellular automata and simulation, and the metaphor/paradigm of digital physics.  He highlighted several projects by other people which are shedding light on deep universal structure, including the work of Alex Lamb.  Lamb has built the first (as far as I know) cellular automata system based on irregular latices (i.e. arbitrary network structures).  Just like in Conway’s Game of Life — the most well-known cellular automaton — there emerge persistent dynamic patterns similar to gliders:

Here are more examples from the Jellyfish system.

What intrigues me most about this is that the brain is a nonregular lattice (by definition all networks are).  Neuronal firing patterns are (that is to say, cognition is) computationally isomorphic to cellular automata on nonregular lattices.  The jellyfish patterns seen in Lamb’s simulations are exactly what I would imagine to exist in the brain.  These would be the semi-autonomous interacting — sometimes cooperating, sometimes conflicting — agents that Omohundro refers to as being the basis of all cognition/intelligence.  It’s exactly what Minsky was referring to in Society of Mind, and what Palombo referred to in The Emergent Ego.  It’s also the basis of crowd wisdom or collective intelligence.

Which leads us back to Convergence.  As we learn more about the nature of cognition, intelligence and thought (both conscious and unconscious), I believe we will recognize ever more clearly how there is new sentience emerging, not alongside human beings (though that is surely happening as well), but rather at the level above human beings and their technological spawn.

I’ll call Rafe’s Daniel Nocera Nobel prize in <10 years and offer up that Artifical Collective Intelligence technology developed at MIT CCI will bring such breakthroughs that Daniel Nocera will be one of the last few INDIVIDUAL contributors to our inventive/discovery process.  Yes, they are using the Bayesian Truth Serum.  Still think i’m crazy when i talk about truthocracy? :)

2006 – MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) has an ambitious goal to understand how to harness the power of large numbers of people—connected together through Internet and other technologies —to better solve a range of business, scientific, and societal problems.  They ask one question: “How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?” (emergence??)

“In the long run,” Malone (CCI Director) said, “this movement toward more decentralized decision-making in business may be as important a change for business as the change to democracies was for governments…CCI is trying to look over the horizon to see what will be common five, 10, or 20 years from now. Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and e-Bay are examples that show something interesting and important is already happening. Such examples are not the end of the story, but just the beginning.  And I hope that our work can help people understand and take advantage of these exciting possibilities”

Here is CCI’s handbook for collective intelligence.

Here are their research projects:
  The Climate Collaboratorium 
  Using new collaboration tools, this project is attempting to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people to help solve the problems of global climate change.   
  Collective prediction 
  This project will attempt to combine human and machine intelligence in flexible new ways to make accurate predictions about future events such as product sales, political events, and outcomes of medical treatments.
  Collective intelligence in healthcare 
  This project focuses on harnessing the collective intelligence of medical professionals, researchers, and others to provide better healthcare for individual patients.

So let’s hear it, what do you think ACI can’t, can, and will do for us?

Rafe has posted about his aversion to supplements. I’d like to offer an opposing point of view, with some personal anecdata behind it.

I’m a 42-year-old woman, 5′1″, and 113 lbs.. I work out 3x/wk. (cardio and weight training) and walk an average of 4 miles/day. Like Rafe, I am a Nutritarian — my diet is made up primarily of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, and whole grains. I eat no processed foods, no sugar other than what occurs naturally in fruit, no added salt, and fewer than 10% of my calories from animal products. I eat eggs 2x/wk, salmon 1x/week, red meat 1x/month, and dairy not at all. I use almost no processed oils (I prefer to water-saute or steam my vegetables) and eat ~80% of my food raw. Recent blood work assures me that I am the healthiest that I have ever been in my life, and my general sense of well-being confirms this. I have only two minor issues:

Firstly, though I am not the least bit worried about my weight, I am concerned with my fat distribution — too much of it is abdominal, which is the most unhealthy place to accumulate body fat. Secondly, after eating this way uneventfully for 18 months, I’ve recently started experiencing intense cravings, particularly for fruit. I consulted with Dr. Joel Fuhrman (author of Eat To Live) to see if he had any advice. His recommendation? Add more healthy fats to my diet (specifically, 1.5 oz. of nuts and seeds, in addition to the flax seeds and avocado that I already eat). To offset this, I need to eliminate ~400 calories from my daily intake. Since I’d been eating 8-9 servings of fruit per day, he suggested cutting back to 3-4. We’re going to reevaluate things in 3 months.

I bought a scale to weigh the nuts/seeds, and started using Fitday to track my calories. Because I tend toward the OCD end of the spectrum, I started weighing and tracking everything down to the ounce. [An interesting side note: if you buy a bag of Earthbound Farm Romaine Hearts expecting it to contain the 12 oz. of romaine that it advertises, think again. For the last 10 days, mine have contained anywhere from 14 oz. to 23 oz. of romaine, with the average bag having 20 oz.]

Fitday tracks not only calories, but also nutrient intake. At any time, you can pull up a graph showing how adequately you’re meeting your RDA of more than 20 vitamins and minerals. On my ~1700 calories a day regimen, I tend to go into dinner with ~600 calories to spare. I now find myself checking to see whether I’m short on any particular nutrient, then modify dinner/dessert accordingly. [Selenium is almost always lacking, as is zinc. I fix that with a brazil nut every other day (literally, one brazil nut has 150% of the daily RDA of selenium) and some pumpkin seeds. When calcium is short, I eat bok choi.] Even within the bounds of my nutritarian lifestyle, I am making some very deliberate food choices.

So what does a typical day look like for me?

Breakfast:
Steelcut oatmeal with fruit and nuts – or - a blended salad
[Kim's Blended Salad: 18 oz. romaine, 1.5 cups frozen spinach, 1/4 haas avocado (37g), 1 tbsp ground flax seed]
Apple or 2 kiwi

Lunch:
Huge, colorful salad (mixed greens, red chard, purple cabbage, yellow peppers, tomatoes, carrots, sunflower seeds)
Quinoa and nut loaf – or – steamed brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower
Banana or melon; 2 squares (11g) dark chocolate (80% or higher)

Dinner:
Vegetable bean soup (includes split peas, carrots, onions, zucchini, kale, cashews, celery, mushrooms)
Baked curried sweet potato with lightly toasted pumpkin seeds
Mixed berries

On blended salad days, that’s roughly 3 lbs. of raw vegetables, another 3/4 lb. of cooked vegetables, plus a variety of fruits, healthy fats, beans and whole grains.

This is my average daily nutritional intake since I started tracking:

1. One can be 95% vegan and still get enough protein
2. One can eat NO dairy and still get enough calcium
3. One cannot, however, get enough B12 from a mostly vegan diet
4. Vitamin D is extremely difficult to get from food sources.
5. If I take a multi, I should look for one without Vitamin A

Perhaps most strikingly, even with a diet so rich in nutrient-dense foods and a bit of ‘gaming’ my meals to meet my RDA, I am just scraping by on 2 of my nutritional needs, and am actually short on 2 others. [I am excluding B12 and D from the tally because I don't expect to be able to meet those needs nutritionally.] I have been taking a B12 supplement ever since I made the shift to a largely vegan diet, and I take a D supplement in the fall and winter when sunlight is inadequate. I believe that these two supplements are unavoidable unless I change latitudes and eat more animal protein.

But what about a multivitamin? Should I be taking one? Should you?

I certainly should. This food tracking exercise is almost over — I now have a pretty good feel for what 1.5 oz. of nuts looks like, so the scale can go away. I also find that by eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m satisfied, I naturally gravitate towards my appropriate caloric range. And while I may have been hitting my RDA numbers for the last 10 days, I fear that when I no longer have the Fitday graphs keeping me vigilant, I will likely come up short on some nutrients on a regular basis.

Should you take a multivitamin? That depends. For one thing, you’re probably bigger than I am, and are likely to be consuming closer to 2000-2500 calories per day. Those extra calories can go a long way toward meeting ones RDA of everything. The real question is: How healthy is your diet? Are you eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, good fats, beans and whole grains? If not, your first priority should be to add more of these foods to your diet. [And while you're at Whole Foods scoring some kale? Pick up a multivitamin, too.] If you’re a fellow nutritarian eating anything close to a vegan diet, you may be able to skip the multi, but you definitely need B12.

One way to be certain of your needs is to track your food for a week. It’s an informative experience. (And you don’t need to be so exacting about it. Fitday and other websites like it offer many options for telling it what you ate and how much — no scale is necessary. If you need to track food on the go, there are iPhone apps for this as well.) If you’re game, it would be interesting to know how you’d rate your diet before you start tracking, then see how well your estimate matches reality. You might just end up as surprised as I was.

Kim is one of my best friends and the single most self-aware friend I have.  In terms of hearing a rational argument and seeing solid evidence, nobody updates their beliefs and practices to coincide quicker than Kim.  And when the evidence shifts to suggest a deeper, more nuanced truth, so does Kim, without ego, and without disdain for those who are not as willing to remake their mind and personal identity with as much facility.  These qualities (amongst others) makes Kim someone I greatly admire and strive to emulate, and someone with whom I always look forward to talking and learning from.  I know you will too.

In learning the history of various religions, it becomes clear that all religions are created to redress human suffering in whatever forms are ubiquitous during the founding. They are spread at a rate directly proportional to the suffering and directly proportional to the simplicity of the message.

Given this formulation, what does it portend for the religions of Science, Democracy and Capitalism respectively?

We are living in an age of, amongst other things, excellent graphic novels. One shining example, which I have just finished reading, is LOGICOMIX, a graphic novel biography of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. (Side note: can a biography still be called a graphic novel? Our terminology may need an update.)

Seeking an escape from his authoritarian religious upbringing, young Bertrand turned to mathematics as the one source of absolute certainty in his life. But the more he studied mathematics, the more he realized that underlying all the sophisticated theories of the time were arguments based more on intuition than full rigor. Driven by his quest for absolute truth, Russell embarked on a project to rebuild mathematics from the foundations up, and thereby establish its status as absolute truth.

Unfortunately, his project ran into major difficulties of the mathematical/philosophical variety (to say nothing of his equally great personal difficulties) including the famous paradox of Russell’s own invention, the arguments of his student Wittigstein that logic was merely a tool for generating tautologies, and finally, Godel’s proof that even in the self-consistent world of mathematics, there must always be true statements that cannot be proven.

In the end, though Russell and his contemporaries eventually succeeded in placing mathematics on a rigorous footing, the dream of a logically grounded “universal truth” had to be abandoned. Mathematics is only as true as the assumptions it rests on, and cannot even prove all that is true in its domain.

While the mathematical and philosophical ideas are well-illustrated for a lay audience, the heart of LOGICOMIX is Russell’s personal struggle, first to find the universal truths in mathematics and then to accept their nonexistence. Like others engaged in this project, Russell’s struggle with logic occasionally veered into a struggle with sanity. Through a meta-narrative of the book’s creation, the authors debate the “logic and madness” theme, and ask whether some amount of detachment from reality a prerequisite for one who spends his or her life searching for its foundations.

This narrative of Russell’s quest had personal resonance for me: I went through my own late-high-school/early-college phase of viewing mathematics as a bastion of truth in an illogical world. I wonder if many of my mathematical colleagues’ careers had their genesis in the same yearning for certainty. I imagine we all eventually come to the same realization as Russell: that mathematics is a powerful tool for clear thinking, but the only “truth” it contains is ultimately tautological.

Disillusioned by his self-described “failure” but ultimately freed from his need for unblemished truth, Russell turns to more worldly concerns, including pacifist activism and the founding of a school with no rules (spoiler: it doesn’t go well). The book ends on a bittersweet note as Russell encourages students to accept their lives in an uncertain world.

I had great pleasure following Russell’s journey, and the many ideas and people encountered along the way. If anyone is interested in what really drives mathematicians, this book is heartily recommended.

As you may have heard, an unknown hacker breached the Hadley Climatic Research Centre and disclosed a large volume of email and documents, thus giving us a peek inside the sausage factory. First, let me say that the breach itself rather concerns me. We’re talking about a government sponsored research facility. Somebody virtually waltzed right in and and took everything but the kitchen sink. Heads should roll in the information security department.

Second, the email correspondence is pretty damning. It won’t affect my position much because I was already fairly sure these types of shenanigans were going on. But if you put your faith in the “consensus”, you should consider updating your position. There are numerous instances of three types of egregious behavior from senior scientists:

• Coordinated efforts to portray all results as supporting the conclusion that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a serious threat. Such efforts included the spinning of results, application of statistical “tricks”, and selective use of data.
• Coordinated efforts to suppress professional dissent. Such efforts included going after editors of journals that published articles supporting a skeptical view and lobbying university administrations to pressure researches who didn’t toe the line.
• Coordinated efforts to evade Freedom of Information Act requests and destroy data that might support the skeptical position if disclosed.

By themselves, these actions should be alarming because they obfuscate the real answer to the question of how serious a threat AGW presents .

But the real take home point is the tone of many emails. These are leading scientists in the field. Yet they clearly hold bitter contempt for colleagues who don’t agree with them. This isn’t business.  This is personal.  To paraphrase, Robin Hanson, climate science isn’t about the science of climate. It’s about social status. The AGW proponents see themselves as an “in group” and AGW skeptics as an “out group”. They are more concerned about destroying the out group than actually figuring out what’s going on with the climate.

Given this attitude, it’s hard to have any confidence that we’ll get a rational, scientific answer any time in the near future.

Michael Pollan, as always, making perfect sense:

When a person walks into a village and blows it up along with themselves we call it terrorism. But when a person drops bombs from a $100M fighter jet and blows up a village it’s somehow not terrorism. Why is that?

This is an observation Laura made tonight that stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know why it did, I’m sure I’ve heard it before.

Another thought that went through my mind was the question of what causes terrorism? The only single-word answer that I can think of which is not oversimplified is… imperialism. I’m sure I’d heard that somewhere before too.

If you ever go to India, I highly recommend loading the movie Ghandi onto your iPhone to watch along the way. The power of his *ideas* is as unfathomable as the ideas are ancient and simple: non-violence; humility; service. Where have we heard these before? The better question is, what ancient belief system does not espouse them?

Some would say imperialism is alive and well. Democracy and Freedom have replaced God and King, but the result is the same: bombs, death and suffering.

Cultural imperialism is a real thing, a vestige of the standard kind. But I’ve come to understand what this means in a new way while in India. Where once I thought it meant selling our crap and pushing our values on “naive” and desperate people, I now realize that’s not it at all. Those who consume America’s culture are neither naive nor desperate. Cultural imperialism is looking at a stranger through your own cultural lens and refusing to consider that the problem is not reality but rather myopia.

Everyone I know who had been to India told me two things: first, be prepared for the horrors of poverty like you’ve never seen before, and second, read the book Shantaram. Now it is quite possible that things have improved so drastically that I am unable to experience the stultifying nature of poverty one could even a decade ago. This would be extremely encouraging if true. But I suspect that economic uplift is only a small part of the puzzle.

Shantaram is full of deep observations about India from an outsider’s perspective, one that captures it perfectly for me, both in the misplaced guilt and the myopia. An example:

Now, before you go off on either the author or me for being an apologist for a morally tenuous state of affairs, consider this. How is it that in a population of 1.2 billion, most of whom are living in unacceptable conditions according to most Westerners, and who live side by side with extreme wealth, that theft and violence are very rare? And how is it that it is perfectly safe for a well-dressed Westerner to walk in any slum in Mumbai at any time of day or night? These are not fantasies of my own making, they are truths corroborated by everyone I talk to here.

I see the masses of people sleeping in the streets, the kids with filthy faces playing in cow dung, the crippled beggars dragging themselves on the ground. They are all still here. But when you put your hands together, smile and nod at any one of them they will invariably do the same right back (and mean it).

It’s hard for us Westerners to understand how different Indian culture is, but think about this for a moment. If you knew you would be reincarnated either as a more fortunate person or a less fortunate person (or perhaps a cockroach) based how you treated other people in this life, wouldn’t that change just about everything? How would you treat people who yell at you? What would you think of them? Would you feel anger (as you probably do today) or would you feel pity?

Cultural imperialism isn’t the unconscious forcing of one culture’s values upon another. No, it’s the audicty and gall one must have to pass judgment on a person’s lot in life (”oh, isn’t that heartbreaking?”) without knowing anything at all about them, their loved ones or their culture.

A final thought that has been playing on my mind recently. It’s been known for a least 2009 years that true leadership is about serving others, something that is echoed today in just about any lecture on leadership. So if this is true then we have to wonder: who is more powerful, the servant or the one being served?

This is based on an LA Times article here

What strikes me most is how athlerosclerotic the science itself is.  Or perhaps it’s just the reportage?

The opening line of the article is “CT scans of Egyptian mummies… show evidence of… hardening of the arteries, which is normally thought of as a disease caused by modern lifestyles….”  One of the researching cardiologist draws this conclusion: “Perhaps atherosclerosis is part of being human.”

The LA Times reporter covering the story (Thomas Maugh) rightly points out at the end, “The high-status Egyptians ate a diet high in meat from cattle, ducks and geese, all fatty.”  Which of course entirely negates the hypothesis of heart disease being part of the natural human condition.

It’s clear why the researchers — both cardiologists — would want ancient evidence to support the notion that heart disease is normal.  But the fact is that the preponderance of evidence around the world in epidemiology as well as cardiology indicates that diet and lifestyle are largely responsible.  Don’t trust me, just start digging around for yourself, it’s not hard to find the data.

Okay, so researchers are trying to get their work into the mainstream, what’s new?  Any thinking person can see through their faulty logic, right?  Not according to all the research on behavioral psychology.  That’s why I’m mostly disappointed in the reporting as opposed to the research.

Maugh and the LA Times bit so hard on this succulent morsel of pseudo-science that the net result is false information which is damaging to public health.  Had Maugh flipped his article upside down and lead with his commentary at the bottom, he would have come much closer to serving the public good with the dark leafy vegetables of truth.

hat tip: @DannyHorowitz

PROBLEMS
Our economic system hasn’t been self correcting through arbitrage, because markets have stayed irrational longer than one could stay solvent.  Our legal system has not been just because precedents have been bluffed into existence using legal costs instead of legal arguments.  Our regulatory systems have been infiltrated by biased colluding agents representing the interests of a powerful minority (who they’re often supposed to be regulating).  Our political system has been overly influenced by a misinformed and/or manipulated majority.   

Evolutionary flaws in these systems can cross-contaminate each other with negative (un)intended consequences and if those consequences are not outweighed by the positives, then we need to improve our systems.  Democracy is merely the best system in terms of the balance between growth and stability that humanity has been able to come up with so far.  Free markets are necessary but not sufficient for efficient allocation of resources.   Our development doesn’t need to be a slave to a misdirected less sophisticated majority to the degree that it currently is.  We are committing simple behavioral flaws/mistakes on different levels (consumer, executive, and regulator) which are Nash rational for our self-benefit, but have free rider/tragedy of the common/agency issues/conflicts of interest consequences written all over them. Our systems can be improved if we only stop pretending that we’ve already perfected them!

SOLUTION
How, then, can we strip away these distortions and get to the core of what a better sytem “should” be?  How can we efficiently filter for and give more weight to unbiased experts and good ideas without appealing to authority, seniority, or majority? Enter the Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS).  I cannot summarize it better than the author of the article:

“BTS is a survey scoring method that provides truthtelling incentives for respondents answering multiple-choice questions about intrinsically private matters: opinions, tastes, past behavior. The method requires respondents to supply not only their own answers, but also percentage estimates of others’ answers. The formula then assigns high scores to answers that are surprisingly common, i.e. whose actual frequency exceeds their predicted frequency…The scoring system transforms a survey into a competitive, zero-sum contest, in which truthtelling is a strict Bayesian Nash equilibrium (Prelec 2004). 

We conduct a general knowledge questionnaire in which we ask respondents if they recognize various items: electronics brand names, historical figures, philosophy terms, etc… By including nonexistent foils alongside the real items, we can measure the degree of deception. When significant bonus payments are awarded to the survey takers with the highest BTS scores, people claim to recognize fewer foils than when bonuses are awarded randomly. The study also validates our claim that truthtelling is in the respondents’ interest: people do in fact achieve higher scores, and earn more money, when they deny knowledge of foils. 

In our second study, we investigate whether it is possible for survey takers to exploit the BTS system by engaging in strategic deception that they hope will be more profitable than answering truthfully. In four surveys, with content chosen to be neutral enough that we can plausibly treat actual answers as truthful, we compare information scores from actual responses to those resulting from various deception strategies. For example, we test whether respondents can score higher by giving the answers they believe will be most popular, rather than their true opinions. We also examine whether respondents do better by misrepresenting their demographic characteristics (gender), or by simulating the answers of some other person they know well. We find that genuine answers reliably outperform every deception policy we test, and that no identifiable subgroup of respondents can expect to benefit from deception.”

BTS KILLED THE DEMOCRACY STAR
In one of a handful of different experiments, MIT and Princeton students were asked to identify US state capitals where the named city was always the most populous in the state (ie ‘Is Seattle the capital of Washington?’).  Here are the results:
“

Expertise correlates with BTS scores but not with Conventional Wisdom.
Conventional wisdom is defined as the number of consensus answers (answers consistent with majority). The two top panels are taken from the MIT study; the bottom panels from the Princeton study. The y-axis is the number of correct answers out of fifty. The x-axis is: (left panels) the number of states where a respondent’s answer matches majority opinion; (right) for each subject r, the sum over 50 states of the BTS score for the answer that they endorsed (averaged across individuals who endorsed that answer)” Source

We can cultivate an ability to maneuver within any given system to discover the most surprising common answers.  If you can predict what others can’t predict, those who “lost”, should  trust your “expertise”, because you are best at discovering truth (the surprisingly common answer).

How can we discover truth by applying the BTS scoring methodology to change our industries, press, entertainment, and politics into institutions that will breed good ideas instead of merely focusing on the short-term profit potential?  A BTS “forum” provides a possible answer.  The people in the forum would have “competitions” to ask each other questions.  If someone asks a predictable question where most others are able to accurately predict what the answer distribution will be, the information value of the question will be 0 (and the person asking won’t have anything to gain himself).  If someone on the other hand can ask a question that is unpredictable, it will hold BTS Information value and most importantly people answering will have the ability to score positive  BTS points and display their expertise, while filtering out nonexperts (negative BTS scores).

For example, ten people ask each other ten questions.  At the end of the game, the scores are tabulated and the people with more BTS points are deemed to have more expertise than the losers.  Top three experts move on to the higher division, bottom three move down to a lower division.  Ten games are played and the league divisions are then changed using a similar rule, with Experts moved up and the “losers” moved down.  Quite similar to promotion/relegation in futbol leagues, tennis, and chess rankings.  (The forum idea is not mine and I am speculating as to what the best way to set it up would be.  There’s a working paper on this that the author has requested to not be cited, but it doesn’t go into much on the topic, yet).

This forum would simulate the evolutionary or emergent (?) learning environment, similar to sports and other competitions.  We ask hypothetical problems of each other and “weed out” the people who agreed on the reply the most where the majority wasn’t able to predict that reply.  It’s a way to test “self awareness” of your own group/sample – your ability to predict the “average” (and possibly even the SHAPE (other statistical parameters) of the distribution).

Please understand that we don’t merely identify experts, which is a grand accomplishment in itself; we also discover “surprisingly common answers” (even to the experts themselves).  For example, people consistently underestimated the degree to which others would find the Humor questionnaire funny (read the first study).  So the BTS methodology allowed us to discover that the Humor questionnaire is indeed surprisingly funny!

I modeled the BTS scoring methodology in excel.  Knock yourself out.  Think of different deception strategies and see if you can break it (I can only think of one that may work, but it’s easily identifieable and thus can probably be corrected for).  I highly suggest reading the paper first, because they unsuccessfully test quite a few deception strategies and truth-telling tends to win the vast majority of the time.

-”Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)

 I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec), but Tyler Cowen’s post on Range Voting has inspired me to do a series of posts on Truthocracy.  It is an idea that we can cut out the highly biased and conflict-ridden middle man that is the Politician in our search for good ideas and policies.  It will all come from crowdsourcing with artificial intelligence to reward and filter truth and sophistication.  The first post focuses on reducing collusion, which is the dominant strategy in a democracy and a tough force to battle in illiquid (Truth) markets.  The second post will focus on defining and discovering truth (yes, there’s an app for that!).  Can you even imagine a world where lying and collusion are incentivized away?  What are the implications?  A discussion is magnitudes more productive than one way communication, so all feedback is encouraged.

Collusion-resistant, Incentive-compatible Feedback Payments (Radu Jurca – Google Zurich, Boi Faltings )
Those with short attention spans please just read the bolded parts and table below.

- If you thought politicians were lying, colluding monsters, just imagine what software agents can do: 
“A key ingredient for all reputation mechanisms is honest feedback.  The future online economy may be dominated by rational, utility maximizing software agents, that will exploit such misreporting opportunities. Hence the need for designing reputation mechanisms that are incentive-compatible: i.e., rational agents and it in their best interest to report the truth.”

- Goal and Methodology: reward truthfull reporters based on how well their feedback improves the predictor model:
“Intuitively, payment mechanisms encourage truth-telling because reporters expect to get paid according to how well their feedback improves the current predictor of the reference report. Every feedback report modifies the reputation information, which acts as a predictor for future observations. The payment received by the reporter reflects the quality of the updated predictor, tested against the reference report. Assuming that the reference report is honest, every agent has the incentive to update the current reputation such that it mirrors her subjective beliefs. Agents thus report honestly, and truth-telling is a Nash equilibrium.”

 - Unfortunately constant reporting strategies (always good/bad, COLLUSION) pay more than honesty:
“In previous work [13] we show that all binary incentive-compatible payment mechanisms suffer from the same drawback: there are lying equilibria that generate higher expected payoffs than the truthful equilibrium.”

- RESULTS: Collusion can be incentivized away (in a realistic world):
Collusion Strategies

The Bayesian Truth Serum takes a slightly different approach and focuses on defining truth as opposed to reducing collusion, but that’s for Part II.  Please stay tuned… 

 More details on Scenario 3 and 4 for those who are interested.  At the top of page 2 in the paper above there is a simple plumber reputation example.
Scenario 3 – Fraction, Full Coordination, No Sharing
- THEORETICAL BOUND - When more than 50% of reporters collude, “any sequence of honest reports, can be `corrected’ by a carefully chosen sequence of colluding reports, such that lying is profitable”. 

- PRACTICAL BOUND - As # of colluders increases, “the design problem becomes more constrained, and therefore, the budget required by the reputation mechanism is likely to grow”. Practical bound for coalition size is <=33% of total responders.
“relative cost of the collusion-resistant mechanism (i.e., divided by the cost of the mechanism that is not collusion-resistant)…  the cost starts increasing exponentially when the payment mechanism must deter coalitions of more than one third of the agent population. This suggests that the practical bound on the coalition size should be around one third of the number N of reporters”
 

 Scenario 4 – Single Strategic Entity, Shared Winnings
- THEORETICAL BOUND – “One anonymous honest report is enough to design incentive compatible, collusion-resistant payments”:
“An apparently more difficult collusion scenario allows the design of payments that are resistant to bigger coalition fractions. The explanation resides in the choice of the solution concept for “[Scenario 3]”. There, honest reporting is the dominant strategy, so that each colluder reports the truth regardless of the reports of the other colluders. In the present scenario, on the other hand, individual colluders are allowed to lie, if the coalition as a whole reports the truth. The constraints are therefore feasible for higher coalition fractions.” 

 - PRACTICAL BOUND – Higher marginal cost, but linear growth <50% coalition size:
“The cost grows linearly for coalitions that span up to one half of the population; for larger coalitions, the cost grows exponentially. Nonetheless, by comparing Figures 2 and 1, we see that for the same coalition size, the collusion-resistant payments are cheaper if we assume a setting with non-transferable utilities.”  

A summary of the 18 points  from an insightul and concise (only 4 page long) paper on Complex System failure (via Infectious Greed).  Number 7 and 8 explain why history rhymes:

“7. Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong. Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessary insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident.

8. Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance. Knowledge of the outcome makes it seem that events leading to the outcome should have appeared more salient to practitioners at the time than was actually the case. Hindsight bias remains the primary obstacle to accident investigation, especially when expert human performance is involved.”

Do yourself a favor and invest in reading it.  Better yet, pass it on to those blaming any specific party for the current economic crisis whether it’s the bankers, the regulators, the borrowers, or the rating agencies.

(Back from Alex’s European adventures)

Michael Martin of Broken Symmetry with two incredibly insightful posts on Soros’ theory of reflexivity, distinction between social and physical sciences, and the ability of markets to regulate us as well as themselves.

1. “Are markets flawed? Or is it competition?“.  Martin’s response to Soros’ criticism of markets’ ability to self-regulate:
“Individuals spontaneously order into firms. What benefit is there to such integration if markets put less constraints on the same individuals? The function of markets is to synchronize buyers and sellers who cannot otherwise integrate their needs within a firm. Soros has it exactly backwards. It’s not that markets are suitable only for individual choices; it’s that individual choices are suitable only for markets.

In this context, Soros would do well to consider some of the New Institutional Economics and Organizational Theory literature, which provides theory on how and when institutional culture develops. I don’t disagree with his point that institutional rules are needed. Just his point that government institutions are necessary or sufficient to meet those needs.”

 The optimist in me believes that “artifical inteligence” akin to google type algorithms could be created to simulate our political choices/decisions to help squeeze out the middleman of politician and create a market/forum of political ideas.  Change.org is a start.  Does anyone know of any other examples?

2. “Reflexivity Goes Deeper than Soros Himself Seems to Realize“:
“The cycle is manifest in the activities of people. The mathematical world is revealed, step by step, through consensus among living and dead mathematicians. The mental world represents the model everybody has, including mathematicians, of what exists. Both of these are embedded in a physical world along with a Noah’s ark of other animals and a Garden of Eden of other living things.

We exercise control over our existence by formulating theories about what exists. There are plenty of things that exist that no person imagined to exist until a theory was developed that permitted for experiments, which in turn were consistent with other experiments, and so on. Nobody doubts anymore that we are made of atoms, quarks, and leptons. Yet none of us has seen any of these things. And if we were to stop looking for them, there is no doubt in my mind that we would eventually forget about them — leaving their existence as ghostly as it was a hundred years ago.

There is no dichotomy between social and natural science. Rather, social science should embrace these constraints that have been on all science for as long as we’ve been doing experiments.”

Imagine you are in your early twenties, out of college several years and your best friend, who recently came into an inheritance of $300K cash told you they could think of no better way to invest the money than to invest it in you.  Not the company you started, not as a loan, but invest it in YOU, as if you were a startup.  In return your friend said all they wanted was 3% of your gross income for the rest of your life.  Do you think you would take it?

Now what if your friend said that they didn’t care what you did with the money or how much you made each year.  If you wanted to sit on a beach in Nicaragua learning to surf, go work in the Peace Corps, stay at home and do your art projects, whatever you want it would be fine, just as long as you made sure to always pay the 3% of whatever you make (as little as that may be).

And finally, what if your friend said you could buy out of your obligation at any point for $6 million in cash.  Then would you take the deal?

. . .

Personal Investment Contracts

. . .

Personal Investment Contract

Phil Gordon and I recently made such an investment in a person we both know very well, call her Marge.  The thing about Marge is that she’s one of these people you know — you can feel it in your bones — that she’s a superstar.  She may have a string of projects and startups that don’t end up producing much in terms of tangible results — in fact she already has.  But you know that all of this “failure” is simply building Marge’s brand equity.  She’s learning how to navigate in the world, how to build value (whether it be monetary value, social good, or however you define it).  She’s also making connections with people who are taking notice of her talent, love her undefinable qualities as a person, and who just want to somehow help her succeed in her life’s mission and be a part of her success.  Everyone who meets Marge knows it’s simply a matter of time before her success is tangible.  Maybe she’ll end up as a founder of a billion dollar startup, maybe her book will top the NY Times Bestseller list, maybe she wins a MacArthur Genius award.  Or maybe over the 40+ years of her career doing what she absolutely loves and was made to do, she will touch the lives of millions of people.

From our perspective as investors, it doesn’t really matter what path Marge chooses or what twists and turns that path reveals.  We’ve already determined that she’s a winner and she will adapt accordingly.  The cash investment was intended to smooth out the earnings curve so that Marge won’t have to take jobs that don’t further her life goals just so she can eat and pay rent.  And even if she blows through the cash, she’s still gotta eat and pay rent, which means she will find a way to make money (while pursuing her dreams).  Maybe one year she makes $10K.  Down the road she herself inherits some money and coincidentally that same year is paid handsomely on a consulting gig and ends up making $400K.  Or perhaps she finds that she loves climbing the corporate ladder and steadily increases her salary from $50K to $500K over the course of 20 years.  Assuming Marge makes an income of some sort for 40 years, she only has to average $250K (in today’s dollars) for us investors to get our money back.

Now here’s were it gets interesting for the investors.  It’s very unlikely that we will be negative on our investment over the course of Marge’s lifetime, unless she dies or becomes incapacitated (which happens of course; there’s no such thing as a risk-less investment).  And in poker parlance, we are “freerolling” to make a substantial return if she hits it big and/or she decides she wants to buy out.  But even if we don’t make a ton of money off of Marge, we know that our investment will have made a significant positive impact on the world.  Why?  Because we hand-picked her as “the one” out of the thousands of people we’ve met over the years to invest in.  Amongst those other there are surely many winners, they’re just not… Marge.

. . .

Simple, Flexible

You are welcome to download and use the document above as you like, it’s hereby placed in the public domain.  Obviously Phil and I have to disclaim any responsibility for what you do with it, and we cannot give you any legal advice.  We are very comfortable that we are not breaking any laws or regulations and we’ve had a team of lawyers and personal agents vet and refine the basic template from both the investor’s standpoint and the investee’s.

And sorry, we are not accepting applications nor will we consider investing in you.  But if you have people who believe in you and trust you as much as Phil and I do in Marge, then show them this blog post and convince them to invest.  The Personal Investment Contract (PIC) can be calibrated for just about any situation where the investor believes the person they are investing in is (a) a true superstar, and (b) completely trustworthy.  Here are the key numbers to keep in mind:

• Investment Amount – This should be determined by the entrepreneur such that they feel like they have enough breathing room to pursue their passion for at least a couple of years, or longer if they feel like supplementing their income themselves.
• Annual Return Payment – The idea is keep this low enough so as not to be a burden on the entrepreneur, but high enough to be attractive for the investor in combination with the Termination Amount.
• Termination Amount – If the ARP is low, this should be high; if the ARP is high, this should be low.  It’s the slider that trades risk for reward.

. . .

Examples PICs

• Example 1: Technologist or Business Person
  • Investment: $250K
  • ARP: 2%
  • Buyout: 10x ($2.5M)

• Example 2: Social Entrepreneur
  • Investment: $150K
  • ARP: 5%
  • Buyout: 5x ($750K)

• Example 3: Do Gooder or Research Scientist
  • Investment: $100K
  • ARP: 10%
  • Buyout: 1x ($100K)

. . .

Important Details

Despite the fact that the contract is ridiculously simple (three pages!), there are some key details in the contract that we believe make this work.  The first is the clause that says the entrepreneur has to give the investor a year’s notice that they intend to buy out.  This is so that the investor can’t be cut out of a big, pending deal that closes soon after the entrepreneur buys out.  It’s possible that the entrepreneur gives notice but for whatever reason (turn of fortune?) can’t come up with the cash required a year later.  That’s fine, the contract stays in effect and the entrepreneur can give notice again in the future.

The second important detail is that the Termination Amount isn’t really just the buyout multiple on the original investment but it also crucially includes the ARP times the net fair market value of all unrealized gains made during the course of the contract.  The reason for this is as follows.  What happens if the entrepreneur buys a house or invests in a business which becomes the dominant (or even just a significant) portion of their net worth by the time they want to buy out.  The investor rightly feels like they contributed to that gain and should get their fair share.  The entrepreneur may not want to (or even be able to) realize the gain at the time of the buyout, e.g. they still want to own and live in the house, or the business they invested in isn’t public yet.  But the investor shouldn’t have to take the worst of the deal.  Hence the fair market value assessment is made (by third party arbiter if necessary) and the investor gets paid.  For instance, consider a PIC using the numbers from Example 1 above.  Entrepreneur buys some property that appreciates by $20M, so the actual Termination Amount becomes ($20M x 2%) + $2.5M = $2.9M.

There are sure to be loopholes that we didn’t close, and it would be great if you could bring those up in the comments section below so the template can be adjusted or variants of the PIC can be made.  Ultimately we decided that because we are investing in people we can trust, and we want to foster that sense of trust and fiduciary obligation, it was better to have the contract be short and to the point, rather than cryptic and air-tight.  Yes, there could be problems down the road, but then again if one party really wants out of a contract or wants to bend the rules in their favor they will be able to.  We’d rather enter into a handshake agreement where we are partners in the success of a budding superstar — as motivated to help them achieve their goals as they are to leverage our resources, experience and connections — than to take advantage of someone because of their temporary circumstances.

. . .

Replicate, Don’t Grow

The first thing that angel investors or venture capitalists think about (once they decide they like the model) is how can they create a fund to achieve scale.  Caution! This way there be dragons.  A PIC is fundamentally a personal investment reliant on mutual trust and respect, not a mechanical device suited to turn into a factory.  PICs can achieve scale, but it will happen from the bottom up, rather than top down.  That is, they are meant to replicate, not grow.

. . .

Feedback

If you have any feedback or experience with this sort of investment, we’d love to hear it!  Share your stories in the comments below.

. . .

There are way too many “happenings” in complex systems research, theory and application to keep track of everything, but here are a few of note that came across my desk recently…

• AAAI Fall Symposium – CAS & The Threshold Effect – Nov. 5 – 7, 2009 – Arlington, VA
  • Schedule ; Facebook Group ; LinkedIn Group
• Call for Contributions: Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems on Self-Adaptive Systems: Models & Algorithms
  • Submission deadline: December 15, 2009
• Teleconferences on Complex Systems: free and open to anyone

If you know of other “happenings” feel free to post them in the comments and may highlight them in a future post.