The Emergent Fool

As most of you probably know, Worldmapper had dozens of charts that scale country size to various statistics.  Here are three maps I haven’t seen in other blogs, but found interesting and would love to hear what people think about the reasons and implications (and of course how communist/wrong/idealistic I am :)):

1.  Earnings of richest and poorest 10^th in each territory compared to other territories.  Sure you’re better off being poor in some territories (Japan, France, even US) over others (Africa, Eastern Europe), but ultimately country GDP doesn’t correlate to these as much as one would think.  One question this chart doesn’t answer is the ability of people to travel from low to middle and middle to high income within any given country, but wealth sure seems to work on universal rules of control and incentives when you dial down the propoganda.  How much should we concern ourselves with growth and relative GDP to other countries as opposed to incentives?:
Richest 10^th – “There are the rich people in every country. The US is just a bit more extravagant about it.” Heidi Hendricks, 2006
Poorest 10^th – “Japan … has simultaneously attained one of the lowest levels of income inequalities and the longest life expectancy seen worldwide.” Tomoki Nakaya, 2005

2. Some have said that debt can be the (not so) new form of slavery.  Europe is exporting finance to everyone…
Finance/insurance Exports – UK, Switzerland, Germany. 
Finance/insurance Imports – everybody else
This one was a complete surprise to me.  I must be missing something.  Where are the US exports?!  What does this mean about the incredible growth of US finance as % of GDP in the last 50 years, if we’re net consumers here as well?

3. Unemployment – Only rich territories can afford a welfare state to even report unemployment.
So then is unemployment a problem, a symptom, or a misunderstood phenomenon that has both pro’s and con’s depending on your definition of employment and unemployment.  Last I checked, technology and bad assumptions were “stealing” a lot of jobs.  Do we not want to incentivize people to figure out how to outsource things we don’t want to do to technology?  Should we also figure out how to educate the ones who can’t compete with techonology OR other countries?  Googleweb is making our lives so incredibly free yet sophisticated at a constantly increasing pace.  Some of the gains/losses are socialized/privatized – doesn’t this mean that incentive/control structure ought to be the main focus of economics?

 Ideas?

Things just got worse if you put your faith in the “consensus” about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  You’ll recall that the disclosure of internal emails undermined confidence in both the surface temperature record and the peer-review process that qualifies research for inclusion into the blue ribbon International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Now we find out that some of the more sensational claims about potential consequences contained in the IPCC AR4 report are not actually backed up by peer-reviewed research. Instead, they come from assertions made by advocacy groups such as the WWF and Greenpeace. Then there’s the dependence on anecdotal newspaper and magazine reports.  Oh, and an amusing reference to a boot cleaning manual from an Antarctic tour operator.

It all started with the infamous, “Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035,” claim, which was substantiated solely by a WWF report. Not cool because IPCC rules state they should only reference peer-reviewed research from respectable journals.

Things get worse.  Bear with me here.  The story is a bit involved, but it reveals how feckless the guys at the top of the AGW food chain can be. India’s environmental minister tried to call BS by referring to, you know, actual measurements of glacial retreat.  But the chairman of the IPCC called this “voodo science.” Of course, the scientist who lead the development of that section of IPCC AR4, eventually admitted that the claim about glaciers disappearing by 2035 was not supported by peer-reviewed research. And it turns out that the chairman of the IPCC was actually informed about the problem months earlier.

Now for the cherry on top of this crap sundae. The chairman of the IPCC runs an institute that received a ton of money based on… wait for it… the claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

I realize that people want to defer to the leading scientists in an area.  It’s perfectly rational. In fact it was what I did before I started looking into AGW myself.  But there should be some evidence that will cause you to update this position. I think we’ve reached that point.

Rafe linked to this essay by Robert Reich.  I don’t have much of a problem with his first point backing Obama’s plan to offer a tax credit for hiring.  I think temporarily suspending the employer’s share of payroll tax is a better mechanism (as suggested by Bryan Caplan a year ago), but close enough.

However, I think he goes off the rails at the end where he suggests the federal government should prop up spending by state and local governments.  No.  They’re the problem, not the solution.  Fortuitously,m Bryan’s partner Arnold Kling referred just today to this Reason essay by Steven Greenhut revealing that the number of state and local workers per 100 citizens has grown from 2.3 to 6.5 since 1946.  Yes, that’s 180% growth in the fraction of people employed by state and local governments.

Recall my own analysis showing that real per capita state and local spending in California increased 38% in the last 10 years and that we would have no budget problem if we had kept real per capita spending at 1999 levels.

The problem is we have more bureaucrats riding on the backs of productive workers.  Economic innovation and growth comes from the private sector.  Much better to substitute every single dollar Reich wants to give to state and local governments for more tax breaks to private sector employers that hire people.

“Extensive research has shown that people tend to lead either from their head or their heart. Unless we make a conscious choice to achieve the appropriate balance, we tend to do what comes naturally and solve the problem from within our comfort zone” (from the Decision Education Foundation)

Those of us on the analytical side of the spectrum often completely discount feelings in making decisions. But it’s worth noting that the Decision Education Foundation (DEF) was founded by Stanford professors who pioneered the science of decision analysis and whose work spawned an entire consulting industry that helps companies make billion dollar decisions. DEF is adamant about the importance of using both head and heart:

Using your heart means taking into account what you really care about, which often includes the effect on other people and retaining their respect and trust. It means listening to your emotions and intuition. If you have taken your heart into account in the appropriate way, a decision feels right.

Those on the other side of the spectrum often feel overwhelmed or scared by any sort of analysis.  They shoot from the hip all the time, justifying this approach by falsely believing that analysis somehow ruins or blocks their ability to tap into their keen intuition.

Both extremes of the spectrum are simply ego-protecting rationalizations that lead people to make bad decisions.

If you find this pedantic and obvious, consider the following: Do you think you are a better than average decision maker (like most people think of themselves)? Do you believe you are a great decision maker?

Were you ever taught in school or at home how to make a good decision or to even know what goes into making a good decision? Given that there is a whole science and industry of decision making, do you think you can possibly compare in skill to someone who has been formally trained?

Over the course the course of your lifetime, how many thousands of decisions (big and small) impact your health, wealth and happiness? No matter how good you think you are at making decisions, don’t you think you could benefit from at least a little formal training?

As a poker player, entrepreneur and investor, I spend a good portion of my life making decisions that directly and immediately impact my finances. And I was never taught the principles of good decision making that DEF teaches. I’ve had to learn what I know from hard knocks and self-directed study.  I wish it were different, that I had learned about decision science school.

Would it it surprise you to know that outside of DEF there is not one non-profit teaching the general public what’s been learned by the decision analysis community over the last 30 years? And it’s not like it’s hard to learn: DEF focuses on middle-school students! Actually they concluded after methodical testing that that’s where it needs to be taught for a person to learn the habits for life.

This is the same conclusion that Self Enhancement, Inc. has come to after 30 years of working with disadvantaged youth in their after school programs. In fact, SEI won’t accept a new student beyond middle school age because in their experience it becomes a lot tougher to make an impact.

While it’s too late for you become a good decision maker, don’t you think you owe it to your children to make sure they learn how? Just kidding, it’s never too late :-) But it is 90% habit and only 10% conceptual. Following a methodology is key to learning a new habit.

I learned about DEF when Annie Duke asked me to play in a poker fundraiser from them (she serves on the Board of Directors). As soon as I saw their tagline (”Better decisions, better lives”) I knew I had to support them. If you feel similarly, I want to hear from you in the blog comments, and if you have any ideas at all on how to support the mission, how to improve the message, questions about or how you can support your local schools in decision education, I especially want to hear from you.

And if you are somehow still skeptical about how learning more about science of decision making can directly improve your own life, check out Annie’s kick-ass talk from The Feast this past October.

I was just interviewed by International Mentoring Network and as a thank you for my time they asked if there was anyone I would like to interview.  Anyone in their network, I asked ?  No, anyone in the world.  Whoever it is, they will try to make it happen.  Now that’s an interesting question!

Okay, so who do you think I should interview?

The trials chronicled in Part I have a happy ending.  I eventually obtained an excellent individual plan from Assurant Health. I followed my own advice and got a high deductible plan that covers no primary care. I thought it would be worth comparing to the traditional PPO coverage I had previously.

The table below shows the salient aspects of each plan.  To compare apples to apples, I had to estimate the 2010 premiums for the previous plan. I used a 9% increase over 2009, which is what a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey says will be the average for employer sponsored plans. Note that this is less than the 10.8% actual increase my company saw from 2008 to 2009 on this plan.

We see something very interesting here. The annual premium on the new plan is $9,833 less than the estimated annual premium on the old plan. Now, we all get checkups each year.  Also, my wife and son have monthly medications they take for allergies.  Adding in the copays for those yields extra $500 on the old plan, pushing us to $10,333 more guaranteed expenditures on the old plan than the new plan. Obviously, this excess is more than the new plan’s deductible.

So there’s no way I can loose on the new plan.  If we stay healthy, I get to pocket $10,333 minus the cost of routine visits and medications.  If something bad happens and someone has a major medical issue, I save at least $8,333 due to the deductible and coinsurance on the old plan. Probably much more due to co-pays for additional office visits and prescriptions, which are not limited by the out-of-pocket maximum.  I actually ran the scenarios and there’s no way I don’t save at least $5,000 per year.

Moreover, the new plan is much better at insuring against catastrophic loss.  The lifetime maximum is 2.5 times as high.  That’s a real selling point for me. I don’t want the plug pulled on my ventilator because my insurance ran out.

How can this be? Why do we even have PPO plans? You may think the tax deductibility of employer-paid premiums is the reason.  But this doesn’t explain why employees wouldn’t choose an employer-sponsored version of the high deductible plan. Those are paid with the same pre-tax dollars.  (It also doesn’t affect me because I’m technically self-employed and deduct my premiums anyway). It certainly explains why the CEO of Whole Foods is absolutely right to offer his employee’s a high deductible plus HSA plan.  It saves everyone money. The math speaks for itself.

The only explanation that makes sense is that people want to spend more on health care when it doesn’t come out of their own pockets. A combination of moral hazard and mental accounting. On the moral hazard front, they go to the doctor more often than they otherwise would because the marginal cost to them is so low. On the mental accounting front, the automatic monthly deduction from their pay is less painful than personally writing checks to pay doctors. But it’s irrational.

Perhaps some marketing wizards should figure out how to pitch high-deductible plus HSA plans in a way that the average person would find attractive.  How about an infomercial that promises to save you thousands of dollars every year with a proven system and throws in a set of handy dandy steak knives if you act now?

Rick Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design” and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC has hit the nail on the head as far as the bank reform goes – Breaking the Banks (via Infectious Greed):

1. “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“
2. “The largest banks are different is that they have something close to monopoly power”
3. “They are not open to outside competition because there are huge barriers to entry”
4. “They promote a noncompetitive industrial organization… by, among other things, creating informational asymmetries.  The innovative products they promote — both derivatives and consumer products — give them an informational edge over their customers. The trading operations they run do the same.”
5. “So if we want to curb the risk taking, too-big-to-fail conflicts, opacity, and the creation of informational asymmetries and complexity, we need to move them down to the scope and scale of the smaller banks. We need to break them up.”

 I hope Rick has a way of converting his personal views into those of the SEC and its staff.  It may have been catastrophic to let the banks fail in the midst of a panic (fall of 2008 – early 2009), because wealth destruction through leverage could have brought the whole fiat money system to a halt.  But if we have learned anything from this crisis, it is that we need to break up JPM and BOA sooner rather than later. 

 Let’s not stop with banks though.  We can extend the information asymmetry analogy to politics.  Profit/money/wealth that was accumulated in the past always tries to control the future by creating barriers to entry (information asymmetry).  It may be as indirect as placing former industry experts on boards of the FDA, RIAA, and don’t forget the Fed.  It all boils down to the battle for copyright of ideas.  It may seem like it has to do with music, but that’s just where the battle front is for now.  Music and culture always build (remix) the past music and culture.  If we are allowed to recursively rearrange Shakespeare’s ideas into books, plays, and movies, then there’s something to be said for balance of the ability to create and copy in all facets of life. 

I am of the opinion that the relatively recent boom in emerging countries has a lot to do with a phase shift in the ability to rip-off ideas.  Last I checked we sometimes call that learning.  Of course the standard counterargument is that one needs incentives to be creative and productive.  No one is denying that, but only to a degree.  The only argument I have is that IF the ability to copy an idea has become cheaper, then the copyright needs to shrink proportionately (but not exceeding the ability to create), whether we’re talking about cultures, ideas, wants or needs.  But scaricity is a very squishy concept.

If I invent the HIV vaccine, how much should I get paid?  How long should my copyright/patent last?  There is not enough information to answer these questions, because you first have to define what economic and political system I exist in as well as the cumulative benefits from an HIV cure and how much R&D is required.  The current state of the US system is moving towards that that of privatized gains and socialized losses.  You tell me what emerges from that!  France, Russia, China, Brazil all benefit from globalization by getting access to good ideas without having to invest as much in R&D.  That is the ecosystem that we exist in.  IF all the countries were one, what would the optimal (most balanced) system be?

But how do we quantify the value of removing scarcity (in this example – the abudnance of HIV)?  What if instead of fighting HIV, I choose to fight computer viruses and to create scarcity, I go out and hire people to create viruses for me to fight or at the very least prevent extermination of virus creators.  The RIP: Remix Manifesto refers to this as “Culture Jamming”.   Scarcity can be created artificially.  Yes, Beatles have a legendary standing.  So do the Rolling Stones, U2, and even Brittany at the very least if we look at their earnings.  They have all built empires remixing older music.  You tell me how much a musician ought to make.  If we can’t figure out music, we won’t make any progress with more important patents.

The whole movie is revolutionary, but these parts are critical:
RIP: Remix Manifesto – Part 7
RIP: Remix Manifesto – Part 9

If you want to jump ahead and become the teacher instead of the student, this is where the peanut butter to my current culture jam is:
The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories

As you may recall, I previously posted about my recommendations for fixing health care (Part I, Part II, Part III). Recently, I had to navigate the current system and thought I’d share my experience in the context of those recommendations. You see, COBRA ran out on my health insurance from the last startup I founded and the new one hasn’t set up a company health plan yet. Thus I had the, um, “pleasure” of trying to obtain individual coverage.

I started by going to eHealthInsurance and hitting up the big three companies: Aetna, Anthem (BlueShield/BlueCross), and HealthNet. My first disappointment came when I discovered that there is no universal application. You have to type in roughly the same information in substantially different formats for each company. What value exactly is eHealthInsurance adding here?

My second disappointment came when they all rejected the applications for different reasons. There are four people in our family. One of them was rejected by two companies, two of them were rejected by one company, one of them was not rejected at all. The reasons were allergy shots, acne, possible acne, and being underweight. The first two are minor ongoing issues.  Considering we were applying for $10K deductible plans with no office visit or prescription coverage, it’s hard to see what the problem is. The second one was unconfirmed by the first doctor, totally minor, and subsequently excluded by a second doctor. The last one is the only one that should have been of any concerned and a check with that person’s doctor would have eliminated the concern.

My working hypothesis is that these companies don’t actually want to offer individual health coverage. For regulatory or political reasons, they have to appear to offer such coverage. But unless an individual is so low risk as to be obscenely profitable, why go to the effort? It’s so much easier to focus on selling group coverage to employers.  This is a side effect of the tax deductibility of premiums for most companies but not most individuals.

Luckily, there are niche providers that pursue opportunities that are not attractive to the largest players. One of them is Assurant Health. After filling out the online application at their Web site, I received a call from their underwriting department within two days. They wanted to review the medical records for the two family members receiving allergy shots to make sure these were not indicative of larger issues. No problem, we had signed a release and I had no objection to paying a premium based on actual risk.

Now, the story takes a funny turn. Apparently, HIPAA has made doctors so paranoid about penalties for breaching patient privacy, that they don’t want to give out your medical records to anyone. Despite the general release we signed, two medical clinics wanted us to sign special releases. It took a month to actually get these special releases so we could sign them. Even then, one of the clinics also required us to call them on the phone and give them verbal permission as well. Government intervention strikes again! If the government had clearly specified the mechanism for releasing medical records, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Even better, if the government hadn’t distorted the market for insurance toward employer-sponsored coverage, this transaction would be so routine that the free market would have solved the problem

The story has a happy ending.  In Part II, I will analyze the excellent coverage we got from Assurant in the context of my previous recommendations.

As careful readers of this blog will note, I’ve been obsessed with Alex Ryan’s visualization of the way new levels of organization come into being (e.g. atoms –> molecules –> cells, etc).  In an attempt to complement and extend his model, here’s a visualization of how I think of the various concepts coming together:

First off, I know that this may not make sense to most people.  The relationships implied by proximity, color, dimension, etc are not totally accurate.  The problem is, I’ve reached the limit of my personal ability to create a good visualization.  So I’m throwing this out there half-baked hoping that the crowd (that’s you) will help bring this together in a more coherent way.

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have great design skills.  If you don’t, then at the least you can ask probing questions to suss out the sources of confusion, which will then feed into the redesign process.

A more detailed explication of these concepts can be found by drilling down through this roadmap.

Relatedly, I have been creating a taxonomy of “emergent network properties” that is definitely half-baked but has been useful for organizing my own thoughts:

The spreadsheet is editable here if you want to extend or refine it.  I’m open to any and all interpretations and ideas in these areas, would love to hear your thoughts.

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto

Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually ignore this vital lesson.  As Wikipedia suggests, some people mistakenly dismiss The Zeitgeist Movement of being similar to Socialism, which could not be more wrong.  Emergent systems are the building block of The Zeitgest Movement, while socialism tends to ignore incentives between the group and the individual.  Most “losers” of history tend to argue that their system of beliefs wasn’t implemented correctly.  But they are right!  Thomas Sowell suggests that WHO is making the decision is the most important aspect of any system.  I urge you to skim this excellent summary of the book.

Zeitgest Movement is a school of thought that grounds itself in its humility and focuses on learning and technology to achieve a kind of Truthocracy I’ve been posting about.  The Zeitgesters are working to create a system for continual improvement where the incentives of the individual are aligned with those of the group.  Where the decision maker is in a continual iterative effort to harvest every drop of wisdom from the group prior to making the decision.  Let’s not be naive though – we have to be honest and humble in this pursuit and continually strive to improve the knowledge gathering algorithms.  We must also beware of students bluffing their way to teaching.

“The Internet was not the first technology to disrupt a few business models. From the printing press to the player piano, one generation is always calling the next a pirate”.  The aim of copyright law was to aid in learning by BALANCING the rights of the authors and readers (teachers and students).    Balance between the copyright and copyleft is the key.  Removing the obstacles for a balanced use of the rational and creative sides of the brain is the trick to achieving flow:
“Alice Flaherty argues that creativity is due to a balance of frontal and temporal lobe activity. In other words the trick is not, in fact, to get out of your “left brain” and into your right, but to increase activity in the right hemisphere (or reduce activity in the left) so it matches the activity on the other side.” Source

Awareness  vs “Bewareness” is the eternal and internal battle of the present imagination and past “experience”.  Our goal then must be to reduce obstacles to balance to create flow in all systems.

Rafe was here more than 2 years ago:
“- Cooperators and defectors co-exist
- “Cooperators survive in clusters”
- “Cooperators can invade defectors when starting from a small cluster”
- One interesting dynamic occurs when two self-sustaining “walker” sub-populations collide into a “big bang” of cooperation which largely takes over the population.”"

So it is very reasonable that I would have never learned this or learned it years from now if i didn’t start Googling my hypotheses.  Ultimately the resource focus of Zeitgest will revolve around the speed of learning, which resides within you – your own willingness to learn, teach, and stay humble.

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto

Then facebook and twitter it (buy a copyleft t-shirt to spread the word and create more balance).  You can’t have big bang without them.

I’m usually a rather optimistic person.  But yesterday, I thought I saw a sign of the apocalypse and panicked.  The usually insightful Coyote Blog posted a chart that I interpreted as saying that the number of people on government payrolls was now larger than the number of people on private payrolls in the US. Such a crossover would be a very bad indicator.

Luckily, I slept on it before posting.  I realized from my background knowledge that this fact was unlikely to be true, so I followed the links to the ultimate source.  You see, I thought “Goods Producing” was in contrast to “Government” in the chart label, i.e., that the categories were collectively exhaustive. No.  According to the original post at NRO, “Goods producing”=construction, manufacturing, mining and agriculture.  Well, duh.  Our employment in those sectors has been gradually decreasing as they become extremely efficient.  Unsurprisingly, government efficiency has not been increasing as fast.

I went to the BLS database and looked up the right statistic.  In Jan 1939, private employment was 25,935,000 and government employment was 3,988,000 for a ratio of 6.50.  In Dec 2009, projected private employment was 108,443,000  and projected government employment was 22,467,000 for a ratio of 4.83.  This is still a relative increase in government employment, which I don’t like, but far from a sign of the apocalypse. A clear indication that private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise, but I already knew that.

As a mathematical evolutionary theorist, I use abstract methods to investigate how the structure of an evolutionary process determines whether social behaviors like cooperation can be successful. So I was excited to learn over the holidays (from David Carballo, archaeologist and family friend of my partner) that archaeologists are pursuing the same question from an entirely different angle.

As far as I can understand it, there is a new field of research looking at whether evolutionary game theory (EGT) can help explain major societal shifts. One article looks at the sudden appearance of communal architecture projects in Andes mountain societies (in the second and third millenia B.C.E.) that previously had few permanent buildings. These new constructions appear to be built for use by the entire community, and their construction clearly required large-scale cooperation. Using a combination of EGT and historical arguments, the authors posit that the labor for these projects was not coerced. Rather, the chiefs of these societies were able to mobilize cooperation by enforcing norms of fairness and justice. In their words:

Cooperation does not magically emerge. However, when the appropriate conditions are met, cooperation becomes the adaptive choice of people assessing the costs and benefits of participating in specialized versus nonspecialized labor, loss of autonomy, gain in material wealth and nonmaterial benefits, and degree to which the production and redistribution process is “fair.”

While all cooperative systems are vulnerable to “free-riders”, who attempt to receive benefits without contributing, the authors argue that the combined mechanisms of punishment and group selection (see this post) were sufficient to overcome this difficulty.

I’m excited to see this field taking off in so many different directions, and I’m looking forward to see what new intersections develop!

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.