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Complexity Economics...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Economics, Incentives, Interventions, Markets, Memes on 02 28th, 2009 | View Comments

In Chasing the Dragon, I wondered aloud whether we could dampen boom-bust cycles in the financial system with an economic equivalent of a controlled burn. Kevin suggested that "generic countercyclical policies" might work. Underlying both mine and Kevin's thinking is the idea that you can possibly do...

Crohn's Disease...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Autocatalysis, Causality, Genetics, Health, Invisible Etiology, Nutrition, Psychology, Science on 02 27th, 2009 | View Comments

Debbie Maier asks us on the Upcoming Topics page to address Crohn's Disease. I don't know too much about it except that it's an autoimmune disease and has a complex, multi-causal etiology and pathology. In my reading on autoimmune diseases in general there seems to be a direct link between latitude an...

Individual vs. Systemic Causation...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Causality, Cognition, Politics on 02 25th, 2009 | View Comments

George Lakoff wrote an interesting piece on FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday called The Obama Code. I will focus on one of the sections in particular because it articulates something I've suspected for a while, but I've never heard anyone else give credence to the notion. Which is that one of the...

Chasing the Dragon...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Economics, Incentives, Interventions, Markets, Memes, Models, Non-linearity, Psychology, Stability on 02 24th, 2009 | View Comments

Kevin just posted about a great article by Felix Salmon in Wired. I underlined three quotes in my reading of it: "Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus." (Tavakoli) "...the real danger was created not because any given trader...

Twitter vs. Psychoanalysis...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Cognition, Culture, Evolution, Psychology, Technology on 02 24th, 2009 | View Comments

In this Times Online article, two psychologists and an author weigh in with their view of Twitter users as narcissistic and infantile: The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you...

Posted by kevindick in Economics, Markets, Non-linearity, Socio-technical systems on 02 24th, 2009 | View Comments

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, an excellent article in Wired about how one formula, embodying one assumption, catalyzed the meltdown. I recommend you read it and ponder it. There are many useful lessons for modeling complex systems in general. However, I will summarize for those of you short on...

Health and Fitness Q&A with Kevin...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Health, Interventions, Science on 02 18th, 2009 | View Comments

Whenever I have a question about health matters that is too complex for an MD or academic researcher to get right, I ask Kevin. Nobody I know has a better combination of broad-based current knowledge of the primary literature, plus a whole-system view and understanding of compex dynamics, plus the...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Crowdsourcing, Economics, Government, Limits of Knowledge, Politics on 02 18th, 2009 | View Comments

Has anyone read the entire text of the stimulus package? The ambiguity of this question is intentional. For those reading this post who have read the entire text, would you please comment on it? What are the highlights, what are the important hidden details, do you think it will work, whatever you want to...

My Favorite TED Talks of 2009...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 02 17th, 2009 | View Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA-zdh_bQBo] My other favorites were these: Tim Berners-Lee Bonnie Bassler Rosamund Zander Willie Smits Dan Ariely Liz Coleman I'll post their talks when they come out, but you can check them out from the program guide in the mean time. What were your...

What is the Best Idea Ever?...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Emergence, Evolution on 02 6th, 2009 | View Comments

Daniel Dennett and others have called Darwin's theory of evolution the best idea anyone has ever had. That means that all the ideas that Socrates, Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein ever had, plus all the ideas that everyone else has ever had are also rans. It would be impossible to really justify such a...

Thought of the Day...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Common Knowledge on 02 4th, 2009 | View Comments

We talk about how we are all one, more similar than we are different. And of course it's true, but... Our lives are so different. And the gap is widening all the time. The diversity of experience increases, as the world becomes more complex, as we create new ways of existing, physically, mentally,...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Cognition, Education, Science, Science 2.0 on 02 3rd, 2009 | View Comments

Gary Marcus says he'd like for there to be a course on metacognition for kids: Call it "The Human Mind: A User's Guide," aimed at, say, seventh-graders. Instead of emphasizing facts, I'd expose students to the architecture of the mind, what it does well, and what it doesn't. And most important, how to...