2009 April - The Emergent Fool

The Emergent Fool

Halting the Spread of Swine Flu – ...

Posted by acebailey in Health on 04 30th, 2009 | View Comments

With flu the incubation period ranges from 24 hours to four days, meaning people often are infectious before they have symptoms. Unless already feeling ill, the majority of people assume they haven’t been infected and behave accordingly. Perhaps, instead, they should act as though they are infected...

One Company, Two Approaches to Cancer...

Posted by acebailey in Cancer on 04 29th, 2009 | View Comments

Dendreon has developed two interesting avenues in the fight against prostate cancer. The first is a therapeutic vaccine that in just released Phase 3 study results increased survival time by 4 months. The second is a small molecule that induces apoptosis in prostate cancer cells. ...

Cancer "Progress" Report...

Posted by danielhorowitz in Alternative Institutions, Cancer, Cooperation, Epistemology, Evolution, Health, Interconnectedness, Medical Breakthroughs, Science, Self-Fullfilling Prophecy on 04 27th, 2009 | View Comments

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for cancer research, as well as the efforts of thousands of the world’s best minds, progress in preventing or curing cancer has been almost non-existent. I find this unacceptable. We should be doing better. We need to be doing better. So what’s...

Stability Through Instability...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Causality, Economics, Government, Interventions, Limits of Knowledge, Markets on 04 26th, 2009 | View Comments

A friend pointed me to a doubly prescient talk given by George Soros in 1994 about his theory of reflexivity in the markets. Essentially Soros notes that there’s feedback in terms of what agents believe about the market and how the market behaves. Not groundbreaking, but he takes this thinking to...

A Step Closer to the Singularity...

Posted by acebailey in Singularity on 04 25th, 2009 | View Comments

Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of the melding of the computational speed of computers with the awesome software of the human brain is one step closer. The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the brain with the goal of “creating a physiological simulation for biomedical...

Best Reader Comment Award...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Autocatalysis, Blog Comment, Economics, Incentives, Interconnectedness, Markets, Non-linearity, Stability on 04 25th, 2009 | View Comments

I’m giving my “2009 Q1 award for most concise, lucid comment” to Paul Phillips for this gem: Viewed from a thousand miles, the financial system has a incalculably large incentive to fail catastrophically as frequently as it can do so without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. As...

Unwinding Mortgage Backed Securities...

Posted by acebailey in Crowdsourcing, Economics, Government, Markets on 04 24th, 2009 | View Comments

One problem facing financial institutions is not knowing what the Mortgage Backed Securities they hold are worth. One problem facing homeowners is that the abandoned and unmaintained house beside them is dragging down the value of their property. An anecdotal story from Modesto, Ca has two neighbors getting...

Placebo Effects: Marijuana and the "...

Posted by danielhorowitz in Culture, Psychology, Science on 04 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

Many users, and friends of users of marijuana report experiencing a “contact high.” That is, they purport to experience some of the effects of marijuana simply by being in contact with or around those using marijuana. Virtually all users wrongly attribute this experience to the inhalation of...

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Culture, Economics, Epistemology, Incentives, Interventions, Limits of Knowledge, Markets, Non-linearity, Scarcity / Abundance, Social Entrepreneurship, Society, Stability on 04 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

A few articles on the economy that were sent my way recently. The Good: After Capitalism (Geoff Mulgan) “The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters.” I urge you to read this entire article, and leave your...

Welcome, Daniel Horowitz and Ace Bailey...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Point of Order on 04 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

Daniel and Ace just joined Emergent Fool as primary authors. You may recognize them from their frequent and insightful comments and hat...

Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Autocatalysis, Causality, Economics, Interconnectedness, Interventions, Management, Markets, Networks, Non-linearity, Politics, Self-Fullfilling Prophecy, Socio-technical systems, Stability on 04 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler. I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms. Here’s what Hubler...

Physics.Cancer.GOV...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Cancer, Cooperation, Government, Invisible Etiology, Science on 04 22nd, 2009 | View Comments

Yesterday, from the Director of the National Cancer Institute, addressing one of the two largest cancer research conferences of the year: NCI commenced a series of workshops that began to bring aspects of the physical sciences to the problem of cancer. We discussed how physical laws governing short-range and...

Crowdsourcing Election Verification, par...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Crowdsourcing, Government, Interventions, Media, Politics, Voting on 04 22nd, 2009 | View Comments

In part 1 I advocated photographing your completed ballot before submitting it and posting your photograph online. Turns out that if you followed this piece of advice in Missouri, you might be in jail right now. Oops! Sorry :-) ...

Climate Change and Human Nature...

Posted by plektix in Climate, Cooperation on 04 20th, 2009 | View Comments

First, let me say how honored I am to be contributing to this blog and to the complex systems web community in general. A New York Times Magazine article raises an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. If you are, as I am, a scientist concerned about global climate change, you may find yourself...

Welcome, Ben Allen...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Point of Order on 04 20th, 2009 | View Comments

Ben Allen runs the Plektix blog and we’re trying an experiment to see if we can move towards a critical mass of like-minded complexity bloggers. To that end, Ben will be cross-posting his blog entries from Plektix for a while to this blog. If it works out to everyone’s satisfaction we may...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Invisible Etiology, Non-linearity, Science, Science 2.0 on 04 20th, 2009 | View Comments

I remember reading this Wired article in 1998 suggesting that the “debunking” of cold fusion may have been way premature. Last night, 60 Minutes did a pretty convincing piece claiming that more than 20 labs around the world have reported “excess heat” from cold fusion...

If Rafe Were In Charge: Major Medical Ed...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Cooperation, Economics, Government, Health, Interventions, Society on 04 16th, 2009 | View Comments

Kevin started an interesting discussion that included a thoughtful proposal for the problem of major medical care costs risk mitigation. You should read that here before reading my proposal below. Part 1: Major Medical Annuities. Federally mandated/funded (similar to SSI/Medicare), with a specific initial...

Technology Evolution Will Eclipse Financ...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Singularity, TED, Technology on 04 16th, 2009 | View Comments

This is a precursor to Singularity sort of...

Mass Adoption of Electric Cars...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, TED, Technology on 04 15th, 2009 | View Comments

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Leveraging Taxes for Civil Engagement...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Economics, Government, Incentives, Society on 04 14th, 2009 | View Comments

Dan Ariely had an interesting idea on NPR’s Marketplace today. Here’s the audio of the segment. The idea is to get tax payers thinking about how their tax dollars should be spent, thus getting them more civilly engaged. His research and that of others suggests that such activity would...

If I Were In Charge, Health Care Edition...

Posted by kevindick in Economics, Health on 04 13th, 2009 | View Comments

I have no desire to be in charge. I’d have to suffer too many fools and forego too much sleep. But I take comfort from knowing that, if I were in charge, I could confidently propose solutions to many of the common problems politicians hem and haw about. It’s not just that I’m smarter and...

Is the Party Over?...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Emergence, Government, Incentives, Politics, Society on 04 13th, 2009 | View Comments

I don’t like the Republican or Libertarian parties. But I’m also no fan of the Democratic party. In fact, I dislike all political parties and think they should be done away with. And while I’m not naive enough to think that this will happen, it makes me glad to see that the “post...

A Serious Solution to Carbon Emissions...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Climate, Science on 04 12th, 2009 | View Comments

As I’ve made clear before, I remain skeptical that carbon emissions pose a significant marginal threat of climate change. The likely climate sensitivity to CO2 is substantially less than the natural variability over human timescales. Seeing as how temperature trends over geologic time scales are...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Interventions, Visualization on 04 11th, 2009 | View Comments

There’s a cool little coffee table book called Microcosmos that features super magnified images of (mostly) living creatures. Here’s a sample: Macrophage (yellow) chomping on e. coli (red) [3000x magnification] ...

Asymmetry Is the Root of All Value...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Asymmetry, Cooperation, Economics on 04 10th, 2009 | View Comments

It’s not hard these days to find vignettes like this one (starting at minute 1:45) that describe a microeconomic chain of events that give you a glimpse into the recessionary dynamic. I think it’s a good starting point to explain my personal theory of why asymmetry is the root of all value...

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