2009 October - The Emergent Fool

Investing in Superstars...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Incentives, Innovation, Investing, Social Entrepreneurship, Trust on 10 30th, 2009 | View Comments

This is the first in a four part series. The other are here: part 2, part 3, part 4. Imagine you are in your early twenties, out of college several years and your best friend, who recently came into an inheritance of $300K cash told you they could think of no better way to invest the money than to...

Complex Systems Events & Groups...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Point of Order on 10 29th, 2009 | View Comments

There are way too many “happenings” in complex systems research, theory and application to keep track of everything, but here are a few of note that came across my desk recently… AAAI Fall Symposium – CAS & The Threshold Effect – Nov. 5 – 7, 2009 – Arlington,...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Asymmetry, Causality, Common Knowledge, Cooperation, Epidemiology, Memes, Mutual Knowledge, Psychology on 10 26th, 2009 | View Comments

The debate over vaccination is raging (c.f. Wired article) and it smacks of one of those conundrums that is unlikely to get resolved by scientific inquiry. I offer the following hypothesis and a way out of the dilemma. Hypothesis: Vaccination is something that is good at the societal level but bad at the...

Daniel Nocera’s Gift...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Energy, Health, Poverty, Scarcity / Abundance, Science, Social Entrepreneurship, Society, Socio-technical systems on 10 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

http://www.vimeo.com/8194089 I just saw the most important talk I have seen in 300+ TED, Pop!Tech, etc talks that I’ve watched. And at the risk of hyperbole, I will say that the worst case scenario is that Daniel Nocera simply wins a Nobel Prize (and yes, I’m willing to bet at even odds that it...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Government, Models, Social Entrepreneurship, Society on 10 21st, 2009 | View Comments

Ever wish you could reinvent the entire systems of government you live under without starting a costly war, revolution or having to win an election? No? Well, Patri Friedman has (wondered, that is). And so has a growing number of seasteaders, ordinary folks (and the occasional PayPal billionaire). Or...

Unsustainable...

Posted by plektix in Economics, Mathematics on 10 19th, 2009 | View Comments

The following question was given as a homework problem in a course I’m TAing: CNBC had an interesting program on the current financial crisis. They located one investor who noticed that since the late 1990′s housing prices have been growing 10 percent every year (that is, each year, the average...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Evolution, Invisible Etiology, Levels, Superorganism on 10 15th, 2009 | View Comments

This is a followup to Ben’s post on Human Cultural Transformation Triggered by Dense Populations. Too many links for this to be accepted into the comments directly… In thinking about these questions, it helps me to remind myself of the difference between evolution and emergence. Evolution...

Posted by plektix in Culture, Emergence, Evolution, Society on 10 12th, 2009 | View Comments

Biologically,modern humans first appeared 160,000 to 200,000 years ago. But the transition to complex human societies, with art, music, advanced tools, occurred a good deal more recently, and moreover, occured at different times in different parts of the world. An article in June’s Science magazine...

Oprah Knows Why You Are In Therapy...

Posted by Alex in Uncategorized on 10 9th, 2009 | View Comments

Is it any wonder most people go through more than one relationship before getting married? Do you really find the right person or figure out that it’s a system? Hollywood, what are you doing to us?!: “(OPRAH.com) — Tricia was depressed. That was her only problem. Although her life had...

A Theory of Scalability...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Alternative Institutions, Autocatalysis, Evolution, Interconnectedness, Interventions, Memes, Models, Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurship, Socio-technical systems on 10 7th, 2009 | View Comments

One of the hidden themes of The Feast this past week has been how to scale successful social ventures. This has been on my mind a lot recently as I have been working informally with both Self Enhancement, Inc. (SEI) and Decision Education Foundation (DEF) on this puzzle. SEI is extremely successful...

Black Swans Don’t Kill People, Bla...

Posted by Alex in Economics, Limits of Knowledge on 10 7th, 2009 | View Comments

Don’t throw the data mining baby out with the black swan. It’s what you DO with the data that creates problems, not the misunderstanding according to Taleb himself. If policy makers aren’t looking at this, they’re not changing anything: “So the central lesson from...

How Viagra is Like Your Mortgage...

Posted by Alex in Economics, Evolution, Government on 10 1st, 2009 | View Comments

A superb discussion of the need and risks of financial innovation. Evolution, complexity, simplicity, and why an equivalent of an FDA approval process may be just what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately critical thinking is probably still required: “We are told, particularly in the U. S., that...