plektix - The Emergent Fool

The Emergent Fool

Game theory and Obama’s mistake...

Posted by plektix in Games, Politics on 12 5th, 2010 | View Comments

Like many of my fellow lefties, I’m disillusioned with current US politics. In my view, we have a president who pursued an admirable, ambitious agenda for two years, but failed to win sufficient public support for his initiatives, and wasted too much time searching for nonexistent common ground. Now,...

Don’t wait for superman...

Posted by plektix in Education on 10 18th, 2010 | View Comments

This weekend I saw “Waiting for Superman” a documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim of Inconvenient Truth fame. It’s ostensibly about how great teachers are the key to saving our education system. But what struck me, over and over, was its complete lack of understanding of or regard for...

Eusociality and a blow to kin selection...

Posted by plektix in Cooperation, Evolution, Uncategorized on 08 25th, 2010 | View Comments

A new paper hit the internet today. “The Evolution of Eusociality” by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson re-frames an old evolutionary question and strikes a blow in an increasingly heated debate. Eusociality is when individual organisms act as a collective reproducing unit. The...

Is a new mode of evolution emerging?...

Posted by plektix in Evolution, Memes, Technology on 08 24th, 2010 | View Comments

Evolutionary theorist Susan Blackmore argues in the New York Times (and elsewhere) that a new form of evolution is emerging, based on the replication of digital information. This would be the third mode of evolution that we humans are aware of. The first is, obviously, the biological evolution of life. ...

Update on Game-Based High School...

Posted by plektix in Complexity, Education, Games on 07 29th, 2010 | View Comments

I wrote a while back on a high school that uses games as its primary pedagogical tool. NPR’s All Things Considered has a new report on the school. Excerpt: “In math, we’re traveling around the world,” says sixth-grader Rocco Rose, a student at Quest to Learn and a citizen of...

Quantum Reality and the Measurement Para...

Posted by plektix in Quantum on 06 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

I may be primarily an evolutionary theorist nowadays, but I have many interests, and this summer is proving to be a good time to explore some areas not directly connected to my need to publish. Lately I’ve been doing some reading on quantum mechanics, and what it tells us about reality. QM is...

The Future of Evolutionary Theory?...

Posted by plektix in Evolution, Mathematics, Models on 05 13th, 2010 | View Comments

Well… it’s been quite a month. This April I (a) successfully defended my PhD thesis, and (b) won a Templeton Foundation fellowship to work with Martin Nowak at Harvard for two years. For those who don’t know him, Nowak is one of the world’s top researchers in abstract evolutionary...

Symbolic Representation is the Key to Ma...

Posted by plektix in Evolution on 03 28th, 2010 | View Comments

I’m briefly coming up from the sea of thesis preparation (two weeks until defense!) to share this truly remarkable quote I just read: Consider the following: in the evolutionary course there have been a few great junctures, times of major evolutionary advance. Their hallmark is the emergence of vast,...

Gene-culture Co-evolution...

Posted by plektix in Culture, Evolution, Genetics on 03 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

A while ago, I wrote on the hypothesis that humans have essentially stopped evolving genetically, because of our cultural emphasis on keeping all humans alive, no matter how disadvantaged. The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective...

The Idea of Applied Mathematics...

Posted by plektix in Mathematics, Models on 02 25th, 2010 | View Comments

Mathematicians occupy an odd place in the public imagination, as objects of great curiosity and also great misunderstanding. TV and movies portray us as anything from eccentric to insane, though sometimes we get to solve crimes. But there is rather little public understanding of what mathematicians...

Evolutionary Game Theory and Archaeology...

Posted by plektix in Cooperation, Evolution, Games, Society on 01 5th, 2010 | View Comments

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)...

Highlights from the Year in Ideas...

Posted by plektix in Alternative Institutions, Artificial Intelligence, Crowdsourcing, Games, Mathematics, Philanthropy on 12 13th, 2009 | View Comments

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...

Book Review: LOGICOMIX...

Posted by plektix in Language, Mathematics, Media on 11 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

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

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...

Human Cultural Transformation Triggered ...

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...

Inferring Social Security Numbers from B...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 09 4th, 2009 | View Comments

An article in July’s PNAS investigates the possibility of predicting a person’s Social Security number from their birth date and place. Exploiting patterns in how SSN’s are assigned, authors Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross developed an algorithm which could correctly predict the first...

The Quandaries of Quantifying Complexity...

Posted by plektix in Complex Links, Complexity, Games on 08 27th, 2009 | View Comments

My good friend and computer scientest Kyle Burke has recently started a highly interesting blog on his research field: combinatorial game theory. The idea of this field is to use games as a tool for studying issues of complexity. Though his blog is only a month old, some important foundational ideas have...

The Criminalization of Poverty...

Posted by plektix in Government, Homelessness, Society on 08 9th, 2009 | View Comments

Barbara Ehrenreich had an excellent article in yesterday’s New York Times on the many ways that being poor can land you in trouble with the law. One striking example: ...

The Evolution of Bad Ideas...

Posted by plektix in Economics, Evolution, Incentives, Uncategorized on 08 3rd, 2009 | View Comments

It is by now common wisdom that our current financial crisis is due in large part to misplaced incentives in our financial system. Analysts and fund managers were rewarded for short-term thinking and risk-taking. If we can rework our financial system to reward long-term, careful planning, it is often...

Biodiversity and Entropy...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 06 28th, 2009 | View Comments

On Tuesday, my Erdos number dropped from infinity to four. That’s right: after four years of grad school, I am now officially published! The article, “A New Phylogenetic Diversity Measure Generlizing the Shannon Index and Its Application to Phyllostomid Bats,” by Ben Allen, Mark Kon, Yaneer...

A Middle/High School That Teaches Comple...

Posted by plektix in Complex Links, Education, Games on 06 11th, 2009 | View Comments

A new school is opening in New York for grades 6-12 that completely blows my mind. The Quest to Learn school combines games and complex systems in a way that pretty much would have made my life as a teenager. Hell, I wouldn’t mind going back to high school now if I got to go here. I’ll let...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 06 4th, 2009 | View Comments

This is just a brief note to let everyone know I’m spending the summer at IIASA, a scientific policy research institute located just outside of Vienna. IIASA focus on systems analysis of global problems such as climate change, land use, demographic changes, public health, ecology, and energy. They...

The Catholic Perspective on Evolution...

Posted by plektix in Evolution on 05 28th, 2009 | View Comments

As an occasional reader of science blogs, I can’t help but notice the extraordinary amount of time and space devoted to the debunking of Creationist and Intelligent Design “science.” Certainly there are good reasons for this: the poor reasoning and scant evidence behind such pseudoscience...

Nature Minus Humans?...

Posted by plektix in Causality, Culture, Interventions, Media, Politics, Scarcity / Abundance on 05 5th, 2009 | View Comments

From the “nothing is quite so simple” department, a Boston Globe article this week points out a hidden legacy of the conservation movement: The expulsion of native peoples from their land. ...

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...