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  Decision Education: A Call to Arms

  Rafe Furst 7:12 pm on January 27, 2010 | 1 Comments Permalink | Reply

  “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.

   
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  Whom Should I Interview?

  Rafe Furst 3:55 pm on January 26, 2010 | 4 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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?

   
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  Synthesis of Complexity Theory

  Rafe Furst 11:35 am on January 11, 2010 | 6 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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.

   
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  Approaching a Cure for Cancer

  Rafe Furst 11:00 am on December 28, 2009 | 3 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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
   
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  “Social Entrepreneurship has Complexity Written All Over It”

  Rafe Furst 11:44 am on December 15, 2009 | 3 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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

   
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  Non-Dualism

  Rafe Furst 8:58 pm on December 11, 2009 | 10 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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.

   
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  Convergence

  Rafe Furst 7:46 pm on December 5, 2009 | 18 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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.

   
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  Welcome, Kim Scheinberg!

  Rafe Furst 10:20 pm on November 27, 2009 | 1 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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.

   
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  Religion

  Rafe Furst 12:34 am on November 27, 2009 | 1 Comments Permalink | Reply

  In learning the history of various religions, it becomes clear that all religions are created to redress human suffering in whatever forms are ubiquitous during the founding. They are spread at a rate directly proportional to the suffering and directly proportional to the simplicity of the message.

  Given this formulation, what does it portend for the religions of Science, Democracy and Capitalism respectively?

   
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  How Many Calories for a Dollar?

  Rafe Furst 11:44 pm on November 20, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply

  Michael Pollan, as always, making perfect sense:

  Now watch Will Allen on urban farming…

  http://www.vimeo.com/7528071
   
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  Cultural Relativity

  Rafe Furst 12:47 pm on November 20, 2009 | 10 Comments Permalink | Reply

  When a person walks into a village and blows it up along with themselves we call it terrorism. But when a person drops bombs from a $100M fighter jet and blows up a village it’s somehow not terrorism. Why is that?

  This is an observation Laura made tonight that stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know why it did, I’m sure I’ve heard it before.

  Another thought that went through my mind was the question of what causes terrorism? The only single-word answer that I can think of which is not oversimplified is… imperialism. I’m sure I’d heard that somewhere before too.

  If you ever go to India, I highly recommend loading the movie Ghandi onto your iPhone to watch along the way. The power of his *ideas* is as unfathomable as the ideas are ancient and simple: non-violence; humility; service. Where have we heard these before? The better question is, what ancient belief system does not espouse them?

  Some would say imperialism is alive and well. Democracy and Freedom have replaced God and King, but the result is the same: bombs, death and suffering.

  Cultural imperialism is a real thing, a vestige of the standard kind. But I’ve come to understand what this means in a new way while in India. Where once I thought it meant selling our crap and pushing our values on “naive” and desperate people, I now realize that’s not it at all. Those who consume America’s culture are neither naive nor desperate. Cultural imperialism is looking at a stranger through your own cultural lens and refusing to consider that the problem is not reality but rather myopia.

  Everyone I know who had been to India told me two things: first, be prepared for the horrors of poverty like you’ve never seen before, and second, read the book Shantaram. Now it is quite possible that things have improved so drastically that I am unable to experience the stultifying nature of poverty one could even a decade ago. This would be extremely encouraging if true. But I suspect that economic uplift is only a small part of the puzzle.

  Shantaram is full of deep observations about India from an outsider’s perspective, one that captures it perfectly for me, both in the misplaced guilt and the myopia. An example:

  

  See and download the full gallery on posterous

  Now, before you go off on either the author or me for being an apologist for a morally tenuous state of affairs, consider this. How is it that in a population of 1.2 billion, most of whom are living in unacceptable conditions according to most Westerners, and who live side by side with extreme wealth, that theft and violence are very rare? And how is it that it is perfectly safe for a well-dressed Westerner to walk in any slum in Mumbai at any time of day or night? These are not fantasies of my own making, they are truths corroborated by everyone I talk to here.

  I see the masses of people sleeping in the streets, the kids with filthy faces playing in cow dung, the crippled beggars dragging themselves on the ground. They are all still here. But when you put your hands together, smile and nod at any one of them they will invariably do the same right back (and mean it).

  It’s hard for us Westerners to understand how different Indian culture is, but think about this for a moment. If you knew you would be reincarnated either as a more fortunate person or a less fortunate person (or perhaps a cockroach) based how you treated other people in this life, wouldn’t that change just about everything? How would you treat people who yell at you? What would you think of them? Would you feel anger (as you probably do today) or would you feel pity?

  Cultural imperialism isn’t the unconscious forcing of one culture’s values upon another. No, it’s the audicty and gall one must have to pass judgment on a person’s lot in life (”oh, isn’t that heartbreaking?”) without knowing anything at all about them, their loved ones or their culture.

  A final thought that has been playing on my mind recently. It’s been known for a least 2009 years that true leadership is about serving others, something that is echoed today in just about any lecture on leadership. So if this is true then we have to wonder: who is more powerful, the servant or the one being served?

   
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• 

  Egyptian Mummies Yield Ancient Secrets of Good Journalism

  Rafe Furst 9:17 pm on November 18, 2009 | 2 Comments Permalink | Reply

  This is based on an LA Times article here
  
  What strikes me most is how athlerosclerotic the science itself is.  Or perhaps it’s just the reportage?

  The opening line of the article is “CT scans of Egyptian mummies… show evidence of… hardening of the arteries, which is normally thought of as a disease caused by modern lifestyles….”  One of the researching cardiologist draws this conclusion: “Perhaps atherosclerosis is part of being human.”

  The LA Times reporter covering the story (Thomas Maugh) rightly points out at the end, “The high-status Egyptians ate a diet high in meat from cattle, ducks and geese, all fatty.”  Which of course entirely negates the hypothesis of heart disease being part of the natural human condition.

  It’s clear why the researchers — both cardiologists — would want ancient evidence to support the notion that heart disease is normal.  But the fact is that the preponderance of evidence around the world in epidemiology as well as cardiology indicates that diet and lifestyle are largely responsible.  Don’t trust me, just start digging around for yourself, it’s not hard to find the data.

  Okay, so researchers are trying to get their work into the mainstream, what’s new?  Any thinking person can see through their faulty logic, right?  Not according to all the research on behavioral psychology.  That’s why I’m mostly disappointed in the reporting as opposed to the research.

  Maugh and the LA Times bit so hard on this succulent morsel of pseudo-science that the net result is false information which is damaging to public health.  Had Maugh flipped his article upside down and lead with his commentary at the bottom, he would have come much closer to serving the public good with the dark leafy vegetables of truth.

  hat tip: @DannyHorowitz

   
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• 

  Investing in Superstars

  Rafe Furst 10:44 am on October 30, 2009 | 48 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 invest it in you.  Not the company you started, not as a loan, but invest it in YOU, as if you were a startup.  In return your friend said all they wanted was 3% of your gross income for the rest of your life.  Do you think you would take it?

  Now what if your friend said that they didn’t care what you did with the money or how much you made each year.  If you wanted to sit on a beach in Nicaragua learning to surf, go work in the Peace Corps, stay at home and do your art projects, whatever you want it would be fine, just as long as you made sure to always pay the 3% of whatever you make (as little as that may be).

  And finally, what if your friend said you could buy out of your obligation at any point for $6 million in cash.  Then would you take the deal?

  . . .

  Personal Investment Contracts

  . . .

  

  Personal Investment Contract

  Phil Gordon and I recently made such an investment in a person we both know very well, call her Marge.  The thing about Marge is that she’s one of these people you know — you can feel it in your bones — that she’s a superstar.  She may have a string of projects and startups that don’t end up producing much in terms of tangible results — in fact she already has.  But you know that all of this “failure” is simply building Marge’s brand equity.  She’s learning how to navigate in the world, how to build value (whether it be monetary value, social good, or however you define it).  She’s also making connections with people who are taking notice of her talent, love her undefinable qualities as a person, and who just want to somehow help her succeed in her life’s mission and be a part of her success.  Everyone who meets Marge knows it’s simply a matter of time before her success is tangible.  Maybe she’ll end up as a founder of a billion dollar startup, maybe her book will top the NY Times Bestseller list, maybe she wins a MacArthur Genius award.  Or maybe over the 40+ years of her career doing what she absolutely loves and was made to do, she will touch the lives of millions of people.

  From our perspective as investors, it doesn’t really matter what path Marge chooses or what twists and turns that path reveals.  We’ve already determined that she’s a winner and she will adapt accordingly.  The cash investment was intended to smooth out the earnings curve so that Marge won’t have to take jobs that don’t further her life goals just so she can eat and pay rent.  And even if she blows through the cash, she’s still gotta eat and pay rent, which means she will find a way to make money (while pursuing her dreams).  Maybe one year she makes $10K.  Down the road she herself inherits some money and coincidentally that same year is paid handsomely on a consulting gig and ends up making $400K.  Or perhaps she finds that she loves climbing the corporate ladder and steadily increases her salary from $50K to $500K over the course of 20 years.  Assuming Marge makes an income of some sort for 40 years, she only has to average $250K (in today’s dollars) for us investors to get our money back.

  Now here’s were it gets interesting for the investors.  It’s very unlikely that we will be negative on our investment over the course of Marge’s lifetime, unless she dies or becomes incapacitated (which happens of course; there’s no such thing as a risk-less investment).  And in poker parlance, we are “freerolling” to make a substantial return if she hits it big and/or she decides she wants to buy out.  But even if we don’t make a ton of money off of Marge, we know that our investment will have made a significant positive impact on the world.  Why?  Because we hand-picked her as “the one” out of the thousands of people we’ve met over the years to invest in.  Amongst those other there are surely many winners, they’re just not… Marge.

  . . .

  Simple, Flexible

  You are welcome to download and use the document above as you like, it’s hereby placed in the public domain.  Obviously Phil and I have to disclaim any responsibility for what you do with it, and we cannot give you any legal advice.  We are very comfortable that we are not breaking any laws or regulations and we’ve had a team of lawyers and personal agents vet and refine the basic template from both the investor’s standpoint and the investee’s.

  And sorry, we are not accepting applications nor will we consider investing in you.  But if you have people who believe in you and trust you as much as Phil and I do in Marge, then show them this blog post and convince them to invest.  The Personal Investment Contract (PIC) can be calibrated for just about any situation where the investor believes the person they are investing in is (a) a true superstar, and (b) completely trustworthy.  Here are the key numbers to keep in mind:

  • Investment Amount – This should be determined by the entrepreneur such that they feel like they have enough breathing room to pursue their passion for at least a couple of years, or longer if they feel like supplementing their income themselves.
  • Annual Return Payment – The idea is keep this low enough so as not to be a burden on the entrepreneur, but high enough to be attractive for the investor in combination with the Termination Amount.
  • Termination Amount – If the ARP is low, this should be high; if the ARP is high, this should be low.  It’s the slider that trades risk for reward.

  . . .

  Examples PICs

  • Example 1: Technologist or Business Person
    • Investment: $250K
    • ARP: 2%
    • Buyout: 10x ($2.5M)

  • Example 2: Social Entrepreneur
    • Investment: $150K
    • ARP: 5%
    • Buyout: 5x ($750K)

  • Example 3: Do Gooder or Research Scientist
    • Investment: $100K
    • ARP: 10%
    • Buyout: 1x ($100K)

  . . .

  Important Details

  Despite the fact that the contract is ridiculously simple (three pages!), there are some key details in the contract that we believe make this work.  The first is the clause that says the entrepreneur has to give the investor a year’s notice that they intend to buy out.  This is so that the investor can’t be cut out of a big, pending deal that closes soon after the entrepreneur buys out.  It’s possible that the entrepreneur gives notice but for whatever reason (turn of fortune?) can’t come up with the cash required a year later.  That’s fine, the contract stays in effect and the entrepreneur can give notice again in the future.

  The second important detail is that the Termination Amount isn’t really just the buyout multiple on the original investment but it also crucially includes the ARP times the net fair market value of all unrealized gains made during the course of the contract.  The reason for this is as follows.  What happens if the entrepreneur buys a house or invests in a business which becomes the dominant (or even just a significant) portion of their net worth by the time they want to buy out.  The investor rightly feels like they contributed to that gain and should get their fair share.  The entrepreneur may not want to (or even be able to) realize the gain at the time of the buyout, e.g. they still want to own and live in the house, or the business they invested in isn’t public yet.  But the investor shouldn’t have to take the worst of the deal.  Hence the fair market value assessment is made (by third party arbiter if necessary) and the investor gets paid.  For instance, consider a PIC using the numbers from Example 1 above.  Entrepreneur buys some property that appreciates by $20M, so the actual Termination Amount becomes ($20M x 2%) + $2.5M = $2.9M.

  There are sure to be loopholes that we didn’t close, and it would be great if you could bring those up in the comments section below so the template can be adjusted or variants of the PIC can be made.  Ultimately we decided that because we are investing in people we can trust, and we want to foster that sense of trust and fiduciary obligation, it was better to have the contract be short and to the point, rather than cryptic and air-tight.  Yes, there could be problems down the road, but then again if one party really wants out of a contract or wants to bend the rules in their favor they will be able to.  We’d rather enter into a handshake agreement where we are partners in the success of a budding superstar — as motivated to help them achieve their goals as they are to leverage our resources, experience and connections — than to take advantage of someone because of their temporary circumstances.

  . . .

  Replicate, Don’t Grow

  The first thing that angel investors or venture capitalists think about (once they decide they like the model) is how can they create a fund to achieve scale.  Caution! This way there be dragons.  A PIC is fundamentally a personal investment reliant on mutual trust and respect, not a mechanical device suited to turn into a factory.  PICs can achieve scale, but it will happen from the bottom up, rather than top down.  That is, they are meant to replicate, not grow.

  . . .

  Feedback

  If you have any feedback or experience with this sort of investment, we’d love to hear it!  Share your stories in the comments below.

  . . .

   
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• 

  Complex Systems Events & Groups

  Rafe Furst 8:30 am on October 29, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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, VA
    • Schedule ; Facebook Group ; LinkedIn Group
  • Call for Contributions: Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems on Self-Adaptive Systems: Models & Algorithms
    • Submission deadline: December 15, 2009
  • Teleconferences on Complex Systems: free and open to anyone

  If you know of other “happenings” feel free to post them in the comments and may highlight them in a future post.

   
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• 

  Inoculating Against the Anti-Vaccine Meme

  Rafe Furst 6:27 pm on October 26, 2009 | 5 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 individual level.  That is, it is a tragedy of the commons.  You want all your neighbors to get vaccinated so they don’t pass on the germs to you, but there is enough risk from the vaccination process (at least for certain ones) that you’d rather not do it yourself.

  The mathematics of the commons tragedies suggests that there are two ways out.   One is to change the payout/incentive structure, in other words, make the vaccine’s less risky to the individual, or at least change the perception of the individual risk (as the Wired article suggests).  The problem with manipulating perception is, what if you’re wrong?  The marketplace of ideas can be efficient, crowd wisdom can be greater than individual understanding.  And even in the cases it’s not, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain alive.

  The good news is there’s another way out.  Just as with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you can iterate.

  What would this mean in the case of vaccines?  It would mean that as a society we must recognize that if we “play the game” enough times we will find that not vaccinating as a whole leads to poorer outcomes to the the individual.  That means YOU.  And thus it becomes recognized that taking the “I’m not going to vaccinate” stance is immoral, or at least unacceptable.  Sure there will be “defectors”, just as there are people who don’t vote.  But those who don’t vaccinate — just like those who don’t vote — do so quietly.  They don’t shout it from the rooftops or let their neighbors know.  And sometimes they even lie and say that they did vote when they really didn’t….

  The level of defection is inversely proportional to the level of transparency — the less your neighbor can find out about your behavior, the more likely you are to defect.  Thus, we solve the dilemma by making public the record of everyone who vaccinates, along with their address.  Those not on the record are assumed to be defectors.

   
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• 

  Daniel Nocera’s Gift

  Rafe Furst 4:33 pm on October 23, 2009 | 4 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 happens in under 10 years from today).  But if the system is able to scale through replication, it will be at least as important as penicillin in terms of ending human suffering and will have a bigger impact on the world as a whole.  Here’s why:

  • Input: Water (clean, saltwater or dirty water)
  • Outputs: Electricity + Pure drinkable water
  • By products: nothing (other than what was in the water)
  • Resources required to assemble: all abundant and most have substitutes
  • Knowledge required to assemble: simple
  • Cost to assemble: relatively cheap

  Essentially what Nocera has done is reverse engineered and re-created a super-simplified photosynthesis process.  It’s a closed loop (i.e. autocatalytic) so it’s actually more efficient to run his reactor on a fixed amount of pure water.  But if you want you can use a flow of new water (say, parasite infested water) and as a side effect you get clean water out; all you have to do is have a way to dispose of the impurities that get separated.  You could do that manually if necessary, but once you have energy, that becomes easier and may be automated.

  Here’s why I’m really excited.  The system is so simple that it can be built and maintained locally by the bottom billion, for the bottom billion, without the need for an electricity grid.  Sounds like a micro-franchise model that could be taught at places like Barefoot College and could simultaneously create economic development and solve the world’s biggest humanitarian problem, both as a side effect.

  And it can be purchased for home use by the rest of us taking our homes off the grid, paying for itself and becoming cash flow positive at some point.  Same for businesses.  What about portable energy, like for cars?  Well, if you have a surplus of energy and water, you can charge hydrogen fuel cells.  Or you can spin up flywheels, store electricity in lithium ion batteries, etc.

  The biggest risks I can see are twofold:

  1. There crops up some collateral effects of running the system indefinitely that emerge over time and at great scale (e.g. some trace byproducts which were too subtle to notice get concentrated to the point of becoming toxic).
  2. The patent on the invention creates a roadblock to replicating the system across the globe.

  The reason I’m willing to wager on the Nobel Prize is that I don’t think these risks would sink that ship.  I think it’s worthy of a Nobel in one of the sciences already.  While those can take decades to be awarded, I am comfortable about the 10 year mark because as we all know, the Nobel Peace Prize is winnable in 10 months.

  Are others as excited about this as I am yet?  Here’s a clue: when the president of MIT learned about Nocera’s invention she called just one person to bring it to the world, someone she thought could understand just how big it is and someone who could properly shepherd it and nurture it.  He’s a venture capitalist who at one point had been a world-changing inventor himself.  His name is Bob Metcalf, and he invented ethernet, the communication transport mechanism of the Internet.

   
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• 

  Switching Government Service Providers

  Rafe Furst 2:46 pm on October 21, 2009 | 5 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 to be more precise, as Patri explained at this year’s Idea Project confab [sign up now for next year, it may sell out quick!] they believe we should at least get to choose from some reasonable options.  Currently your choices are some form of democracy, autocracy, or theocracy.  And switching costs are high.

  What if you wanted to start your own sovereign nation in a tucked away corner of earth somewhere?  Problem is, every piece of land more than a few feet above sea level is already claimed by governments, private individuals or commercial interests.  Enter, the high seas.  Turns out there’s nothing stopping you from going out to international waters, building a platform, giant boat or floating something-or-other and starting over with government, completely from first principles.  Patri and Seastesd.org are committed to helping you do just that.  And before you go assuming that the best form for your utopian flotilla must be some form of democracy (social or otherwise), consider all the unsolvable problems that face even your very favorite “government service provider” today.

  So with that in mind, I’ve invented a new form of government that I’m putting in the public domain for any would-be seasteaders, guerilla factions or velvet revolutionaries to use as they see fit.  Don’t thank me now, just send postcards from time to time.

  ---

  •

  Valuestan

  “Having a nice life… Wish you were here!”

  •

  Principle 1: Values First

  • Rather than assert that there are such things as Inalienable Rights (or even Rights at all), recognize that there exist a set of  Shared Values which can be explicitly stated.  It is the Shared Value Statement (SVS) around which the State is organized.
  • To be a Citizen you must uphold and abide by the SVS.  You may renounce Citizenship at any time.
  • The SVS may be amended (process TBD by founders; process subject to amendment by Citizens).  It is understood that any amendment is likely to turn some Citizens into non-Citizens.
  • Any non-Citizen who is visiting or residing in the State is to be treated — and act — AS IF they were a Citizen.

  Example values: Empathy; Discipline; Group Harmony; Consensus; Individualism; Personal Freedom; Happiness; Respect; Gratitude; Absolute Truth; Relative Truth; Parsimony; Efficiency; Sustainability; Education; Personal Improvement; Democracy; Meritocracy; Marketocracy; Autocracy; Theocracy; Ends Before Means; Means Before Ends; Aesthetic Beauty; Entertainment; ad infinitum.

  It’s clear that Values are soft, not hard like Rights.  And that any particular set of Values will, to a greater or lesser extent, conflict.  The SVS is an unordered finite set.  Relative significance of Values is unspecified by the SVS and can only be known by inference from practical implementation via Principles 2 and 3.

  It is up to the Citizenship to determine what values belong in their SVS.  Some sets of values will be inherently more stable than others, and some are simply not viable.  But it is a category error to suggest that some SVSs or states are more moral than others.  Morality is internal to the State and relative to Shared Values.

  . . .

  Principle 2: Positive Incentives Before Laws

  • Where possible, formal positive incentives (economic, social and otherwise) will be used to shape individual action.
  • Where such incentives are impractical or undesirable, formal laws may be created.
  • Laws trump incentives and should be used sparingly.
  • The entire set of formal incentives and laws (i.e. the Formal Code) is meant to embody and prioritize the SVS.

  How the FC is arrived at, amended and implemented will vary from state to state, and is to be in accordance with the SVS.  If Democracy is part of the SVS you would presume to see some form of voting mechanism.  If Democracy is not on the SVS but Consensus is, you might expect the FC to be determined by a jury-like process.  And so on.

  . . .

  Principle 3: Practical Wisdom

  It is recognized that Principles 1 and 2 are not enough by themselves to create a good society.  To wit: our loss of moral wisdom.

  Therefore, it is the Responsibility…

  • …of each Citizen to be a moral exemplar always and embody practical wisdom
  • …of the State to celebrate moral heroes and create a culture of moral action

  . . .

  Principle 4: Non-Human Agents

  It is recognized by the State that there are non-human agents that exist in the world, some of which exist in the State, and that they do not necessarily have the same motivations or moral capacity as humans.

  Examples of non-human agents include: corporations, governments (the State, other sovereign states, local governmental bodies within the State), military systems, market systems, exogenous non-state actors (e.g. terrorist groups), religions, cults, sociotechnical complexes (e.g. military-industrial complex, academia-medical-regulatory complex, DDoS attacks, crowdsources), technological agents (e.g. software viruses, robots).  New forms of non-human actors are emerging at an accelerating rate, and are largely unpredictable.  So-called “artificial intelligences” are of particular interest and concern.

  Non-human agents are good at responding to incentives, but not good at responding to laws or moral intuition.  The proper treatment of non-human agents — including and especially the State itself — is recognized as important, especially as it pertains to the legal system.

  The treatment of non-human agents as Citizens in Fact may be a threat to a good society.  For instance:

  • Should Corporations be treated as Persons (as they are in the U.S. legal system for many purposes) ?
  • Should the State or local governments be party to lawsuits?
  • Should there be a para-governmental system designed to protect humans inside the State? the State itself? the SVS? humans not in the State?  humanity as a whole?
  • What should be done about non-human agents which threaten the State from (at least partially) inside (e.g. military-industrial complex) ?

  . . .

   
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• 

  Comments on Human Cultural Transformation

  Rafe Furst 10:04 am on October 15, 2009 | 5 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 happens whenever you have a population of agents with heritable variation and differential reproduction rates. There are at least two types of emergence, both of which can create new types of agents. Various self-reinforcing mechanisms lead to stronger and more stable agency. We may not even recognize the emergence of nascent agents for what they are until said agency (or coherence) becomes strong enough. For instance, many people have a hard time wrapping their head around cultural agency of any form.

  Obviously none of us on here have a problem with the concept of non-human agency, but as Alex and Ben collectively point out, cultural agents depend on human agents for their very existence.  Yet as they become more coherent they inevitably come into conflict with human agency (i.e. what’s good for the organization diverges from what’s good for its constituents). This is the fundamental yin-yang dynamic of the creation of new levels of organization and complexity.

  It is worthwhile asking what the future holds for humanity. This is what Kevin and I were on about in this whole superorganism and singularity thread:

  • Superorganism and Singularity
  • Superorganism Considered Harmful
  • Response to Superorganism Considered Harmful
  • Superorganism as Terminology
  • Superfoo
  • Focusing on Autonomy
  • Going Meta on Autonomy

  Summary is:

  1. we disagree on whether there will be a single overarching Gaia-esque Super-agent on earth or whether there will just be a rich ecology of many interacting “small s” super-agents with no strong “big S” Super-agent
  2. we disagree on how to measure “autonomy” so we can’t come to a consensus on what life will be like for humans
  3. we didn’t really dive too deeply into the extent and nature of interaction between human agents and super-agents

  This last point is interesting to me since it appears from the evidence that as each new level emerges, several things happen:

  • communicative interactions between higher level and lower level agents increases
  • level boundaries become less strict so that levels “overlap”
  • the amount of co-evolution between the lower-level population and higher-level population — i.e. multilevel evolution — also increases

  To make this claim more concrete, compare for instance the difference (in the above regards) between these three dyadic systems:

  A) atom –> molecule

  B) cellular organism –> multicellular organism

  C) human –> corporation

  All thoughts, disagreements, questions welcome…

   
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• 

  A Theory of Scalability

  Rafe Furst 12:46 pm on October 7, 2009 | 7 Comments Permalink | Reply

  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 in the Portland locale where they began 25+ years ago, achieving 98% high school graduation rate (working against hard socioeconomic realities).  Like with many models that are very successful “in the small”, the biggest challenge is to translate that same success to larger scales (e.g. all across America, or all around the world).  DEF is attempting to build scalability into its model from the start, and has found that this is extremely challenging.

  In thinking about this I am reminded about a duet of innovators who spoke at the Pop!Tech conference last year about scaling.  Both Bunker Roy and Paul Polack have some profound lessons to teach us about scalability.  You will learn these lessons by watching Roy talk about Barefoot College and by watching Polack talk about his Out of Poverty approach (also see BarefootCollege.org and PaulPolack.com).  But despite all of the incredible wisdom to be gleaned from observing how Roy and Polack achieve scale, I’ve been wondering about how their success can be translated to other realms.

  Replicators

  In creating a general theory of scalability, I think there is a key conceptual anchor from Susan Backmore’s TED talk on the third replicator.  Now, I have to pause here because as simple and great as the universal Darwinism principle is, I know from conversations that many people have a really hard viewing evolution in non-biological systems as anything more than a good metaphor.  It’s hard for most people to see that “true evolution” — the kind that Darwin was talking about — is actually what is happening in these non-biological systems.  I will address this in detail in a later post, but ask that you indulge me for the time being so that we can talk about replicators.

  When we talk about scaling sociotechnical systems, really we’re talking about one of two things: either growing the original system to handle “more”, or replicating the original system (or enabling it to replicate itself) with appropriate variation for the new context.  Growth models are the more familiar and comforting to governments and policy makers for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has noticed how scared these types get when faced with systems that scale via replicators.  Formal organizations (corporations, non-profits, governments, anything with a legal structure or formal set of rules) are growers; networks of cooperating agents (open source software, social change movements, revolutionaries, anything that is formed in a grass-roots / bottom-up manner) are replicators.

  I am not here to argue that either type of system is dispensable, indeed they are both essential.  I will leave it as an unproven conjecture that we are at a point in history wherein the ecology of sociotechnical systems is dominated by growers that are straining and stretching to the edges of their dynamic range.  Societal edifices are crumbling under their own weight, and are thus vulnerable to subversion by an algal bloom of replicators in their midst.  For those that want the argument and evidence, go read The Chaos Point by the grandfather of complex systems theory, Ervin László.

  And I will leave alone in this theory of scalability the entire grower side of the equation.  It’s been systematized and refined since at least the days of Machiavelli;  we know it today as management science.  Instead I want to suggest that there is lacking an entire half of the formalization project for a unified theory of scale, and that’s a formal model for scaling via replication.  The reason this formalism has eluded us for so long is the same reason Darwinian evolution is so hotly contested: it requires a fundamentally different way of thinking than the Western analytic tradition is based on.  That’s not to say that the complex systems paradigm is not scientific, just that the scientific method as it exists today has not yet incorporated the bottom-up, emergent calculus required to be complete.

  The first question we must ask is what exactly is being replicated, and only then we can ask how that replication is achieved.  Blackmore names three classes of replicators which I would like to refine by pointing out (as she does) that these are really self-replicators.  In her TED talk she observes that biological self-replicators exist (i.e. what we normally refer to as “life”), that mental self-replicators do indeed exist (though most people don’t take this notion seriously enough yet), and that technological self-replicators are in the process of being born.  If we think about it though, it is easy to see that certain forms of this third replicator already exist: computer viruses, bot nets (e.g. as are used in DDoS attacks), digital agents in artificial life simulations and genetic algorithm systems, and others.  What Blackmore was hinting at with the her more restrictive definition of technological self-replicator is one in which the artifact being replicated has a physical form (as opposed to digital information form).

  I must digress here for a moment to point out that it is a red herring to try to neatly circumscribe the system being replicated (the “artifact” or agent) from its environment.  In reality there is no such thing as a true self-replicator; there are always some resources or information that is outside the self-replicator that is required for replication to occur.  Neither the chicken nor the egg can recreate itself.  And if you (rightly) view the chicken/egg system as the thing self-replicating, you only need observe that food is also essential (as are many other things) for replication to occur.  Given this truth in the realm of biology, is it really so far fetched to view digital cameras self-replicating technological agents, that is replicators of the third kind?  Sure they require humans, manufacturing processes and other technology from their environment to replicate, but I’ll reiterate that there are no biological life forms either that are entirely self-replicating.  (This blog post puts an even finer point on it all, if you are still not convinced).

  Principles

  The scaling brilliance of Bunker Roy and Paul Polack was hard-won, after many years of solving specific problems at the bottom.  It was only after gaining a deep understanding all of the interacting subsystems was it possible for each of them to engineer an overall system that was scalable via replication.  Looking at various attempts to scale sociotechnical systems, both successful and unsuccessful, a pattern starts to emerge of the key principles and dynamics.  Here are a few:

  • Counterintuitive: Brilliant solutions are only obvious in retrospect.  Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious.
  • Self-Replicators: It is important to identify the parts of the system that are — or that can be made to be — self-replicating.
  • Fecundity: Digital information replicators are more easily replicable than mental constructs (i.e. memes), which are in turn more easily replicable than organizations of humans.
  • Mutation: The more fecund the replicator, the easier it is to co-opt for ulterior motives, and the more likely it is that random variation will throw the overall system off course.
  • Environment: It is easy to mistakenly believe that a prospective environment is suitable for replication when it’s not.
  • Side-effects: With any complex dynamic process there are always side-effects. If ignored, this usually leads to collateral damage, but on the flip side there is usually an opportunity to accomplish other goals and turn side-effects into new benefits.

  In thinking about how to engineer a system to bring solar electric installations to rural villages around the world, it is counterintuitive to think that poor, illiterate grandmothers (with no formal education and very little social standing in their village) could learn to be solar engineers.  To further think that they could be taught by illiterate trainers (who don’t speak the same language) is crazy.  Until Bunker Roy proved it was possible.

  Microcredit was crazy too, until Muhammad Yunus proved that it wasn’t, and then it was obvious.  So obvious in fact that it became a viral meme and has spread all over the world.  The concept of microcredit is a very fecund self-replicator.  Unfortunately, the practice of microcredit in many places has ignored the nuances of different environmental contexts and unintended side-effects.  Add to that a high mutation rate: the model being tweaked to confer greater benefit to lenders (at the expense of borrowers); the introduction of middlemen who screw up the incentive structure and unwritten social contracts; etc.  The net effect has been that in some areas microcredit has been a net negative to the economy, and especially negative to the borrowers, whom the model was originally designed to help most.

  Polack’s franchise model (an indeed all franchise models) are inherently replicators.  They are also good self-replicators because customers and other locals get exposure to the idea of becoming an entrepreneur themselves. And some of them end up as franchisees.  That is replication.  But to move from solving one problem (e.g. clean drinking water) to solving a very different one (e.g. locally available energy), new technologies that are also “radically affordable” have to be created on a regular basis.  And this type of innovation does not self-replicate.  So Polack created an entirely separate institution, the non-profit R&D lab, specifically to tackle the problem of replicating franchises (i.e. going from an electrochlorinator franchise to a solar concentrator franchise).

  Applications

  With this nascent framework in mind, I’d like to invite you to evaluate some of the social ventures that I encountered at The Feast (and a few of my favorites from Pop!Tech last year) and see if you can predict how scalable their model will be based on the replicator principles above.  And in cases where they have achieved some amount of scale (like charity: water and frontlineSMS), can you explain their success using the theory?

  • SHE (Feast talk Session #3 starting 0:46:30)
  • charity: water (Feast talk Session #4 starting 0:01:30)
  • frontlineSMS (Feast talk Session #3 starting 0:25:45)
  • Yellow Brick Road (Feast talk Session #1 0:31:37)
  • 9th Ward Field of Dreams (Feast talk Session #4 starting 0:59:20)
  • Change.org (Kitchen)
  • International Transparency Solutions (Kitchen)
  • Madecasse (Kitchen)
  • Parent Earth (Kitchen)
  • Srina (Kitchen)
  • TrustArt (Kitchen)
  • VotaVox (Kitchen)
  • Global Citizen Year (Pop!Tech)
  • Vittana (Pop!Tech)

  I would love to hear your thoughts, both on the specifics of these ventures, and on the theory of scaling through replication.

  ---

  
  Big shout out to the newly formed Brains of Change group whose speakeasy jam session helped crystallize many of these thoughts: Daniela Papi of PEPY - Taryn Miller-Stevens of StartingBloc -Daniel Epstein of Unreasonable Institute.  Be sure to follow their sailing trip around Madagascar as part of the #spintheglobe initiative!
  

   
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• 

  The Limitations & Dangers of Incentives

  Rafe Furst 7:30 am on September 14, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply

  

  If you liked this, check out these posts:

  • Behavioral Economics with Dan Ariely
  • Management 2.0
  • Executive Compensation
  • World’s Most Ambitious Crowdsource
  • My Favorite TED Talks of TED 2009

   
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• 

  The Link Between Food & Healthcare Reform

  Rafe Furst 1:26 pm on September 13, 2009 | 10 Comments Permalink | Reply

  Also must-read this Sunday is Michael Pollan’s NY Times Op-Ed piece from Wednesday.  Nice cap to my week of ranting on the dismantling of rationality when it comes to lifestyle choices that directly impact one’s health, here and here.

   
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• 

  “Bad people do bad things”

  Rafe Furst 7:44 am on September 10, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply

  In listening to this account of Hemant Lakhani, convicted in 2005 of illegal arms dealing, I was reminded of another This American Life episode about Brandon Darby.  Underlying both stories are accounts of seemingly incompetent, misguided, would-be bad guys who were actualized on a path of evildoing by law-enforcement agents during sting operations.

  What I found most interesting was the quote in the title of this post, said by the prosecutor in the Lakhani case.  This was his justification for why it was okay to have the U.S. military supply Lakhani the weapon that he was convicted of illegally dealing.  (If you listen to the story you will learn that Lakhani had been making promises to the informant of being able to procure weapons for a long time and he’d been unsuccessful on his own).

  While it seems on the surface that “bad people do bad things” — i.e. that’s how bad things get done, they require a bad person to do them — renowned Stanford psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, has a different theory, which he uses to describe what happened in Abu Ghraib:

  
   
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• 

  Rafe Issues Challenge to Statin Industry

  Rafe Furst 11:09 am on September 9, 2009 | 10 Comments Permalink | Reply

  I have been trying to get the straight scoop on whether statins actually decrease mortality and morbidity in a significant way and I haven’t been able to find any real evidence that they do.

  If you ask a cardiologist it’s clear that they believe unequivocally that statins work, mostly because they see what statins to do blood cholesterol levels.  But remember, cholesterol numbers in and of themselves do not matter.  They are a proxy variable for cardiovascular health.  Plaque buildup matters.  At one time blood cholesterol numbers were the only non-invasive indicator we had of plaque buildup, but that’s not true anymore.  However, drug companies are highly incentivized to prove that statins improve health.  So they fund lots of studies.

  Notwithstanding the systemic bias when there are profit motives and publication motives, we can turn to these studies and see if statins actually work.  The best way to remove bias is to look at large-scale meta-analyses, like this one.  If you simply read the conclusion you see “statin use was associated with significantly improved survival and large reductions in the risk of major cardiovascular events.”  However, if you decode the numbers you see that “significant” means that, for example, at age 65 you improve your changes of dying within the next four years from 8% down to 7% [hat tip to Kevin for helping me decode the numbers].  Now, is that really significant?

  If my cardiologist told me I needed to take statins and I said “prove it” and he produced that study above, I would absolutely not take them.  For one, there are known deleterious side effects (which could possibly account for the small overall mortality risk decrease).  For another, the average length of followup was only 4 years, whereas I am told that I am to take these drugs indefinitely.  How do I know that the long-term side-effects won’t overrun the long-term benefits sometime after the four year mark and thus increase my overall mortality risk?

  On the other hand, some small scale studies done by well-respected physicians indicates that you can reverse even advanced heart disease, as measured by the number of cardiac events (i.e. what really matters) through diet and exercise alone.

  You can object all you want to the statistical significance of small scale studies.  The real issue is, given the evidence, what would YOU do if you were diagnosed with heart disease or were at high risk of heart disease as measured by your cholesterol numbers?

  Since I’m not such a candidate, I made a friendly wager with a good friend of mine about a year ago who is.  He has been under a physician’s care for years because he has abnormally bad cholesterol numbers, and it runs in his family.  His doctors told him that he couldn’t control it with diet and that statins are the only way to go.  Problem is, he has a hard time tolerating statins (i.e. deleterious side effects).  Despite being on various statins, his numbers had barely budged.  The wager was designed to test the hypothesis that through dietary changes and exercise he could improve his numbers, a proposition that he claimed was impossible because he’d changed his diet in the past but it didn’t work.  My claim was that he was misinformed about what he was supposed to be eating and what he was not.  He got some advice from another friend who knows the literature.  Here is the result:

  Been on about an 80%ish vegan diet, taking 2 meds (that I’ve taken before to little effect) that are pretty mild as far as lipid management,my cholesterol on a recent test came back lower than it’s ever been:

  total chol = 165, hdl = 40, ldl = 110, triglyc = 80

  my LDL level was 270 less than a year ago, and my total chol was 350.

  Still kind of stunned, and I expect the results are at least somewhat anomalous, but even if they prove to be outliers to my normalized levels it will represent a bigger improvement than I could have ever had taking super-dosage statins.

  Here’s my challenge to the medical establishment: produce a meta-analysis of statins that shows absolute age-adjusted mortality rate decrease of greater than 10% over 20 years.*

  In the mean time, I’ll be eating healthy, exercising regularly, and making money from people who want to take the same bet as my friend.

  ---

  
  * Statins were commercially available in the U.S. starting in 1987, so the underlying data should exist.  And remember, going from 8% to 7% is a 12.5% relative decrease but only a 1% absolute decrease.  Since we care about human lives, not publishable results, isn’t it time that we start demanding absolute improvement from the medical community?
  

   
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• 

  The Problem With Processed Foods

  Rafe Furst 10:05 pm on September 8, 2009 | 11 Comments Permalink | Reply

  By design, most processing concentrates certain nutrients and biochemicals while removing others.  This skews the natural ratios that we have evolved to eat.   This leads to two phenomena which, over many years, seems like a bad idea to subject one’s body to:

  1. Over-concentration: Just because a little bit of something is harmless or even healthy for you, doesn’t mean that large quantities are better.  Often times it’s worse for you, and even toxic.  While supplements are an extreme example of this — consider Vitamin D toxicity, which is something that only happens if you get it in supplement form — processed foods in general can take a food which is a net positive and turn it into a net negative.  So, whereas whole oranges you can eat quite a bit of and improve your health, drinking lots of orange juice is bad for you (the sugar content badness outweighs the micronutrient goodness).
  2. The missing 99.99%: There are tens of thousands of phytochemicals and other micronutrients in whole vegetables and fruits.  So if you are eating a significant portion of your daily food intake in the form of processed foods, think of all the health-promoting biochemicals you are not getting.  Furthermore, you were evolved to eat the entire package (i.e. the whole food), and if you are eating processed foods you are only getting a handful (less than 0.01%) of these things that are good for you.  As Mark Bittman says, “It’s not the beta-carotene, it’s the carrot.”  The point is not that you need every single phytochemical every day but rather you don’t which ones you don’t need and which ones you do in what combination, etc.  And neither does anyone else.  So the rational strategy is to eat a variety of unprocessed foods to cover your bases.

  Here is Bittman’s TED talk, which is well worth watching:

  
   
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• 

  Welcome, Alex Golubev

  Rafe Furst 1:21 pm on September 4, 2009 | 0 Comments Permalink | Reply

  We have a new blog author on Emergent Fool that regular readers will recognize from his many insightful comments.  We look forward to his posts!

   
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