If you can convince someone you are a superstar, there’s a way out.  But if you are having trouble making that case, then maybe you’d consider becoming a Social Capital Uncontractor.  What’s that, you ask?  I’m not sure, I’m making this up as I write, you can help…

Here’s my life.  I have a large and growing number of projects that I am working on, and an even larger (and more accelerating) number of projects I’d like to begin.  The critical bottlneck for me is not money but time.  It’s getting so bad that I don’t have time to even think about the management of these projects, let alone manage them.  Plus I hate managing projects and it’s definitely not my biggest strength.  I’m much better advising and asking questions that make you think differently.

On the other hand I have many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. who are underemployed, by their own definition.  I’ve thought about “clearing the market” by paying to get these projects done, but there are many issues involved.

Why I Won’t Pay You in Cash

• I refuse to pay a salary (it undermines the intrinsic motivation that is needed)
• I’m unwilling to have you in my life if you view me as a source of cash (if you need rent money, Starbucks is hiring, and there’s no time clock on my projects and any deadlines would be agreed upon upfront)
• If you’re thinking to yourself (no doubt, while you read this at the one internet cafe in your village before you trek home five miles with daily drinking water you just collected for your entire family) that there are no jobs paying what you need to survive so that you can work on one of my projects for no pay, you’ve failed the first test.

For all those who’ve passed and are still intrigued, I’m interested in doing an experiment in social capital.  I’d like to see how far I can get on my projects without my having to pay any cash and while reducing the time I spend currently on “the management issue”.

Why You Might Want to Work With Me

Eventually, if you are successful, you will become an equity stakeholder in one or more for-profit ventures that you oversee.  Or you may find a project that you go off and run by yourself.  Or I might pull some strings and recommend you for your dream job.

Uncontractors Only

Here’s the deal: there is no deal.  You either want to work with me in this capacity or you don’t.  There’s no commitment on either side, and no contract (stated on implied).  If you let me down, there will be no legal, financial (or otherwise visible) recourse.  Your social capital account with me will be diminished though.  And as it does, I pay you less attention, I stop recommending you to people, etc.  I start everyone with a positive social capital balance, but once you deplete it, it’s really hard to replenish.

Your Ideal Traits

• Emotionally self-sufficient
• Think like I do, but eager to accomplish stuff (vs just catalyze it like me)
• Can work well with others by generating, and using, your own social capital
• Communicate well via writing
• Communicate well visually (graphic design / video skillz are huge plusses)
• Technologically very savvy/geeky
• Only reinvent the wheel when it can’t be created with existing parts

Areas of Interest

Presentation Creation

• creating standalones like this and like this for subjects like cancer, social ventures, Science 2.0, whatever I blog about, etc.
• creating presentations on the same themes for live forums like TED, The Feast, Idea Project, etc.

Project Management

• Managing anything you see on RafeFurst.com and many more like them in development

Software Development

• e.g. email solution that sits on top of Mail.app or Gmail that adds functionality I want
• e.g. implementing crowdsourced rating system for my blog content (primary and comments)
• e.g. seeding the application space for A World of Goodies
• e.g. building out the vision on TruthMarkets.org (and combine with Goodies for EPIC WIN!)

System Administration

• Managing my domains, websites, blogs and integration thereof on an ongoing basis

How I’d Like to Work With You

Virtually, via a combination of skype video, email, and phone mostly.  Ideally, you just get shit done with as little interaction from me as possible, throw it on the web for the world to benefit, but do it in such a way that someone who knows me well could stumble upon it and “get it” in under two minutes and the first thing that would pop into their head would be: “OMG, Rafe would love this, I gotta call him and tell him about it!”

Time is Money

I love people who understand what this really means to me.  People who don’t understand it tend to write long emails and create work for me in having to read through stuff I don’t care about and expect me to respond appropriately.  People who do understand it, think really hard about how to get me interested in spending my limited time addressing what they’d like me to (and realize that it takes time away from my being with other people I care about too, helping other people with their also-important projects, etc).

Guilt works on me, but it very quickly depletes your social capital.  I take my obligations extremely seriously, which is why I hardly ever consciously create them for myself.

Money is Violence

I am not opposed to spending money to make things happen, I just view it — like violence — as a last resort.

I don’t want to pay you in cash because I don’t want to do violence to you.  My vision is that you make your money working hourly for someone else so you can meet your worldly needs, while at the same time, you work with me to get yourself to the Adjacent Possible where you can make increasing cash returns via the social value you add to the ecology.

I’m willing to pay cash for completed projects that meet my specification and exceed my vision.  I love crowdsourcing with cash prizes for this reason.  But I’m not going to pay you cash to complete the project because it’s a waste of your valuable time.

If you can figure out a model for a project that sustains itself financially and generates value (cash, social, some combo) then I’m willing to listen to your pitch as to why I should invest my money.  But realize that you start with two strikes against since I said at the outset this is about an experiment in pure social capital.

Want to Participate in the Experiment?

First and foremost I am looking for a single individual (a leader) who will oversee everything and not require oversight themselves.  If you fit into the big picture somehow but are not that leader, you can make your case below in the comments and prospective leaders will be able to evaluate whether they want to work with you.

Related posts:

1. Equity Micro-Investing
2. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit
3. “Social Entrepreneurship has Complexity Written All Over It”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am working with founder Nancy Conrad on creating a self-sustaining, growing funding mechanism to expand the mission.  Might be an endowment, might be for-profit investment fund, might be an incubator, might be some combination.  We need to talk to people who are veterans of funding innovation (VC, hedge fund and angel investor types), who are as passionate about the mission as we are, to figure it all out.

What the mission doesn’t say, but what I believe, is that this will change the educational landscape permanently and profoundly.  There a a million “ideas” for how to fix the broken system.  The only way change actually will happen is through setting up subversive alternatives that the discontent (that’s you and me) can switch over to and replicate with appropriate modification for their context.  Spirit of Innovation Awards actually works in a big way.

So if you are someone with experience in funding innovation, we’d like you to join us at The Innovation Summit, held this year at NASA Ames, Moffett Field, California, April 8 – 10, 2010. The list of people presenting and attending is impressive, more info here.

Whether or not you can come, if you have something to contribute (expertise, connections, money) to the goal of creating this funding mechanism, please either comment publicly below or privately via this link and use the subject “Innovation Fund”.  And let us know whether you will be at the Summit so we can loop you into the breakout session.

Related posts:

1. What I'm Working On: Supercharging Innovation
2. The Nature of Innovation
3. Revolutionizing Angel Funding

…[Can] we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.

Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!

I won’t belabor the point except to say that I view the increasing irrelevance and danger of statistical reasoning as the essential argument of The Black Swan, the fundamental reason why the global financial crisis occurred, and one of the main things we humans need to understand better if we are going to solve the problems facing the world.

No related posts.

What’s interesting about possibility-space is that tomorrow’s Adjacent Possible depends on the actions and choices we make today; it’s not symmetric and it’s nonlinear.  Certain actions generate more future possibilities than others.  In my experience, those actions tend to be the cooperative ones, ones that produce network effects: financial, social and otherwise.

Due to our evolutionary heritage, having come from a resource-constrained world, we may be predisposed to see the more competitive actions which tend to shrink the Adjacent Possible.  Whether or not this is a bias or an actual state of affairs, much of our thinking is based on scarcity, so we are drawn to actions that become self-limiting.

Here’s how I visualize the Adjacent Possible, and it has profound consequences for how I think and live my own life:

No related posts.

To get to “better” we have to be able to change our minds when we get stuck on locally maximal peaks.  That’s why I love this post on the Rationally Speaking blog called How to Want to Change Your Mind.  The techniques are simple, but profound, and harder to put into practice than they seem.  Here they are in summary:

• Divorce your belief from your self
• Think of disagreements as collaborative, not adversarial
• Visualize being wrong
• Take the long view
• Congratulate yourself on being objective, not on being right
• If you can’t overcome your competitive instinct, re-direct it

To these, I will add some of my own:

• Truly Listen – I am told that I am a good listener, but I am dismayed by how infrequently I truly listen, without judgment, and with compassion, to what people are saying.  Are you truly listening?
• Resist the urge to interrupt – How can I be listening as deeply as possible if I’m spending some of my mental energy looking for an opening to interject?  If I have something to say in response, surely it can wait until a few seconds after you stop talking.
• Ask how other person could be RIGHT – The habit of the scientist is to ask how things can be wrong; this is the hegemony of falsifiability.  Computers are the world champions of falsification (ask Kasparov).  This frees us humans up to do the creative part.  Isn’t that more fun than crunching symbols?
• Ask why the other person believes what they do – If the answer is “they’re an idiot” then try again.  That’s not very creative.  Nor is it likely true.
• Notice emotional reactions – Our mind-bodies know when something we hear resonates with our current biases or is in discord; the effect is emotion.  A negative emotion is a particularly good clue that there’s something interesting to explore…
• Notice language – Empirically I’ve noticed that I use the second person (“you’re wrong”) when my argument doesn’t speak for itself.  When I’m confident about what I’m saying, I have no trouble using first person (“I think”, “I feel”), or use simple statement of fact without making it personal at all.
• New models, no judgment –  There’s no harm in trying on new clothes, even if you decide to return them later.  What is harmful is trying on new pants and judging them without trying on the rest of the outfit first.  Hey, maybe you’ll be the belle of the ball if you give the new duds a chance…
• Embrace Paradox – Paradox and dualisms are your clue that you’re outfit doesn’t match.  Do you really think that “light sometimes behaving like a particle and sometimes like a wave” is the end of the story?

Hat tip: Eric Brooks

No related posts.

But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior.  This part is scary.  People around me don’t understand what I’m saying initially because I necessarily need new words, new language, to describe the new landscape.

And rather than start totally afresh with a new lexicon, I notice it’s more productive (personally and in communication) to overload old terms and let them slowly blend into their new meanings.  We all resist the strain, especially those who did not sign up for the jump through hyperspace.  They use the hill-climbing techniques that incrementally achieve higher ground (logical deduction, reductionism) in order to deny that we are in new territory at all and “prove” every new claim as false.  But unless we eliminate most or all of our old assumptions and embrace the new ones, these techniques will always yield inconsistency.

Thus, it seems like a good idea to resist the urge to bring to in the heavy logical artillery until it’s clear we are on the upslope.  In practice what this means is adding more novelty — but not as much as last time.  This is the Boltzmann technique of simulated annealing: start with a high degree of heat/randomness and turn it down slowly, all the while pounding away with the tools of logic and reduction.

What I mean by Science 2.0 is an intentional (and methodological) injection of novelty into the scientific method.  This is the beginning of a series of posts on the hows and whys of such activity.  I hope you will join in constructively and creatively.

Related posts:

1. Two Books On Cognitive Science You Should Read
2. Non-Dualism
3. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning

$10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform

• Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved
• Allows anyone to pledge additional dollars to someone else’s already-offered prize
• Uses crowdsourcing to vet which goals are worthy of public prize offer and which get top billing
• Uses crowdsourcing to determine if/when a prize gets awarded
• Has been used to award at least five prizes of one thousand dollars or more
• Does not have any pending lawsuits alleging that the platform violates U.S. federal or state laws
• Has an opinion letter from a U.S. law firm that the system does not violate U.S. federal or state laws

Note that this is different from Kickstarter in that (a) it’s the donors who set the goal not the recipient; (b) Kickstarter does not use crowdsourcing in its vetting process at this point.

$15K for Y Prize Platform

Same as the above except, instead of prizes, the cash award is an equity investment that gets executed once the stated goal is achieved (as determined by the crowd).  The platform must have been used to invest at least $10K in at least one for-profit venture in exchange for an equity stake in the venture.

Again, this is different than Kickstarter in that they only facilitate pure donations, not investment.  It’s also different from Unreasonable Finalists Marketplace as it currently exists.  I love both of these platforms and think they have worldchanging potential.  And both are eligible for my prizes here if they add what I’m looking for.  But I don’t think they will (they’ve got different fish to fry) so don’t be discouraged from jumping into the fray yourself!

$75K for 20%

I’d like a 20% ownership stake in a for-profit venture achieves the Y Prize Platform above.  I don’t know if my making such a “reverse offering” would constitute a violation of U.S. law or not, so I am not actually offering it yet.  What I am doing is suggesting that if you build such a system, and you start a for-profit company to monetize it, and you can convince me and my lawyers that your company is fully legal, and you are willing to offer me 20% of that company, then I’m willing to invest $75K.

Furthermore, this whole page of offers is null and void in any jurisdictions in which it’s not 100% legal (a determination that you need to make personally, I can’t advise you on this).  And I reserve the right to modify anything on this page at any point in order to assure compliance with all U.S. laws and regulations and to clarify my intent.

Finally, if you are a lawyer licensed in the U.S., I’d appreciate your posting any legal opinions you have on any of this via the comments section below.

Related posts:

1. X Prize Annuity Funds
2. Open Letter to Gotham Prize
3. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why:

1. Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.
2. Replication is a red herring anyway since it presupposes time (or at least well-ordered events).
3. I conjecture that the distribution of universes is unimportant, as long as all possible universes are represented in the multiverse (i.e. the distribution can be random).

It’s worth noting that this is a purely a metaphysical/logical argument and says nothing about specific physics or cosmologies.  One of the things that makes it hard to see why this is true from reading the Smolin/Susskind debate is that they bounce between the logical argument and various proposed, unimportant details (like whether black holes are the replication mechanism in question or not).

More importantly though, we hear scientists call one another “unscientific” whenever they propose an hypothesis that is unfalsifiable.  Here’s why I think that’s problematic:

• Ever since Popper, science has been obsessed with falsifiability, which is really about assuring consistency.
• Godel proved that there are true statements that cannot be proved.
• More specifically he unpacked “truth” into completeness + consistency and showed that we can’t have both simultaneously.
• Due to extant complexity (let alone potential infinity) completeness is out the window.
• If science is only concerned with consistency, then it’s a pointless endeavor; I can sit here all day and generate tautologies that are neither interesting nor useful.
• If science is about truth, then there needs to be a way of expanding the set of discovered tautologies along the completeness dimension as well.
• There are at least three formal logical systems which do that without sacrificing consistency: deduction, induction and abduction.
• Only deduction is formally falsifiable.
• But science relies on induction and many other forms of evidence too (statistical reasoning, clinical trials, simulation, storytelling, etc); this is the “democracy” Smolin himself referrs to in his TED talk.
• The structure of the Anthropic Principle is abduction.  So is the structure of Occam’s Razor.  And depending on who you believe Bayesian inference is either induction or abduction.
• Conjecture: Newton’s Calculus is a formalism based on abduction.
• Conjecture: strong emergence (aka novel emergence) is fundamentally abduction.  This may be why science has such a hard time with it.
• Conjecture: natural selection is fundamentally emergence/abduction.  This may be why Creationists have such a hard time with it.

There is no one true definition of what constitutes “Science.”  We hear reference to the so-called Scientific Method.  Ultimately, the holy Scientific Method is whatever scientists as a whole do; no more and no less.  To say otherwise is ad hominem.  Now I’m not claiming that ad hominem argument shouldn’t be counted as scientific evidence, but anyone who bows before Popper would.  The irony there is that ad hominem is a form of Bayesian inference.  And if you’re keeping score, that means that anyone who claims that you are being unscientific if you don’t forsake all unfalsifiable idols, is themselves committing the sin of inconsistency.  Which by their own logic means they are unscientific too.

To which I respectfully submit, their pants are on fire, hanging from a telephone wire.  And that’s a scientific fact.

No related posts.

Now lets assume there is some process for picking out universes from the multiverse.  Since there’s no time in the multiverse, the process has no beginning and no end.  It’s like a computer program, but it’s infinitely complex.  Let’s call it The Process.

If The Process is infinitely complex and has no beginning and no end, what can we know about it?  We know that it picks some universes but not others, which effectively creates an “in group” (all those that are picked) and an “out group” (all those that are not).  Of course, both sets are infinite and still have no structure.  But note that all the universes in one group or the other now stand in relation to one another.  That is, they share the property of “in-ness” or “out-ness”, and between the two groups there’s the relationship of “different”.

The Process further divides these sub-multiverses in unknown ways, and this sorting creates other relationships between universes.  You can visualize a network of universes with the connections representing these relationships.  The network is infinite, and if you consider any subset of the network, it’s also infinite.  But these subnetworks are no longer arbitrary, they are networks themselves and networks have structure.  And since a subnetwork by definition shares the same connection relationships as the original network it is a “sub” of, the subnetwork is structurally similar to the network itself.  That is, the network is self-similar, which in mathematical terms means it’s fractal.  Of course this fractal we are talking about is infinite, and so wherever you start, it’s turtles all the way down, and all the way up.

Notice that the process of identifying subnetworks does something interesting, it creates an asymmetry that wasn’t distinguishable before.  For any network N, if you choose a subnetwork, n, then N “contains” n but not vice versa.  This containment relationship can viewed as a network where the connections are arrows, meaning they have directionality, N –> n.  You may have noticed that we just went from talking about a network of universes to a network of networks (of universes), but that’s okay.  Remember the multiverse is infinitely infinite, and we’re just chatting about some arbitrary aspects of it.  There’s lots of other aspects we could talk about instead, but it’s starting to get interesting here, so let’s continue….

Somewhere in the fractal multiverse network of networks described by The Process there is a subnetwork (actually an infinite number of them) where the structure is like this: each universe is connected to by only one other universe but connects to an infinite number.  Let’s call this structure, Time, and note that there are an infinity of subnetworks of the network which have this Time structure.  Unless stated otherwise, I’ll be talking from now on about networks with Time structure.

Remember though, the multiverse itself has no structure; The Process overlays structure on top of it and thereby allows us to know about things like Time.

Now let’s start using the words network, system, particle, entity, agent and universe interchangeably, so we can say things like “time network”, “temporal system”, “particles over time”, and “A causes B” to refer to roughly the same thing.  I realize that by overloading these terms I’m jacking into (and hopefully hijacking) your intuition about what these words mean, but that’s my intent.  Hopefully you’ll continue playing along by my rules and try not to project what you already know onto this alternative cosmology.

When we use the words network, system, particle, entity and agent, you might wonder whether we are talking about a universe or a multiverse.  The answer is Yes.   Remember, the multiverse is infinitely infinite and self-similar, so in some sense we can say it contains itself.  We have a hard time with infinity so this concept is mind-boggling, but if you follow the logic, hopefully you’ll accept this paradox as true.  So lets just use the word universe from now on and forget about multiverses.  And to not get confused, let’s refer to what we used to think of as the Universe as the known universe instead.  The known universe is where you live (or more precisely where you think you live) along with everyone and everything you know about or can imagine.

The known universe is expanding the more you learn about it.  The known universe is temporal.  And as we know from Einstein, it must therefore also be spatial — remember it’s not space and time but rather the spacetime continuum.  The known universe consists of particles (i.e. matter) and therefore — also thanks to Einstein — it consists of energy.  Time, space, matter and energy here may or may not be totally in sync with our intuitions of them, but just suppose they are the same thing and that our intuition is slightly biased by our particular experiences in life and could use adjustment.

We haven’t really talked explicitly about laws of nature, fundamental constants, invariant equations or even mathematics.  And I kinda jumped the gun when bringing Einstein into the equation (so to speak).  But it’s really hard to follow a line of thought without some sort of logical paradigm, some structure of thought.  In the end it doesn’t really matter what I’m saying, what you’re hearing, or whether any of this is “true”.  I’m just telling you a story, and hopefully it’s amusing enough for you to finish reading.

Originally we talked about The Process, which is infinitely complex and which describes all sorts of possible realities.  The known universe is one of those possibilities, one in which we see structure and patterns, order and complexity all around us.  Somewhere “out there” there may be portions of the multiverse (whoops, I said I wasn’t going to use that term anymore, sorry) where it’s still appears, unstructured and thus unknowable.  But let’s come back to the known universe and the “knowable” universe.

Because of the fact that we are here in the known universe thinking and talking about it, and not in some unknown or unknowable part, the non-random patterns that we see may look to us like universal laws (E=mc^2, the second law of thermodynamics, etc.)  Well, we know that even these laws are not truly universal, they apply to only certain scopes.   For example, “relativistic but not classical or quantum realms”, or “closed systems but not open systems.”  String theorists are looking for universal laws, but so far none have been found.  But let’s just grant them that they will eventually find some (or one).  How would we be able to distinguish between a true Law and just a pattern that is very very persistent over all known scopes?

How about we stop using the word “law” and instead replace it with the word “principle” to suggest that it may really just be a pattern that we see in the known universe.  And as the known universe expands via our increase in knowledge/understanding/awareness, we might find exceptions to the pattern.  After all, that’s what’s happened to every “law” ever considered in the history of science so far, and why should that pattern stop?  (Sorry, my paradox detector just went off, let me reset it….)

Coming back to principles, there’s one that emerged from the last few paragraphs, did you notice it?  Cosmologists call it the Anthropic Principle, which is the notion that the universe appears ordered in the particular way that it does with these nifty laws and constants because of the very cosmic coincidence that we are here observing it!  In other words, we live (and can only live) in the known universe, by definition.  And we wouldn’t be “here” and able to “notice” anything if we were in some unknowable part.  That’s a pretty trippy concept, but one that many physicists take very seriously.  It’s the same kind of argument as for why we haven’t been contacted by aliens yet: there’s a decent chance we are the most advanced intelligence out there and we’ll have to wait for others to catch up so we can communicate.  It’s also the reason that your keys are always in the last place you look.

Remember the Anthropic Principle because it’s really useful.  It has the same logical structure as Darwinian evolution and other “emergent” phenomena.  Is this Generalized Anthropic Principal (GAP) a universal/fundamental one?  Who knows.  Probably not.  We anthropic agents are so self-absorbed.

Another principle that emerges from our cosmology is Coherence.  Because of The Process, birds of a feather flock together.  Actually, The Process defines which birds are of which feather, so this is a tautology, though it’s fun to think of it as “like attracts like”.  But we know that really it’s just co-incidence: the birds exist at the same Time.  Using the analogy of birds, we can ask whether these coincident birds are different birds or the same bird.  But it’s a silly question because the answer is Yes.  Think of quantum coherence, if you like.

Now let’s say we are talking about particles and not birds, and instead of Coherence we’ll say Gravity.  Isn’t it the same thing?  We talk about stars and planets and other astral bodies as if they were coherent entities, but If there were no gravity, would those entities exist?  Or let’s talk about the Cooperation of the cells in your body; without it, would you exist?  We’ve all heard about the “law of attraction” from The Secret, isn’t it the same thing?  You imagine the future you want, and that acts as a beacon guiding you in every decision you make, every micro-decision, every unconscious action until at some point you find yourself living in the future you imagined.  Coherence, cooperation, attraction, unity.  Same thing.

Here’s a secret: there is no Process.  Or if you prefer, The Process is completely random.  Yet that doesn’t change anything I’ve said above.  Think of it this way: in an infinite series of random numbers, all patterns appear eventually, right?  So “somewhere” in the infinite randomness, The Process “produces” the structure I’ve been talking about.  Or maybe the fact that we’re anthropically talking about it produces the structure.  We are The Process.  Or more generally, we humans are part of The Process.  The Process is the universe.

Related posts:

1. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
2. Notes from TED
3. Synthesis of Complexity Theory

Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68.

Related posts:

1. TED Talk: Chris Abani
2. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"
3. My Favorite TED Talks of 2009