The human mind is not unitary. We have competing preferences, compartmentalized beliefs, contradictory thoughts, and conflicting emotions. The recognition of this dividedness is hardly new—in the Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky describes how our mental sub-agents interact to create our intelligence, and...

A couple of weeks ago Kevin and I went around on the topic of whether or not science is “broken”.  We came to the point of agreeing that we have different basic assumptions of what constitutes “utility”.  And because of this, while we could agree that each of our arguments made...

http://www.vimeo.com/17409766 This interview was done as part of the New Cancer Mentality initiative: New Cancer Mentality is a grassroots organization focused on giving cancer patients a virual townhall to ask their questions to leading oncologists and researchers about their work. Furthermore, New Cancer...

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Over the last several years I’ve been digging into the science of cancer and systems biology, while at the same time looking at the epidemiology of disease and nutrition.  And the more I learn, the more I’m convinced that there’s a gap that our scientific tools and methodologies cannot...

What fundamental truths exist in the universe? This question, perhaps above all, is the basis for scientific inquiry.  Yet we rarely ask it in this way and we rarely step back to the very basic assumptions we hold about the possible form of answer we might expect.  For instance, is matter fundamental? ...

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

In my post about The Process it turns out that I stepped on a pedagogical minefield when using describing the Anthropic Principle (AP).  Two preeminent physicists had a very public argument a while ago in which one called the AP unscientific because it’s unfalsifiable.  I will return to that in a...

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

Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite.  There’s just infinity.  Or if you prefer, nothing.   There’s no space, no time, no matter, no energy.  There’s no structure whatsoever, and nothing “in” any of the universes that make up the multiverse.  it’s not even clear...

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...

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...

Just not for “remembering” things.  We are not memory machines, we are learning machines: “Reconsolidation research has helped foster a growing sense that the flexibility of memory might be functional—an advantage rather than a bug in the brain. Reconsolidation might be how we update our...

This is not my meditation, it was created by Cellucidate: ...

Heng, et al recently published a review paper that brings together and touches on many different aspects of cancer complexity.  I thought this an opportunity to selectively quote the paper and organize the quotes loosely around various complex systems concepts they relate to.  I’m curious whether...

Kevin just posted about a great article by Felix Salmon in Wired.  I underlined three quotes in my reading of it: “Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus.” (Tavakoli) “…the real danger was created not because...

I try not to practice false modesty (those of you who know me well probably just did a spit take at that understatement).  So while I try to stand up and admit when I’m wrong, I also like to stand up and point out where I’m right. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you that I came to the...

How Our Moral Compasses Fail Us From the comments on my Introduction to this series, it appears I have discovered a controversial topic. Good. My first objective will be to illustrate why we cannot rely on  moral compasses to guide society. After some thought, I have decided to break the topic of moral...

I was recently having a conversation with a mutual friend of Rafe’s and mine.  Like the two of us, he’s quite smart, well educated, and socially aware.  I respect his thinking a lot. However, during the course of this conversation, it became clear to me that he holds what I think of as an...

Response to Superorganism as Terminology. I was actually about to post something about terminology, so I’m glad this came up. It’s just so difficult to choose words to describe concepts that have little precedent, without going to the extreme of overloading on the one end (e.g....

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post. Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular...

This is from a recent Seed Magazine article.  Click on the image to enlarge...

An incidentaloma according to wikipedia is “a tumor (-oma) found by coincidence (incidental) without clinical symptoms or suspicion.”  The provocative NY Times article below suggests that indolent tumors (i.e. ones that do not need treatment) may come and go as a normal part of life.  With...

The following is a recent paper by Henry Heng published in JAMA.  I’ve linked concepts mentioned in the paper to corresponding explications from this blog. JAMA. 2008;300(13):1580-1581. The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism Henry H. Q. Heng, PhD Author Affiliations: Center for...

I am a fan of prediction markets.   They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections.  Why?  Here’s a thought experiment.  Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win).  Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your...