Walking On Oceans of Gold

With all the recent talk about the new venture Planetary Resources, Inc., and its goal to mine the asteroids for their millions of $trillions worth of gold, platinum, and other precious resources, it is easy to forget that everyday we are walking over oceans of gold deep beneath our feet.

During the formation of Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals -- such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core to cover the entire surface of Earth with a four-metre thick layer. _SD

More from Nature journal research, which claims that the heavier metals we use now -- including the "precious metals" -- came from a "terminal bombardment" of Earth by metal carrying asteroids.

Image Source

If there is enough precious metal in the Earth's core to cover the entire planetary surface with a 4 metre thick layer, why are the billionaires of Google talking about mining the asteroids for precious metal? Because the Earth's molten core is inaccessible, for one reason. But even if the core were accessible, it would be almost impossible to separate economic quantities of precious metals from the massive amounts of not-quite-as-precious metals such as iron and nickel.

In other words, at this time it is cheaper and more economically viable to build machines to mine the asteroids for precious metals, than to build machines to tap into the oceans of gold inside the Earth's core.

And so, for now, we are stuck with the paltry amount of gold given to us by the terminal bombardment of metallic asteroids. And so most of us have heard the term "peak gold," used in much the same sense as the term "peak oil" is used -- to suggest a permanent depletion and a terminal decline of production.

Perhaps we should take a look at what has gone wrong with the confident -- but failed -- predictions of "peak oil," in order to understand some of the ways in which "peak gold" might fall on hard times:

The first estimate of proved crude oil reserves worldwide, made in 1944, was 51 billion barrels. Today, that number is 1.4 trillion barrels, and cumulative production in the last 66 years has been twenty times the original estimate.

...Natural gas and coal proved reserves have also increased several-fold despite decades of production.5 Reserves of tin, copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc were also higher in 2000 than in 1950, despite the fact that production in the half century in between substantially exceeded reserves in 1950.6...The story would be similar for other minerals, from bauxite to uranium.

...The expansionist view of mineral resources is often associated with Julian Simon, who won the most famous wager in the history of economics regarding the future scarcity of minerals. Simon and Paul Ehrlich agreed that if resources were to become scarcer in the future, their prices, adjusted for inflation, would rise. At Simon’s invitation, in 1980, Paul Ehrlich et al. chose five minerals: chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. If, in 1990, the prices of the minerals were to rise, Simon would pay; if the prices dropped, the consortium would pay.

Simon won resoundingly. The prices of most of the picked minerals had fallen in dollar terms between 1980 and 1990, and each fell in inflation-adjusted terms—despite 822 million more people consuming “depletable” resources.7

In the annals of the history of economic thought, Erich Zimmermann, of the Institutionalist school of economics, not Simon, got there first with what he called a functional theory of resources.

According to Zimmermann, resources are not known, fixed things; they are what humans employ to service wants at a given time. Human “appraisal” turns the “neutral stuff” of the earth into resources. What are resources today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa.8

Zimmermann wrote:

Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.9

Zimmermann concluded: “Knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.”10 _master resource blog

Humans not only discover new sources of vital, depletable resources, but they also devise substitutions for these scarce materials, from cheaper and more plentiful materials. Or they find other ingenious workarounds and alternatives. If the proper incentives are there, humans will find ways around problems that would have been "unimaginable" or "inconceivable" before the fact. (Do those words mean what we think they mean?)

Human societies are incentivised by institutional policies -- particularly government policies. In democratic societies, voters determine what sorts of incentives their institutions will set for them when they step into the voting booth. If voters are unaware of the crucial importance of incentives, and are instead manipulated by clever campaign rhetoric and promises, the institutional incentives that are ultimately set are likely to be sub-optimal.

We are walking on oceans of gold. But we are impoverished by foolish institutional (government) incentives and an absent-minded neglect of our civic responsibilities. It is our choice, our minds, our ingenuity...

Ultimate Resource II ... Free, online book by Julian Simon explores the concepts introduced above

Counter-Intuitive Creativity Boosting, New and Old

A U. Mass Amherst researcher with degrees in computer science and philosophy, Anthony McCaffrey, has won a $170,000 National Science Foundation grant to develop new tools to boost creativity and creative problem solving. His ideas revolve around the acrononyms OFH (obscure features hypothesis) and GPT (generic parts technique).

Looking at more than 100 significant modern and 1,000 historical inventions, McCaffrey analyzed how successful inventors overcame various cognitive obstacles to uncover the key obscure information needed to solve problems. He found that almost all innovative solutions follow two steps, as articulated by the OFH: Noticing an infrequently-seen, obscure feature and second, building a solution based on that feature.

...Psychologists use the term "functional fixedness" to describe the first mental obstacle McCaffrey investigated. It explains, for example, how one person finding burrs stuck to his sweater will typically say, "Ugh, a burr," while another might say, "Hmmm, two things lightly fastened together. I think I'll invent Velcro!" The first view is clouded by focusing on an object's typical function.

To overcome functional fixedness, McCaffrey sought a way to teach people to reinterpret known information about common objects. For each part of an object, the "generic parts technique" (GPT) asks users to list function-free descriptions, including its material, shape and size. Using this, the prongs of an electrical plug can be described in a function-free way to reveal that they might be used as a screwdriver, for example. _ecs.umass.edu

Part of McCaffrey's approach offers parallels to Edward de Bono's "Lateral Thinking" theories and creativity training programs.

Lateral Thinking Techniques

1. Alternatives / Concept Extraction: Use concepts to breed new ideas
2. Focus: Sharpen or change your focus to improve your creative efforts
3. Challenge: Break free from the limits of accepted ways of operating
4. Random Entry: Use unconnected input to open new lines of thinking
5. Provocation: Move from a provocative statement to useful ideas
6. Harvesting: Select the best of early ideas and shape them into useable approaches
7. Treatment of Ideas: Develop ideas and shape them to fit an organization or situation

"Great business competitors are great lateral thinkers . . ." - Edward de Bono

How Might You Use Lateral Thinking?

The Lateral Thinking techniques are useful in a variety of applications.

• Constructively challenge the status quo to enable new ideas to surface
• Find and build on the concept behind an idea to create more ideas
• Solve problems in ways that don’t initially come to mind
• Use alternatives to liberate and harness the creative energy of the organization
• Turn problems into opportunities
• Select the best alternate ideas and implement them 

_LateralThinking

Yet another parallel counter-intuitive creativity approach comes from a website called Brainstorming.co.uk.

So, what creative thinking techniques are available?

Many! The techniques we specialize in, and will be training you in, are listed below. All of them will provide you with fresh stimuli and a new way of thinking. You will be able to incorporate them into your brainstorming sessions (individual or group) to generate new ideas easily and they will make sure you'll never be stuck for a new idea.

• Random Word
• Random Picture
• False Rules
• Random Website
• SCAMPER
• Search & Reapply
• Challenge Facts
• Escape
• Analogies
• Wishful Thinking
• Thesaurus

_Brainstorming.co.uk CreativeThinkingTechniques

This webpage provides more detail and allows actual practise with a few of the techniques.

All three counter-intuitive creativity approaches are likely to provide positive results to those who are willing to put in the time and work. But that is not what most people want to hear. Most modern wannabe legends -- in their own minds -- would like to have world-shaking ideas pop into their heads on demand, effortlessly.

But as Daniel Kahneman explains, fast intuitive thinking is not trustworthy unless a person puts in the hard work to hone it to a fine edge. Besides, fast intuition is not generally creative, but rather tends to arrive at more obvious -- and often more fashionable -- solutions.

That is why most creativity training programs which produce relatively good results, tend to be of the "counter-intuitive" variety. Because you are looking for solutions that are not typically obvious or intuitive.

One final example of the counter-intuitive approach to creative problem-solving, is John David Garcia's "autopoietic" method. Garcia's technique is meant to be utilised by an octet -- that is, eight people in a group -- consisting of four men and four women. But according to Garcia, a doublet consisting of one man and one woman can also achieve good creative results. Al Fin's experience with this method convinced him that single individuals could also achieve good results, in many cases.

The central idea behind the autopoietic method of creative problem solving, besides a significant mental preparation, is to have a problem presented, at which point the the early, easy, automatic intuitive solution is summarily rejected. That is just the first step, of course, but it is the crucial step. The goal is to enter a deeper, creative state of mind.

Creativity -- like much humour -- is typically counter-intuitive, at least in the sense in which most persons are intuitive.

If we want our children to be creative and powerful problem-solvers, they will not only need to hone their intuitions to a sharp edge, but they will also need to learn when to reject fast and easy intuitive solutions in favour of deeper, less obvious (except in hindsight) solutions.

More for those interested in the John David Garcia autopoiesis techniques: The philosophy of creativity and ethics behind the technique is described in the freely accessible online book by Garcia, Creative Transformation. More detail regarding Garcia's technique and philosophy of autopoietic creativity is presented in Chapter 5 of Creative Transformation.

As developed by Garcia, the experience can be extremely powerful and effective at eliciting a wide range of counter-intuitive solutions and ideas. But it is certainly not for everyone, or even for most.

Creativity Is Dangerous -- The Absence of Creativity Is Fatal

When we encounter new creativity, the work of someone who is really trying to bring something new to the game, our first reaction won’t be, ‘Oh, that’s lovely’, but rather, ‘Oh my God, that looks dangerous’. Maybe even that it’s disgusting.

We need to recapture the edge that creativity is supposed to have and inject that back into the discussion about it. _CreativeTimesUK

Removing danger and risk from life necessarily involves removing creativity. And without creativity, human life on the scale of modern times, is impossible. In other words, the engineers of modern societies are grooming their populations for oblivion, by removing risk, responsibility, and creativity from their childhood and adult lives.

As a general rule, we dislike uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain world is a much friendlier place. And so, we work hard to reduce whatever uncertainty we can, often by making habitual, practical choices, choices that protect the status quo. You know the saying, better the devil you know? That about sums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires novelty. Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exit, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. In other words, it is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening... _SciAm "Why So Afraid of Creativity?"

Democracies are all about keeping the voting masses relatively calm and satisfied. If this involves the wide scale infantilisation of mass populations from the cradle to the grave, then so be it. Humans are unpredictable creatures. Best to keep them fat, dumb, and happy.

If you are considering putting yourself out there creatively/emotionally, or are already doing so, you have a potential audience that is much, much larger than just your parents. It is true that the world can be a cruel and punishing place, but it is also large and welcoming. It is just a matter of when you will be heard and who will be there to hear you. _PsychologyToday

Okay, the last quote is a bit touchy-feely psychobabblish. Of course there is no guarantee that taking creative or emotional risks will turn out well in the end. That is the point: There are no guarantees, either way.

Complacent people will choose not to take the risk, not to create or innovate into a new and unfamiliar world. They will choose a wide choice of home entertainment, alcoholic beverages, and prescription drugs. Lots of prescription drugs.

Perhaps you have guessed by now that dangerous children are not about staying in the safe zone, and avoiding risk and responsibility. Dangerous children learn that the best way to become trapped in the stun-stall of the abattoir is to play it safe, and stay inside the prescribed lines.

Al Fin social analysts suspect that most persons living in modern social democracies will choose the path of mass oblivion. But just in case there are some who would choose differently, we are exploring the concept of "the dangerous child."

If you are interested in learning more about the concept of "the dangerous child," we are running a series of postings on that topic at Al Fin, the Next Level. Feel free to drop in anytime.

First published at abu al-fin

Unconscious Pathways to a More Creative World

Creativity is one of our most valued human traits. It has given human beings the ability to change the world that they live in; and it has also, paradoxically, given them the ability to adapt to changes in the world over which they have no control. Our highly developed capacity to develop and implement new ideas arises from our highly developed human brain. Understanding how creative ideas arise from the brain is one of the most fascinating challenges of contemporary neuroscience. _Journey Into Chaos

Creativity makes our lives richer in many ways, but it cannot be easily explained by ordinary conscious thinking or decision making. Creativity is not the same thing as intelligence, since people with very high intelligence do not tend to have a high creative output on average. Persons of greatest creative achievement appear to have IQs that cluster near the 120s -- above average, but not genius level. (Andreasen 1987, MacKinnon 1965)

If creativity is not equivalent to a high IQ, then how else might it be defined and measured? Several different approaches have been taken to address this question. One has been to develop tests specifically designed to measure creativity and to designate people who achieve high scores on these tests as creative. The basic assumption behind most such tests is that creativity can be defined as having a capacity for achieving a high level of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is defined as the ability to come up with a large number of responses to an open-ended probe; it is contrasted with convergent thinking, which tends to apply a sequential series of steps to answer a question that has only one possible solution (Runco and Marz, 1992). An example of a probe used to assess divergent thinking is asking: How many uses can you think of for a brick? A series of similar questions can be asked and then used to create a score that is a continuous measurement of divergent thinking (Torrance, 1998). This approach is favoured by some psychologists as a way of achieving an objective measure of creativity.

An alternative approach is to define creativity operationally. That is, people who have produced some type of creative output are designated as creative based on their achievements. When this method is used, it is typically in conjunction with an approach known as the “case study method.” People are selected because they have achieved a high level of success and recognition in fields such as architecture, writing, mathematics and physics. Often a specific criterion of success is used, such as having won a major prize or award (e.g., Fields Medal, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Lasker Award). These people are further assessed using structured interviews about their work habits and thought processes, personality tests and measures of cognition. The commonalities that they share are considered to be characteristics of creative people and their cognitive style. An important recent spin-off of this approach is to conduct neuroimaging studies of such people in order to examine the neural basis of creativity. _Mens Sana Monograph...Chaos, Creativity, and the Unconscious

Creativity may be able to tap into deeper wells of thought than are available to the conscious mind in the setting of a timed, structured IQ test.

Creativity involves both the creation of novel ideas, and the selection of the best of these novel ideas for further development. It has been generally felt that the unconscious participates most in the stage of novel creation, rather than in the selection stage. But recent research suggests that the second stage -- selectively choosing the best creative ideas -- is also an area of unconscious expertise.

Today's world of continuous change thrives on creative individuals. Anecdotal reports suggest that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. Empirical research on the role of the unconscious in creativity, though, is inconsistent and thus far has focused mainly on one aspect of the creative process – idea generation. This is the first study to assess the role of the unconscious mind for both idea generation and idea selection. Participants generated creative ideas immediately, after conscious thought, or after a period of distraction during which unconscious thought was hypothesized to take place. After having listed their ideas, participants selected their most creative idea. Performance in idea generation was similar between conscious and unconscious thought; however, individuals who had unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea. These findings shed more light on the role of unconscious processes in creativity, and provide a means to enhance creative performance. _Thinking Skills & Creativity

Here is a plain language explanation of this research

Although the authors of the above study make an excellent point regarding the value of the unconscious in selecting between creative ideas, they appear to understate the value of the unconscious mind in generating creative ideas. More on this later.

Interestingly, the unconscious also seems to play a role in improving economic decision-making:

...a more rational and optimal approach to financial decision making than is proposed by finance theories alone would be that includes unconsciousness into the process. The total cognitive decision making capacity of an individual is comprised of both a conscious component and an unconscious component; and these two components are complementary and compensatory to each another. A decision-making process that integrates these two components would, therefore, first generally improve the quality of decisions, and second reduce the unfavorable impact of behavioral biases (with overconfidence, heuristics, etc as examples) on decision making. _(Abstract) Journal of Behavioral Finance

It is important not to underestimate the role of the unconscious in the generating of novel and creative ideas, however. Successful induction of creative mind states almost invariably calls on the unconscious -- as if in the conjuring of spirits. When conjuring the creative unconscious spirits of one's own mind, it is best to adopt a humble attitude. The conscious mind thinks of itself as the star of the show, and often struggles for dominance as if it were a question of survival.

The unconscious mind will make its creativity known, if allowed to. Suppression of the conscious mind occurs automatically during sleep, and much creativity occurs in that state. We cannot access this creativity, however, except during specific stages of transition between sleep and wakefulness -- the hypnagogic states.

If you want to be creative without falling asleep, you will have to find other ways to temporarily suppress the conscious mind, at least partially. Several methods have been devised, including Edward de Bono's "Lateral Thinking" method, and John David Garcia's powerful "Autopoiesis" method. Few of these methods are widely used either by professional writers, musicians, inventors etc., or by educational institutions.

Many creative persons suppress their conscious minds with chemicals, such as alcohol, opiates, or sometimes hallucinogenics. While it is possible to function creatively under the influence of moderate quantities of alcohol or opiates, the creative benefit of hallucinogens is often not experienced until after one has mostly emerged from the hallucinogenic state.

Deep relaxation or meditation can sometimes induce more creative quasi-unconscious mental activity as well, as can deep laughter. But as with the hallucinogens, an enhanced productive creativity may only be accessible as one emerges from the meditative state.

Once one has generated a wealth of creative ideas, and selected the most promising among them, actual creative production can be enhanced by stimulating other parts of the unconscious mind, which drive semi-rote behaviours. These highly automatised unconscious processes can be induced by caffeine and other stimulants such as amphetamines, as well as by rather light doses of alcohol.

One of the best all-around mental exercises for enhanced creativity, is the use of Manfred Clynes' Sentic Cycles (PDF). These cycles are not generally promoted as creativity enhancers, but it is likely that the best ways of enhancing creativity are those that are not yet recognised as such.

More aspects of the unconscious mind are being discovered

Thinking More Deeply: Building Innovation Engines

Innovative Thinking
In research and development, the most revolutionary discoveries are often hidden beneath the flash and whiz-bang of fancy products, processes, and therapies. But here are two examples of discoveries of a more subtle and important type:

A TEAM of North-East academics and industry experts have "cracked the DNA code of plastic" which could mean massive cost and energy savings for business. Researchers at Durham University and the University of Leeds have collaborated with the Tees Valley chemical process sector to solve a long-standing problem that is set to revolutionise the way new plastics are developed.

Before the discovery, industry would develop a plastic and then find a use for it, or try hundreds of different recipes until they stumbled across the right mix. _Source

Alert readers will see the similarity between this new innovation engine for creating plastics-on-demand, and approaches to "rational design" of drugs and proteins. This type of breakthrough often sets the stage for large numbers of rapid-fire innovations to follow.

University of Utah chemists developed a method to design and test new catalysts, which are substances that speed chemical reactions and are crucial for producing energy, chemicals and industrial products. By using the new method, the chemists also made a discovery that will make it easier to design future catalysts. The discovery: the sizes and electronic properties of catalysts interact to affect how well a catalyst performs, and are not independent factors as was thought previously. Chemistry Professor Matt Sigman and doctoral student Kaid Harper, report their findings in the Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, issue of the journal Science.

“It opens our eyes to how to design new catalysts that we wouldn’t necessarily think about designing, for a broad range of reactions,” Sigman says. “We’re pretty excited.” _Physorg

This is another example of a discovery that could potentially set off a chain reaction of new discoveries and revolutionary products.

Some people intuitively understand the deeper nature of such discoveries, and the infinitely larger potential of such developments to revolutionise entire fields and societies. Others, failed by modern dumbed-down educational systems, may need to think about the idea for a while.

A great deal of attention is given to the concept of "higher order effects (PDF)," but too little attention is given to "higher order causes."

The modern mass production methods of education do not generally help students to learn how to think. Ideologically driven educators assume that if the student is indoctrinated in the proper ideology, she will then naturally think in the "correct" manner. And so indoctrination replaces education, and graduates and future leaders become lifelong incompetents, because they never learned to think.

This is not just about logic and resolving contradictions. It is also about generative thinking, lateral thinking, problem solving, and growing beyond ideology. A society whose graduates can think rationally and generatively is less likely to fall into a quagmire of malaise such as currently entraps much of the advanced world.

Generative thinkers do not merely solve problems as they arise. They also solve problems that lead to other problems -- before they arise. They do this by thinking more deeply, and further out of the ideological box.

Let's be clear: Although ideology can make a person's life easier and his choices more automatic, an honest person who is bound tightly by ideology cannot truly think -- the cognitive dissonance becomes too great. Thus the heated and perpetually unresolved arguments one sees in religion, politics, and on environmental issues.

It is always a pleasure to confront an ideological opponent, and to mutually penetrate beneath the level of ideology to a generative level and mode of thinking. The productive output of such sessions can be much greater than any number of brainstorming sessions occurring within a circle of "self-anointed truth-bearers."

Generations of children are being short-changed and mind-stunted by inappropriate educational methods. This stunting and starving of brains occurs from kindergarten through university, and beyond. Those who have been paying attention understand that this is not happening by accident, just as the "energy starvation agenda" of modern governments is not happening by accident.

If a society is marinated in ideological thinking -- as virtually all human societies have been -- change can be very slow in coming. Since the converging problems of debt and demographic decline in the west are occurring at a rate which will probably not allow the needed changes to occur at high enough levels, it is up to persons at more local levels to instigate necessary changes to the best of their ability.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that a magical singularity will miraculously solve the human world's problems. Singularities help those who help themselves. Humans will have to make this transition from ideological thinking to generative thinking.

What proportion of humans will need to move beyond conventional thinking? Al Fin futurologists estimate that at least 10% and perhaps as many as 20% of humans within a society will have to forsake ideology and learn to think for themselves. The odds of finding such an innovation-rich environment by accident are very poor.

Brain Wiring Speed: Intelligence vs Creativity

The brain wiring map above was created by Paul Thompson of UCLA from several sets of healthy twins between ages 20 and 30. Thompson had already correlated intelligence with higher speed in brain wiring.

Now a scientist at U. of New Mexico at Albuquerque is claiming that slower connections between parts of the pre-frontal cortex and the thalamus seem to correlate with higher levels of creativity.

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. "This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity," he says....the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness.

One of the triggers for Jung's study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. "Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik's cube, but you don't necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed," he says. _NewScientist

This is premature speculation on very early findings, of course. But as all of the functions of the brain are studied in real time, and correlated with each other AND correlated with what is going on in the real world, we may begin to get some good clues as to what is happening and why.

Creativity without intelligence is the problem behind popular culture: television, music, cinema, gossip, "news" etc. But intelligence without creativity can be just as bad -- leading to dead end paths such as post-modernist philosophy and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming doom. Getting stuck in a rut (intelligence without creativity) is as bad as frantically spinning one's wheels (creativity without intelligence).

Besides creativity and intelligence, one also needs grit, character, executive function. In addition, the wisdom of experience and perspective is vital to knowing where to direct one's energies for the best result.

Resource Scarcity vs. Human Ingenuity

Humans have been quite adept at finding solutions to the problem of scarce natural resources: finding more abundant substitutes for various natural resources, exploration for and discovery of new reserves, recovery and recycling of materials, and, perhaps most importantly, the development of new technologies that economize on scarce natural resources or that allow the use of resources that were previously uneconomical. _Krautkraemer2005PDF

Predictions of resource scarcity and accompanying doom have become common among late 20th and early 21st century pseudo-intelligentsia. And yet predictions of doom with fixed due dates invariably fail.

In 1980, Julian Simon, the recently deceased economist and author of The Ultimate Resource, offered to environmentalists a wager based on his assertion that the price of any raw material would indefinitely decline on a future date. The wager was taken up by Paul Ehrlich, author of the best- selling 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," which predicted that during the 1970s "the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death...

"In October 1980, Ehrilch and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities which could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten) ten years later as 1980 prices," writes Ronald Bailey in his book EcoScam. "If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990." During the 1980s the combined prices of the metals selected by Ehrlich declined by over 50 percent. Simon easily won because he knew that the supply for resources was not becoming more scarce but more abundant, since the economic history of predominantly free capitalist nations had demonstrated how the prices of most major commodities have declined over time.

While Simon was proven correct, Ehrlich went on to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant -- based on his career of fantastic apocalyptic predictions that never came true. _Capmag

Human ingenuity in the face of resource scarcity is an old story, dating back many tens of thousands of years, at least. A fascinating ongoing chapter in this story involves a fantastic new field of chemistry that is enticingly close to "alchemy":

According to the authors of the paper, it is possible to mimic certain properties of precious metals as platinum and palladium using combinations of far more mundane materials. And that opens up the prospect of replacing expensive strategic metals in many industrial applications by much cheaper alternatives.


...Now the team is working its way across the big central block of the Periodic Table, consisting of so-called transition metals from scandium – used in aerospace alloys – to gold. Their aim is to discover other superatoms, and to gauge the extent of their similarities to standard atoms.


Not surprisingly in view of the commercial implications of success, the Penn State team is not alone in its quest. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University recently announced that a cluster of eight caesium atoms plus a vanadium atom mimic the magnetic strength of manganese. The research team has also predicted that superatoms of gold and manganese will be magnetic while not conducting electricity – a combination making them useful in some biomedical applications.


Such discoveries suggest we are witnessing the birth of a whole new branch of chemistry, and one that could not have arrived at a better time – for many critical technologies are crying out for a breakthrough in material science. _TheNational

Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource 2:People, Materials, and Environment" is free online and worth a look.

A look at "The Ingenuity Gap"

Why Asians Can't Think (Outside the Box)

The higher average intelligence of East Asians compared to Europeans is well documented. The question is: why do East Asians -- despite their intelligence -- lag behind Europeans in measures of creativity, particularly over the past millenium?

Dennis Mangan recently looked at differences between thought styles of Asians and Europeans in this posting. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science provides the grist for discussion:

The first four Euro-American nations are overrepresented among the Nobel laureates by a factor of 5 to 10; Switzerland is overrepresented by a factor of 28! In sharp contrast, all Asian nations are underrepresented among the Nobel laureates. Japan, for example, has been a major geopolitical and economic power for most of the 20th century (Small and Singer, 1982). Yet it has produced only 12 Nobel laureates, the same number as Austria, which has one-sixteenth of Japan's population.

This problem has long been known to East Asian specialists as the "creativity problem" (Eberts and Eberts, 1995, pp. 123-127; Taylor, 1983, pp. 92-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 89-90). Some argue that the ideographic Asian languages curb abstract thinking and creativity among Asians (Hannas, 2003).....Whatever the reason, it is evident from Table 1 that some combinations of cultural, social, and institutional factors combine to stifle basic science in Asia.
_Kanazawa (PDF)

A similar story is told in Charles Murray's classic compilation "Human Accomplishment." While Murray went to great lengths to include as strong an Asian componentas possible in the history of human accomplishment, the cumulative list of Asian accomplishments up to the present fell short.

Q. You pay a surprising amount of attention to Asian culture. Does that stem from the six years you lived in Asia beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer?

A. Put it this way: There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand. Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains.

When I began the book, I actually hoped to give Asian accomplishment a still larger place than it wound up getting.

Q. Why did you end up with mostly Dead White European Males in your inventory of 4,002 significant figures?

A. That's what happens when you employ the methods I used. And as I spend many pages in the book describing in perhaps excessive detail, those methods are not skewed by Western sources that are unfairly oblivious to non-Western accomplishment. _Charles Murray Interview

So, how does one explain the lagging of East Asians behind Europeans in the creativity race? La Griffe du Lion suggests that East Asians have such high visuospatial ability, that their overall IQ score is lifted higher than all others except for Ashkenazi Jews. But while visuospatial / mathematical ability is quite important in many fields of hard science, mathematics, and engineering / technology, deep creativity and radical innovation appear to spring from yet other parts of the cognitive neural assemblage beyond mere visuospatial ability.

Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology ("academic conservatism") is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution. _Kanazawa PDF

A conformist culture will certainly lend toward an anti-innovative conservatism, which can leave life-long imprints in the brain of a growing child. On the other hand, culture does not spring out of nothing. Culture is strongly influenced by the genetic complement of a population. For example, communist totalitarian conformity was forced onto several nations of Eastern Europe at roughly the same time that China was forced into communism by the victory of Mao's PLA. But communism did not last in most of the European populations, whereas in China the CCP is still the locus of one-party rule.

Long ago, inventors in China devised gunpowder, printing, paper money, the magnetic compass, and probably other wonders now lost to history. But even millenia ago, entrenched Chinese conservatism prevented the constructive uses of most of these inventions. It was left to Europeans to expand and innovate on these ancient inventions around the time of the "renaissance." Has there been a fatal "lack of curiousity" in Chinese culture?

This lack of curiosity extended into science. While ancient China was in many ways more technologically advanced than ancient Greece, knowledge for its own sake was never valued. The ancient Greeks in contrast wrote and debated tirelessly about abstract ideas that had no connection to the real world. _HBDBooks

Similarly, Hindu mathematicians devised advanced arithmetic notation and algebraic logic, as well as other advanced mathematical concepts for the times. These ideas moved along routes of trade and conquest to Islamic centers of thought in Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Andalusia ... where the Hindu ideas were combined with ideas from ancient Greek mathematics, and a synthesis of sorts was created. But it was left to Europeans to take the Hindu - Islamic - Greek synthesis along with rediscovered Greek ideas, and turn them into the modern mathematics upon which modern technology is based.

East Asian scientists and technologists certainly have the brilliance to maintain and advance the modern technologies that Europeans are bequeathing to them. The question remains: what will be the pattern of advance? Will we see a plodding, step by step elaboration and revising of science and technology centered on current fields of study, from the new "Asian renaissance?" Or will we see the sort of radical creation of entirely new foci of science and technology of the sort we have become accustomed to over the past few centuries, from European inventors and researchers?

There is much to be learned about the cultural -- and genetic -- reasons why different populations seen to have different habits of thought. Rather than shying away from such research as somehow "racist" or "not PC", we should get busy understanding all aspects of this universe we live in.

Obama's War Against Innovation & Creativity

In fact, not only the stimulus package itself, but the higher taxes that it will require....are likely to reduce the number of entrepreneurs in America. _CityJournal_via_FreedomPolitics_via_NewsAlert

Entrepreneurs -- particularly inventor/innovator entrepreneurs -- are the carriers of "creative destruction" in capitalist economies. Creative entrepreneurs bring in the new and cause the obsolescence of the old. Without them, societies become stagnant and stuck -- like the tribal societies of the third world, and the hyper-bureaucratic societies of Russia, Europe, and North Korea.

"Stimulus is not part of the language of economics," says Arizona State University economics professor Edward Prescott. I talked to Prescott just hours before Obama set the presidential pen to the stimulus bill. "There is an old, discarded theory that's been tried and failed spectacularly, which is where that language of stimulus comes from." The stimulus bill, Prescott told me, "is likely to depress the economy."

...[Edmund]Phelps is disturbed by the thought that we may be shifting from an entrepreneurial economy toward a lobbying economy. "A lot of potential entrepreneurs, who were contemplating making an innovation and launching it in the marketplace, will now think, 'Well maybe the safer thing to do is to try to get that government contract.' ... And nobody does the innovation. They're all too busy trying to get the government contract." _TheWeek_via_FreedomPolitics

This is the other side of the "wealth and the IQ of nations" story. If a country is ruled by ideologues who lack basic wisdom and competence, then time-proven wisdom of the market is apt to be overturned by special interest social engineering. The end result is a severe distortion of the marketplace, with much-diminished innovation, entrepreneurship, and productive job-creation.

Markets understand these underlying dynamics far better than legislative, executive, or judicial branches of government understand them. The unbridled growth of government -- such as we are presently seeing -- is the death of markets and the economy. Hence the growing movement of capital away from the US and the US Dollar, toward economies where the market is still being allowed to work, more or less.

These interventions....tend to unsettle consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs by vividly demonstrating how political discretion can so suddenly throw everything up for grabs. "The scary thing is," Prescott says, "when this doesn't work what do they do? Start panicking and throwing good money after bad?" _TheWeek

Here is an interesting look at some of the deep, underlying assumptions made by various players in this game (via SimoleonSense)

Individualism vs. Collectivism--Maximising Creativity

When considering the problem of a sustainable future, the problem of overpopulation often comes up. My view is that earth suffers not so much from overpopulation, as it does from under-creativity. It is quite possible for the earth to support many times the number of humans presently alive, in a sustainable manner, if the humans were creative enough to adopt sustainable methods.

Recent UC Berkeley research suggests that a culture of individualism may be a powerful force for creativity, in the research environment.

“The message of this article is that diversity of ideas and perspectives is crucial for innovation,” says Staw, who has been studying creativity for 15 years.

Staw and Goncalo’s findings are the latest rally in a fierce academic debate over how culture relates to innovation. Other professors have argued that a strong and collectivistic culture – one that is more team-oriented and emphasizes organization-wide goals – may improve creativity when the firm has set widely accepted goals for innovation. They cite Hewlett-Packard and 3M as examples.

Staw, chairman of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group, disagrees. “A strong corporate culture can be detrimental to innovation because everyone has to get on board and be relatively alike,” says Staw, also the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Professor in Leadership and Communication.

On the other hand, the advantages of an individualistic culture may be especially salient when innovation is an explicit goal, Staw and Goncalo hypothesize in their article. They define an individualistic culture as one that values uniqueness, encourages people to be independent from the group, and provides clear recognition for individual achievement.

To test this hypothesis, Staw and Goncalo conducted a one-hour experiment with teams of undergraduate students. First, participants completed a survey designed to prime a collectivistic or individualistic mindset. Then each group was instructed to be either creative or practical as they spent 15 minutes generating as many ideas as possible about how to solve a problem.

The problem was figuring out a new business for a space vacated by a mismanaged and low-quality restaurant at a major West Coast University. In the final phase, each group was asked to select the idea that they believed was either the most creative or practical.

“On every measure, individualistic groups were more creative than collectivistic groups when instructed to be so – generating more ideas, presenting a greater number of ideas that depart from the pre-existing solution (i.e. restaurants), and posing ideas that were judged to be more novel,” the authors found. “The results simply show that, when creativity is explicitly desired, individualism will serve to facilitate such performance.”

Individualistic groups instructed to be more creative generated significantly more ideas (37.4 ideas on average) than collectivistic groups told to be creative (26.1 ideas on average). Collectivistic groups instructed to be creative generated significantly more restaurant ideas as a percentage of total ideas generated (14%) than individualistic groups (7%) given the same instructions to be creative.

And on a creativity scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most creative, ideas from individualistic groups instructed to be creative were more creative (with an average rating of 3.03) than those generated by collectivistic groups (with an average rating of 2.83).

The upshot of this research is that companies should protect individual perspectives, Staw says.

“Organizations try to hire people who fit with the culture, but organizations should instead look for people who are different,” he says. “Nurturing individualistic perspectives is better than having a corporate-wide direction,” Staw adds.

However, Staw notes that U.S. businesses have increasingly emphasized team projects and have long been interested in Asian business practices, which are known for their cooperative atmosphere. “This study raises a red flag because the U.S. has had a very individualistic culture, but as we’re moving more toward team-based organizations, we risk losing some creativity,” he cautions.

Many academics have wondered why the European culture spawned so much scientific and technological innovation from the middle ages on, when other previously fertile cultures such as the Hindu, the Chinese, the Islamic, etc. had grown stagnant, intellectually. (see Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment)

The current university culture in the social and political sciences has downgraded the importance of creativity, and certainly individualism. And many sustainable living theorists abandon creativity in favour of simple-minded population reduction approaches. To these simple thinking theorists, individualism and creativity are enemies--threats to their ability to fully control the down-sizing of population they feel is necessary.

But to more intelligent theorists of greater vision, it is obvious that only human creativity will discover the paths forward to greater sustainability, even in the face of 8 to 10 billion humans living on the earth's surface.

The Berkeley research was oriented toward corporate research institutes, which exist in order to create new products and services to enrich the parent corporation. The same principle applies to creative efforts oriented toward finding sustainable futures that are currently obscured by the uncertainty of the branching future.

Blank Slate: Special Report on Re-invention

Forbes.com has compiled a special online report dealing with the re-invention of everything. From re-inventing life itself, to re-inventing re-invention, several topics are covered.

Here are links to some of the articles on re-inventing:

• The University
• Intelligence
• Reality
• Pharmaceuticals
• You
• Prison

And there are other articles dealing with things such as crisis creativity and more.

It is nice to see mainstream journals reporting on futuristic topics. Forbes has a bias toward corporate development of ideas, but the underlying issues of creativity, design, and reinvention are the same regardless of the ultimate use.