Can Humans Invent New Ways of Knowing and Discovery In Time?

Michael Nielsen is a pioneer of quantum computing and a champion of open-source science. Nielsen sees the Polymath Projects -- an open online group effort by mathematicians around the world to solve interesting problems on the edge of mathematical knowledge -- as a prototype for what is possible in open-source science as a whole.

A project that I really like a lot is one called the Polymath Project, which has involved a large number of people, mostly mathematicians, from all over the world. They have started using blogs and wikis to collaborate together on difficult, unsolved mathematical problems. It’s a place where they can pool all their different types of expertise, hopefully get a conversation going, and maybe make some progress on problems that any individual amongst them might find very, very challenging. They have had some big successes. They have also had some other projects that haven’t gone so well, which is about par for the course in research. If you’re not having a lot of failures, it means you’re trying problems that are too easy. But it is exciting to see them doing this and pioneering a new way of doing research.

...By and large, [universities are] not standing in the way except through inertia. As a scientist, you build your career by publishing papers, basically. If you’re spending a lot of time doing that, it’s hard to make time to, say, share your ideas online or to share computer code online or any of the other things you might potentially be doing, even though those things have tremendous scientific value. So, in some sense, the entrenched system of reward that universities use is standing in the way of open science, but it’s not because of anything malicious on anybody’s part. It’s just that we have this established system, and it’s very difficult to get everybody to change at the same time. _Boston Review: Michael Nielsen

Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen

Nielsen's open-source group approach to problem solving and discovery is one possible answer to the daunting problem of a rapidly building data glut in science. Scientists have been aware of this problem at least since the 1960s, but it is becoming particularly acute in the 21st century:

When the datasets are so large that they become unwieldy even for the Internet, innovators are spurred to invent new forms of sharing. For example, Tranche, the system behind ProteomeCommons, created its own technical protocol for sharing terabytes of data over the Net, so that a single source isn't responsible for pumping out all the information; the process of sharing is itself shared across the network. And the new Linked Data format makes it easier than ever to package data into small chunks that can be found and reused. The ability to access and share over the Net further enhances the new economics of deletion; data that otherwise would not have been worth storing have new potential value because people can find and share them.

...the biological system of an organism is complex beyond imagining. Even the simplest element of life, a cell, is itself a system. A new science called systems biology studies the ways in which external stimuli send signals across the cell membrane. Some stimuli provoke relatively simple responses, but others cause cascades of reactions. These signals cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The overall picture of interactions even of a single cell is more than a human being made out of those cells can understand. In 2002, when Hiroaki Kitano wrote a cover story on systems biology for Science magazine -- a formal recognition of the growing importance of this young field -- he said: "The major reason it is gaining renewed interest today is that progress in molecular biology ... enables us to collect comprehensive datasets on system performance and gain information on the underlying molecules." Of course, the only reason we're able to collect comprehensive datasets is that computers have gotten so big and powerful. Systems biology simply was not possible in the Age of Books.

...The problem -- or at least the change -- is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It's not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It's a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.

Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens. _theatlantic: David Weinberger_via_J.Curry_via_WUWT

Too Big to Know by David Weinberger. Weinberger is a philosopher, author, marketing guru, and more.

In the early 1950s, psychologists of learning attempted to describe different levels of thinking and learning:

Recognizing that there are different levels of thinking behaviors that are important to learning, Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956), developed a classification of levels of intellectual behaviors. This taxonomy... contains three domains: the cognitive, psychomotor and affective. The cognitive domain had six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. _ Synergy PDF

Moving up the levels from primary recall knowledge up to comprehension, application, synthesis etc. represents increasing levels of understanding and ability to interconnect and utilise knowledge in productive ways.

Here is an example of an attempt to climb up the levels of knowledge, from the field of climate science: A physicist attempts to build a mental model of the radiation balance of the Earth from basic principles. Following physicist Robert Brown's (Duke U.) logic as he tries to make sense of a complex dynamic system, may give you an idea of the process of moving from general knowledge to the early stages of understanding in science.

Nielsen and Weinberger would like to help find ways around the impasse with which modern human societies are confronted. But it is not clear that entrenched modern institutions -- academia, government, media etc -- are as willing to help. In many ways, humans that are good with their brains -- and capable of teaming up with others who are also good with their brains -- represent a significant threat to current ways of doing things, or of preventing things from getting done in many cases.

Human societies are confronted with some very serious problems which may prove to be the end of us all. For example, most governments of advanced societies are wasting time and enormous resources fighting phantom, non-existent problems such as carbon hysteria. To fight this phantom problem, they are committing their citizens to a progressive energy starvation which will inevitably handicap their societies just at the moment that they are being hit the hardest by the twin problems of debt and demographic decline. Tragically, the institutions of academia and the media appear to be solidly behind governments in this suicidal agenda.

It seems a bit futile to worry about the problems and solutions presented by Weinberger and Nielsen, when our own governments and societal institutions are busy doing us in. But in reality, humans can use the powerful networking resources of modern technologies to move beyond their governments and other institutions -- at least to an important, if limited, extent.

Consider this a wakeup call of sorts. A marvelous future waits for us, if we will only wake up and make it happen.

Knowledge Is a Scary Thing; Most People Shy Away from It

"Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner." -- Ann Rice, in The Vampire Lestat _Source

I ran across the Ann Rice quote on page 28 of this slideshare presentation on energy policy. This is a theme that has been covered repeatedly in the Al Fin blogs: the truth is both dangerous and difficult to find and assimilate.

If the truth were not so dangerous and destabilising, there would be no need for the layers of bureaucracy in governments, academia, big media, religion, and corporations.

The control and obfuscation of the truth is a growing industry in the modern world, and far more instrumental in determining your beliefs than you would like to think.

It is not important what you believe. It is only important that you learn to think and judge the relative trustworthiness of information, relative validity of arguments, and relative likelihood of conclusions. The process of testing ideas, arguments, and beliefs has been ignored (or blocked) at the highest levels of policy-making on national and global levels. Unless that suicidal approach to policy-making is changed, economic and societal ruin are inevitable.

This is one example of obfuscation of truth by insiders, which could lead to significant economic destruction at the trillion dollar level. Similar obfuscation of "truth" is occurring on a daily basis at every government office, in every big media outlet, in large numbers of university and K-12 classrooms, and inside your own head.

First you need to realise that "truth" is a verb, rather than a noun (an ongoing dynamic process rather than a static object).

A million years of biological evolution did not prepare most humans for this rapidly growing and critical challenge. But it is important that as many people as possible be empowered with these skills -- the earlier the better. Once the brain has fully matured -- around age 25 or so -- most people are reluctant to change their minds.

Electrical Energy: Sound Scientific Solutions

View more presentations from John Droz

A compact scientific exposure to electrical energy solutions. You may learn -- as Al Fin did -- that everything you think you know, just ain't so.

On Not Knowing What the Frack You are Talking About

Those of us who wish to break through to the next level of human existence, are going to have to learn to love uncertainty (via Bishop Hill). The science correspondent of The Guardian looks at some answers to the latest Edge question:

Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, emphasised the uselessness of certainty. He said that the idea of something being "scientifically proven" was practically an oxymoron and that the very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

"A good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability."

...Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know that "truth" is just a model. "The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don't – they make and test models," he said.

"Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It's a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom." _Guardian_via_BishopHill

The mind naturally hates uncertainty. If we do not know what is to happen, we cannot plan for it, and are at the mercy of "the fates."

The basic idea is simple. It is that to perceive the world is to successfully predict our own sensory states. The brain uses stored knowledge about the structure of the world and the probabilities of one state or event following another to generate a prediction of what the current state is likely to be, given the previous one and this body of knowledge. Mismatches between the prediction and the received signal generate error signals that nuance the prediction or (in more extreme cases) drive learning and plasticity. _AndyClark

Of course it is one thing to embrace uncertainty and accept humility. It is quite another to pretend to embrace uncertainty, then to tell everyone to shut the fuck up because you understand what is going on better than anyone else does. That is what several of the commenters at the Edge site appeared to be doing.
True science does not attempt to limit what models can be tested by which experiment. True science does not limit the nature of models which can be entertained and played with. True science does not play down the massive uncertainty within its boundaries so as to influence public policy on a massive scale -- for its own financial benefit and increase in prestige.

This is what we are dealing with in modern climate science -- and in a wide range of other sciences which have attracted the attention of politically ambitious scientists, politicians, and bureaucratic administrators. The quest to build better models -- falsifiable models which can be ruthlessly tested by experiment -- is being hampered and biased by political and ideological concerns. Even at more "enlightened" websites such as Edge.org you can see the underlying corrupting influence of politics.

That is why science is escaping the bounds that "scientists", science bureaucrats, science journalists, science publishers, politicians, political lobbyists on scientific issues, and other supposed gatekeepers of science are trying to maintain. The tools of experimentation are escaping into the public domain, with all the attendant risks and opportunities which that entails.

Scientists are also politicians, at least within their own little realm. Some of them actually sell themselves to "the dark side" and attempt to practise politics on a grander scale. If a scientist lacks humility in his public pronouncements and policy recommendations, he is not practising true science, but is practising politics.

Until we can quantify the uncertainty in our statements and our predictions, we have little idea of their power or significance. So too in the public sphere. Public policy performed in the absence of understanding quantitative uncertainties, or even understanding the difficulty of obtaining reliable estimates of uncertainties usually means bad public policy. _LawrenceKrauss

All models are metaphors and all metaphors are man-made. The greatest danger in financial modeling and the modeling of all human activities is therefore the age-old sin of idolatry. Financial markets are alive but a metaphor is a limited human work of art, entrancing perhaps, but inanimate. To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a potential future disaster. All metaphors have their limits. _EmanuelDerman PDF

Emanuel Derman Map of Emotions PDF
Humans are not programmed for rationality, except insofar as finding the next meal, or a relatively warm, dry, and safe place to sleep are measures of rationality. The lofty world of grand scientific ideals and integrities is more of a convenient fiction to justify academic and research budgets. The reality is more one of roiling emotions and jostling egos of unbridled ambition and jealousy.

Politicians of all stripes want to project an image of invincibility and absolute certainty. Journalists, speechwriters, and public relations hacks assist them toward that end. Scientists -- by keeping their mouths shut about how little they themselves know -- also assist the politicians (at all levels) toward their petty, venal ends.

One of the happy exceptions among scientists is Freeman Dyson.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. _Dyson

But if your paycheck depends upon wrangling a grant from a government that is down to writing IOUs, you want to project a degree of certainty and a crucial pivotal nature within your research, which you cannot actually know or prove. You probably don't even believe it yourself, deep down, but bills must be paid, kids must be raised, appearances must be kept up....

The enormous academic, political, and journalistic house of cards which exists to bamboozle the public into believing that the ruling and credentialed class knows what it is doing, cannot last forever. It is already crumbling about the edges and showing deepening cracks in its infrastructure.

What should you do about it? Learn to embrace skepticism toward the proclamations of would-be authority, and adopt a robust system of planning in your personal life. Things do not typically turn out the way we expect. Learn to deal with a healthy measure of uncertainty and unpredictability.

And keep your powder dry, you just may need to use it.

Humans: Just Smart Enough to be Stupid

Regardless of what breathless news anchors try to sell you, humans are not living in special times. Human societies have always been in turmoil politically, religiously, economically. Despite the "lessons of Mumbai", human violence was much greater in the past, human suffering much more widespread. Humans have been closer to the brink of destruction, and the environment of Earth has been in greater danger in times past.

Humans are no smarter than in the past, although the wider availability of nutrients and micronutrients has made it easier for more people to be as smart as they are likely to get. Market economics on a broader scale has made the bounty of multi-specialised human effort inexpensive enough to stock in the stores of every country that allows its citizens to trade relatively free of corrupt and official extortion.

Governments can create an atmosphere of freedom and security from violence and fraud, which allows a market economy to flourish. But it is important for governments to maintain a "hands-off" posture except where necessary to ensure valid contracts, patents, copyrights, and standards. When government goes beyond the minimal support of a free market, in an attempt to "drive the economy," problems will begin to crop up.

Unfortunately, many smart humans assume that governments not only can drive the economy, but believe that governments should do so. These humans -- some of them Nobel Laureates -- believe that affluence and prosperity derive directly from the governmental organisations they have devoted their best efforts to.

If even the smartest of humans make such an elementary mistake, what are the rest of humans to think? Particularly when an army of lackeys in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracies stand ready to propagate, amplify, and implement into policy the pronouncements of these "smart but not wise" human authorities.

Once again, governmental and inter-governmental leaders are falling into the trap that so frequently catches persons of power: the pretence of knowledge. Wielding their pretence of knowledge like a bloody club, these leaders are willing to beat down all objections to their most destructive proposals and "reforms". Basking in the glow of pseudo-knowledge, they are perceived by lesser beings as actually being wise.

Smart people can as easily be fools, as anyone else. Particularly when they start believing their own press releases. At that point, the smart person becomes a fool falling down a vicious spiral of self-delusion. For such a person, wisdom would involve knowing when to stop. But wisdom is not usually involved, only fragile self-regard. The person -- and everyone dependent upon him -- get carried along with the flow.

The people soon to be in control of the strongest and wealthiest nation on the planet, believe that they can legislate and administer prosperity and affluence. Starting with that failed premise, there is no combination of "smart people" who will be able to help them succeed. Anyone who thinks otherwise is suffering a common but fatal delusion.

Smarter people might help to limit the damages of such policies of designed failure. More likely, the prospect of failure will merely feed into the delusional cycle which these smart people are trapped within. They will believe that too much has been invested to express doubt, to turn back. Having experienced so much early success in their lives, and having been told how special they are, they will feel obligated to follow through -- until it will be too late to change course, even if they had the will.

Smart people, behaving stupidly. It happens every day. This time, the consequences are likely to be severe for everyone who depends upon the global economy.

If you are positioned so as to be able to take advantage of local or regional prosperity -- which is organised so as to be viable during an international financial crisis -- do what is necessary to assure the soundness of the fallback economy. It is from such pockets of local and regional prosperity that a larger-scale prosperity will be able to establish itself in recovering from the folly of the incoming leadership.

Humans will continue to be smart enough to be stupid, until they stop. You may think that wisdom is the missing ingredient, but that is only partly true. Wisdom is a verb, not a noun, and it is a moving target. Wise people have evolved to an enlightenment which suits a particular environment, or range of environments. Environments change, often drastically. Neither a smart nor a wise person should be complacent. Take care of the essentials first. Then work outward from there, systematically. That is a basic wisdom that is not likely to change, for most environments you may fall into.

Waking Up To Capitalism--A Modern Rip Van Winkle

Jan Grzbebski woke up from a 19-year-long coma, and he seems to like the smell of capitalism in the morning.

When Jan Grzbebski woke up after 19 years in a coma the Polish railway worker found himself living in the future.

The Soviets had disappeared. So had food rationing. The only thing that stayed the same was his doting wife, Gertruda. She refused to believe the doctors who threw up their hands after diagnosing her comatose husband with brain cancer and said he was likely to die within a few years of the accident.

....Communism collapsed. Their four children married and produced 11 grandchildren.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski tells TVN24, according to Reuters. "Now I see people on the streets with cellphones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

Source

Check out this BBC video.

Communist Poland suffered under the "knowledge problem," like all strictly communist or true socialist economies. Without the straightjacket of communism, Poland has the opportunity to recover from a decades long nightmare coma of its own.

As Russia Fades

Russians are having a difficult time coming to terms with their loss of "superpower" status.

Russia today is a much diminished version of the Soviet Union. The population of 140 million is shrinking because of a plunging birth rate, and falling life expectancy. The Russian GDP, at $900 billion, is less than seven percent of the United States (which has more than twice as many people). That, however, is an improvement. In the early 1990s, when economists and accountants got the first good look at the Russian economy since the early 20th century, it was found that the Russian GDP was about four percent of the U.S. GDP. Add back all the lost components of the Soviet Union, and you still don't have a GDP amounting to more than six percent of the American one. How did the Soviet Union achieve superpower status on such a thin economic base? They did it mostly with illusion, and an excessive arms budget that ruined the economy.

....Soviet weapons, as impressive as they appeared to be, always came out a distant second when they were used against Western ones. The main thing that kept the Soviet military reputation going was the need of Western militaries to make the Soviet Union look strong, in order to justify high Western military budgets.

The one effective weapon the Soviets did have were their nuclear armed ballistic missiles. Better maintained than the rest of the military, enough of this missile fleet would work, if used, to devastate Western nations. Russia still has a large part of that nuclear arsenal. But that does not make Russians feel like a superpower. That's because Russia no longer has the huge fleet, air force and army.

...It took Russia over four centuries to build that empire, and the inept Soviet Bureaucrats a few weeks to lose it all. An increasing number of Russians want it back, but are unwilling to confront how they lost it in the first place, or why rebuilding the empire is an uncertain and dangerous enterprise. This is all very dangerous stuff.

Source

Russia's problem derives to a large extent from the "knowledge problem." Centralised economies are forced to contrive false data in order to make economic plans. But the error in data compounds with time, until no one really knows what is happening in the economy.

The recent actions of the Putin government in confiscating private enterprises and nationalising them, or selling them to Putin cronies, are placing the Puting economy squarely within the danger area of the knowledge problem. There is no amount of oil and gas wealth that can compensate the national economy for these mistakes. Certainly savvy international investors understand the problem, and will keep their distance--until Russia wises up.

The Knowledge Problem--An Inconvenient Constraint on Would-Be Social Engineers

Given the predominantly leftist tilt of most university faculties--at least in economics and social sciences--it is not surprising that many students and recent graduates have not become acquainted with "the knowledge problem" in economics.

The problem dates to the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The problem has been explicated further by Thomas Sowell, in the book Knowledge and Decisions (Sowell's best book in my opinion).

The knowledge problem is stated various ways, but it boils down to describing the immense difficulty in implementing a centrally planned economy when more than one person is involved--much less when millions or hundreds of millions are involved. Think of it as the "two body problem" from physics transferred to the economic realm, except far less tractable.

A lot of students and recent graduates refer to circumstances where socialism or communism are "proven to have worked". Unfortunately, most of them are unacquainted with the knowledge problem. An economic system comprising more than one participant rapidly gains complexity in determining the value of various economic transactions.

Whether a person wants to found their own socialist country, or build a working artificial intelligence, they must come face to face with the knowledge problem (KP), and they must learn to accomodate the constraints the KP presents.

For those who are serious about writing meaningful articles and books on the topic of hyper-complex entities such as economies or intelligences, acquainting themselves with the KP would be a useful side area of study that would reap huge benefits. Anyone who neglects a deep and meaningful investigation of the knowledge problem will pay dearly for the neglect.

I will try to work in more information on this topic in other postings.