Monthly Archives: September 2016

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Is Science Coming Full Circle??

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A change in natural science is emerging along with “computing”
turning away from using theory & equations as a guide,
toward using data pattern recognition for
naturally occurring systems revealed in the data to be a guide.

Preface

Note: About 20 Years ago algorithms were developed for selectively extracting differentiable continuities from raw data, making a major step beyond “splines” for true mining of natural continuities from noisy data without regression.    The result was quite successful forensic pattern recognition of  discovered natural systems, their forms and behaviors.   Combined with a general systems “pattern language” based only on the constraint of energy conservation, that pattern mining has provided a very productive alternative to AI for investigating naturally occurring forms and designs.  The one unusual leap for applying scientific methods was to use it to capture the great richness of natural textures available from studying uniquely individual cases and forms found in nature.   That is what overcomes the worst faults of studying individual cases, and so instead greatly enriches theory with directly observed phenomenology.  The rudimentary tools successfully developed have been proven useful again and again with subjects such as illustrated below.  10/21/16

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A long central principle of modern science, relying on defining nature with the information we can find, is considered here by way of  eight examples of how important it is for science to also rely on doing the opposite, looking for patterns in the information we are missing somehow.   Doing much the reverse lets us use the information we have to ask better questions about what nature is hiding from us.  

It’s such an odd and obvious mistake to stubbornly treat nature as our data, as Neils Bohr and Popper insisted on and the QM community has maintained.   Being limited to analysis and data creates a large blind spot for science, made unable by that limitation to learn from observation, and to see clearly how very different the “data world” (what fits in a computer) is from the “material world” (what doesn’t). The puzzles of found in natural patterns, turning up in ‘bigdata and various pattern sciences seems to be putting all of these matters into question again.    

So I may take some unfair advantage, perhaps, by making a little fun of that prior arbitrary constraint on scientific inquiry, insisting that nothing we have no data for can exist.   That of course is almost everything when it comes down to.  It’s no joke, though, that our data is decidedly inferior for defining nature.  Here and elsewhere I tend to allow that nature defines itself, as I certainly don’t do it.

The “Impacts Uncounted” article mentioned describes a simply enormous worldwide neglect in economic accounting, a huge mismeasure of lasting business environmental impacts.   It’s caused by the traditional insistence on trusting the data at hand and refusal to look for what data is going uncounted, as if the fact that we can only study the data we have means nature is not being misrepresented by it, a curiously deep concern for understanding the scientific method.  In reality there is more to life than the data we have.   Treating “science” as whatever our data defines, then, actually means “flying blind” regarding all the kinds and scales of phenomena going unmeasured, the difference between nature and data going unseen.  For accurate accounting, even older scientific principles need to apply, such as defining units of measure in relation to the whole system or “universe” for that measure, not just the part easy to measure, and so “Impacts Uncounted” is the effect of counting the global impacts of business using local measures, as is today standard around the world, a big mistake.  

So these 8 examples are “data visualizations” that neatly expose where important data is very much missing, as a guide to where to go and look.   Those hiding places exposed as gaps in the data turn our attention to phenomena of perhaps another kind or another scale, or on another plane with material influence perhaps.  That is then what needs to be discovered and looked into. to really understand what the measures display and the systems or events they refer to.    That the data available, then, always points to phenomena beyond the scope of the data to define is both the oldest and perhaps now the newest of deep scientific principles for interpreting what we see.

Is science coming full circle…?  The answer seems to be YES!

 

Persistent patterns in data generally reflect complex natural forms of design, complex and complicated well beyond what data can define.  So we present data in a way to helps show someone what’s missing.

Data from a natural source is generally biased and incomplete as a result of how it’s collected, and a “proxy” for various things other than what it is said to measure. So not really knowing what it measures, it is best studied as being another way of sampling an undefined universe, to become meaningful by discovering its boundaries

Patrick Ball’s HRDAG[1] methods demonstrate comparing sources for death records in conflict environments, using the differences and overlaps to reveal the true totals. My own research shows environmental impacts of business are undefined, lacking a common denominator to make them comparable as shares of the same universe.  Correcting the mismeasure appears to increase the impact scale of business by several orders of magnitude[2].  In both cases characterizing the universe the original data is implicitly sampled from serves as common denominator for making the original data meaningful.

For discussing basic explanatory principles of physics used for forensic systems research[3]

1.   See where hidden connecting events shifted the flows??

test sext
[The missing data is about the unstable states, the markers of whole system change in design]
Continue reading Is Science Coming Full Circle?? →

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Regions Left Behind

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The discussion of the UN’s  Sustainable development Goals (SDG’s) focuses on the poor, and “Leaving No One Behind”.   That overlooks that it’s most often the growth of the world economy that made older parts of the economy outmoded, and leaving whole communities behind as the world economy moves on to what’s more profitable.  This discussion illustrates more of the detail, how innovative change like the “green revolution” thought to be for feeding the poor.   It would quite predictably also leave more and more agricultural communities behind, …as everyone has increasingly seen in their own regions… like in my own home region of New York State, exhibiting common symptoms of being economically left behind you see around the world:

  1. abandonment of rural communities
  2. as farmers can’t afford sell to feed their own communities
  3. the flight to cities with now skills to sell
  4. the growing refugee and landless migrant populations
  5. growing youth cultures with little to do but to get angry
  6. or that are fighting over resources degraded by over use

And that’s only one of the kinds of distressed communities unable to keep up with the competition ans the most profitable invest their profits in becoming more profitable and more and more people can’t keep up.

A natural pattern of the growth systems is using profits to develop innovations that are more profitable, which of course also multiplies the disruption of the ways of life being displaced..., that we've called
1. & 2. A natural pattern of the growth systems is using profits to develop innovations that are more profitable, which of course also multiplies the disruption of the ways of life being displaced…, that we’ve called “externalities”, as if they didn’t matter, and don’t get counted. It leaves more an more communities behind at the limits though.

These all actively leave whole societies of suffering people behind in a way that is not reversible.   It’s the real predictability of ever escalating competition causing all these uncounted impacts of how we invest money in growth for the wealthy, that undermining the sustainability traditional economies.   That’s the real quandary here, it so very predictable.    What DO development planners think about, not to ask who the latest innovation will put out of business.   Well, to do real sustainable design, we’d need to add that question to the list, what will our “killer app” put out of business?    It’s always a trade-off when you “create jobs” of any kind, that there will be jobs lost elsewhere with a very high probability.

Conceptually the lasting profitability option is fairly simple, gradual stabilizing of the whole system profit as the profitability of growth stops growing as fast, leading to a steady state creative living.

The Lasting Creative Spira, so familiar in life, only requiring that investment not be compounded as growing innovation meets diminishing lasting returns.
3. The Lasting Creative Spiral, so familiar in life, only requiring that investment not be compounded as growing innovations meet diminishing lasting returns.

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For the big picture of how we got the math wrong…

The economic impacts we don’t count turn out to be the great majority of disruptive earth and societal impacts we experience (seeImpactsUncounted ).  They even have a name, the “externalities” incurred as liabilities of obtaining services by paying someone else to deliver the goods.   So those are actually internal to the operating necessities for running a business, only external to the accounting we’ve been doing.   Counting them is actually just ruled out for SD accounting, by a “stroke of a pen”, as effects that decision makers don’t feel responsible for, and have no direct control over.   Those include impacts of financial decisions, for investing in disruptive innovations, also excluded from the discussion of impacts by the stroke of a pen.

Some impacts of finance are easily measured and some not, so to fully understand the problem takes sorting through what is accountable and what is not, develop different ways of assigning shares of responsibility.    Certainly the ones that are measurable should be counted.  They’re mostly counted globally, like soil and water depletion and lots of other things.   They’re just not at present assigned to anyone’s responsibility.  Doing so proportional to share of world GDP would be both scientifically correct and perfectly fair.   So a study group would pick one or two such questions at a time to see what can be learned.

Another concern is how the continual compounding of profits forces everyone in the economy struggle to keep up with financial demands for ever increasing productivity and competition…  what the phrase “the rat race” technically refers to.   It’s why we all seem forced to to run ever faster to stay in one place.   That’s of course not really sustainable, but very hard to know how to measure.   Still, it’s a very real kind of suffering and accumulative culture change, and connected to the escalating competition in the economy that leaves ever more people and communities behind, a kind of “destructive creation”.

In figures 1 & 2 illustrate how regions are left behind, using the example of how once thriving agricultural communities of New York State collapsed, leaving long term economic damage behind.   The question is where did the money go that once invested in productive farming in the region.   The costs were left behind as the money fled to create the extractive industrial farming of the mid-west and elsewhere, mining water and fossil fuel resources very unsustainably, to grow corn, wheat and soy where it wouldn’t thrive naturally.  Of course, much of this is only observable in hind sight and not really manageable, but the costs to society clearly also do escalate.   That makes it imperative we take responsibility and do what’s right.    The driver is making more profits, for investing in even more competitive businesses, using “disruptive innovation” that also leavea ever more others behind somewhere too.

For many decades people have more often called that effect of disruptive innovations “creative destruction”, accepting that to make more money and increase the economy’s products, you have to destroy the economy’s old ways of making products.     The hard question is when to change from calling that  “creative destruction” to calling it “destructive creation”.    The programming of the economy to always grow that process seems to assure ever stiffer competition for everyone, all the time.    It’s so constant we might just take it for granted,… but as a continual culture change for pushing everyone to face ever stiffer competition for how they live, it’s certainly not sustainable.   As you push the limits then… it seems to naturally leave more and more people and environments behind, and be really more destructive than productive.

How that escalates is illustrated below, alongside the map of New York State, roughly showing the area of Central NY farming communities that vanished in the 50’s to 70’s, giving in to the competition from industrial farming.    We could count the region’s lasting economic and cultural damages, perhaps.   We can also see that the global corollary is of larger scale and seeming leaving more and more behind around the globe all the time.   We can see it was no one’s political decision, nor is there anyone else at direct fault.  We can see that kind of change is quite irreversible once it has happened.    We’d only know if we counted it, and attributed the costs to our financial decisions to profit that way.   As societal collapses are not reversible, we’d really need a more holistic way of measuring our impacts, to understand the costs of how we make money for our future.

Its SO predictable!

What would make people care??

What would let them notice??