Personal comments and letters that seem to capture an idea well
I get Google alerts to popular comments I’ve made on other blogs. Following are the most recent 4:
________ Continue reading Four comments “the world” liked… Mar 2011
Dan Ariely gave a recent talk on some of his new “Predictably Irrational” research. It stimulated my thinking to ask, using his approach, “What beliefs do people not dare check?”.
The example below suggests that is a problem for the green movement, regarding why it has been ineffective in slowing the growth of economic impacts. Dan replied “force yourself to do a systematic analysis and listen to the analysis”.
That’s good advice, to “listen to the analysis”. Aren’t we ALWAYS supposed to listen to your own analysis?? There seem to be regularly reoccurring ways in which we don’t, making a big difference in our impacts on the earth. Continue reading Simple facts… and hard memes, why greening doesn’t work
Leland, Thanks for forwarding Christine Harper’s (Bloomberg Jan 31) notes on “The lonliest man in Davos…” reporting from the meeting of the World Economic Forum.
It all sounds like the very same script pulled from the drawer at every stage of history, as the next greater ecological or financial bubble emerges,
…hoping against hope that each greater failure isn’t leading to the inevitable for financial systems designed to ‘stabilize’ growing expectations for results from physical systems not providing them.
When I first noticed that problem long ago I quickly narrowed it down to that deep error of intent, and then to how our accounting system keeps records of it on the faint hope that the impossible will someday be fulfilled. It treats the physical world as a “black box” of unknowns, relied on to multiply returns that can’t be confirmed or contested. So I say, why not “look in the box”, see what you really have! Continue reading The very same script pulled from the drawer
Brian Lehrer on WNYC radio asked that question “What happens after the revolution?” to discuss the experience of people that might apply to the amazing events in Egypt and the Arab world, and what follows.
I’m a scientist who studies the revolutions in natural systems that nature uses to create everything. You discover causes later, and discover revolutions happening from the explosion of new relationships emerging.
Generally there is a kind of “calm before a storm” that becomes a “viral event” which then goes through a succession of stages. The emerging system seems to “graduate” from one level of organization to another as much as people move through a succession of graduations in life, experiencing a “disrupting and remaking” its environmental relations.
The Egyptian revolution today is at the stage of “immature new culture” needing to mature to find what to refine as their new national culture. A similar challenge faced followed the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, now seemingly approaching the end of its second experiment with self-government.
There are better new tools for studying these events and histories, as seen in my study of “silent” collapse of the Crack Culture in NYC from 1990-95. You need some mathematical analysis to make sure you have quality data, but mainly just learn to observe how an environment is changing by the presence viral cultural or ecological events. Continue reading What happens after the revolution?
The journal Nature published an insightful research article on Systemic risk in banking ecosystems that added valuable insight into what went wrong in the 2008 financial collapse. Invited comments on a forum page Financial systems: Ecology and economics added other insights on what did or could go wrong.
My comment pointed out that trying to fix what went wrong in prior financial system failures to prevent the next, is what led to the next not the solution, for a curiously visible reason. A link to Dmitri Orlov’s new video on what happens if these kinds of systemic contradictions are not attended to, and my comment, are below as well.
Nature Forum,
The curious omission by Haldane and May, as well as by Johnson and Lux in their critiques, is not considering the place of this financial collapse in history.
It was just one of a great many self-similar panics and collapses, large and small throughout history. It’s been an interest of mine for over 30 years. Continue reading Why fixing what failed before always led to the next
One of the constant threads of my work from the start has been the curious gaps between the world our minds present to us as a whole, and the one nature builds for us to *work* as a whole (using a considerably more complete deck of cards, you might say)…
Here’s a good note to a mathematician and physicist, John Baez on his Azimuth website, prompted by the interest he expressed in studying the math of real world problems in his comments regarding mathematical economics.
John, in your first comment at the top I noticed your intent to go back to teaching math differently next time, as you said:
What could be challenging and intriguing is to try to model the elemental problem of “complex systems with thinking parts”, or “learning systems”.
The problem is how a network of independently “observing, interpreting & responding” agents would interact. They are not follow rules, exactly, but following discoveries instead.
Learning systems share their own original learning and responses and developed a combined viewpoint of their dynamically changing environment. Economic markets do that for example. Continue reading The limits of learning machines… (drawing a blank!)
I wish we could talk about it, in the dark somewhere preferably, to avoid being vilified by the bullying that mysteriously appears to enforce the silence,… and prevent our true celebration of life on an interconnected planet…
There’s a remarkable pattern of historic scientific breakthroughs concerning how we fit into earth’s energy budget, that were deliberately discredited by social attacks. Pejorative gossip has been used to fight otherwise clear and valuable insights, over and over.
It’s useful to look why it is socially unacceptable to see how we fit into earth’s energy budget. It seems to point to exactly what people, mistakenly, think they’re avoiding, and find so objectionable. Continue reading A New Year’s wish, for the true celebration
I’ve been discussing since the 70’d how and why growth creates growing complexity and so growing difficulty of problem solving, as a natural physical limit of growth for systems with physical working parts of any kind. A a discussion of the signs to look) It’s both a real concern as a threat to the health of an economic growth system, and good proof that the natural world functions very differently than a conceptual model. It led to my proposing a whole new set of scientific methods for how science can study natural systems in their own form, as forms of natural organization not concepts.
1970 marked the sudden end of steadily growing US wages, and the start of ever growing wealth inequity. “Information overload” as a threat to societal resilience was becoming a key topic of discussion as computers emerged as our premiere business tools
Below this discussion of the general problem is the blog comment from 9/3/2012 observing the strangely logical connection of the emergence of computers as a (false) solution for the ever more numbing complexity of our lives.
A follow-up Sept 7 2012 post Computers taking over our jobs and our pay? explores a fairly reasonable cause for the systemic decline in demand for the products people produce, that the computers making them don’t buy them…
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Here’s a graph of the use of the word “complex“, as found in books scanned by Google. It seems to show a distinct end to the long historic growth of interest in complexity, apparently in pace with the increasing complexity of the economy. The complexity of all our life issues, as well as demands of education, etc. have similarly increased with the growth of the economy, but only up to ~1963.
Google’s Ngram tool shows steady exponential growth in the use “complex” beginning in ~1840 and continuing to ~1963, where there’s a distinct growth “inflection point” (curvature reversal) in the trend. The clear end of increasing use of the word is a little mysterious.
The 1960’s, of course, coincided with the actual time when the complexity of the economy’s environmental conflicts, the emergence of computer use, and the rise of true globalization were noticeably exploding the complexity of things… That is also directly implied by the continuing explosive growth in real GDP, as shown in the combined graph below.
That divergence between the two trends would seem to imply that a very large gap, between the real complexity of our experience and our cultural awareness of it, began for some reason to grow faster and faster at that time. It seems to have starting in the early 1960’s and to continue!
And to repeat, here’s my little tale of unexpected bounty, that takes on new colors and meanings every year, as our world rapidly changes. Peak Zucchini
My favorite zucchini recipe at the moment is to split them lengthwise, grill and then turn them over to cover them with stuff… chopped sundried tomatoes, pesto, strong cheese, oregano, onion and garlic salt..shredded fresh basil or whatever you have time fix, and put them back in till it combines… WoW!
pfh
There’s a nice report out of the NY Federal Reserve on Shadow Banking. That’s the ability of the great sloshing global pool of money to act as a world bank, without any safety net. I wrote an apparently effective note, got a nice response from the author.
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Dear NY Fed
A comment on your July 2010 report. Shadow banking is an emergent natural system. I’m a natural systems scientist who studies the difference between scientific theories and complex natural systems.
Equations can’t have independently learning parts, for example, but economies and other natural systems rely heavily on the adaptive processes of their parts. So, that adds to the long list of reasons for why abstract theories tend to have a short “shelf life”, you could say. Continue reading Shadow Banking, out of the shadow