Complex systems and intuition vs rationality

almost taiwan

...destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis...

James Lovelock's four possible outcomes for humans vs Gaia, quoted in Straw Dogs, p8

Recent interview and Q&A [mp3] with James Lovelock, who has good stories and is cheerily gloomy about the outlook for humanity. He's 90 this year, but sounds decades younger.

Many good things to take away, but one I noted down at the time: There's no use being rational about complex systems, as all models that we'd rationally produce are gross simplifications that make us over-confident in their simplified [i.e. wrong] predictions [cf. recently discredited financial models]. In such cases Lovelock says it's best to observe a lot and then be intuitive.

Related post:

The planet will save itself

Useful without being true

almost taiwan

1) It does not always make sense to eradicate stories and customs that do not have inner logical validity. They maybe useful without being inherently true.
2) Seeing people acting correctly, does not show that they know what they are doing.

Yechezkel Zilber

Leap into the void

Yves Klein

Nearly all my weaknesses stem from the same optimism / idiocy / arrogance - the belief in fresh starts, the idea that I've neither original sin nor accumulated faults, and an escape is always possible.

In part this is because I reflect on my past very, very little, there are no memories that I'd rather revisit than laze about in now or in meditations / daydreams / empty-headedness. And I don't trust my memories, as soon as I pick one up it becomes a story, and I've no touch for fiction, quickly boring myself with the necessary inventions inre. what happened and why.


Viewed in this distant fashion - I'm a stranger here myself - I'm quite at ease with the idea of a personal eschaton, no problem surrendering free will as things unfold around me. I'm still experiencing it all for the first (and last) time, subconsciously reconstructing things in my head a moment after they've happened in the world as it is outside of me.

Related post:
Narrative fallacy

Sarcastic ending

tokyo undressed

For the utopian mind the defects of every known society are not signs of flaws in human nature. They are marks of universal repression - which, however, will soon be ended. History is a nightmare from which we must awake, and when we do we will find that human possibilities are limitless.

John Gray, Black Mass, p29

Moving average

The standard freelance work is famine or feast, and while it'd be nice to have things smoother that'd also take away the random and non 9-to-5 nature of the work, and it's in the peaks and troughs that you get the rushes of doing the right thing with regard to getting lots of work / $ and then having enough loose time to bicycle around town at odd hours and do other things.

Below is one way to smooth things out.

Freelancing income, arbitrary units, June 2008 to February 2009

I plotted my freelancing income for the last nine months as regular numbers and as a cumulative average. What's unsurprising is that wild fluctuations are far more likely to come at the start of the process, and the line gets progressively smoother, with even large changes having little effect.

Now halfway through March, which so far has been less busier than February, although I'm due 200 or so pages of a philosophy thesis [book?] from the UK this Friday, which is supposed to be finished by Monday. No doubt it'll be on Derrida and make no sense, whether well written or not. Accepting jobs like this makes me wish I hadn't eaten all my modafinil long ago, but I charge by the hour and it'll take up the slack of the last few days of doing nothing paid.

Still, halfway through March and the income is not where I'd like it to be, and because I'm relatively new to this game and waiting on general economic collapse there are small episodes of panic...but then plotting it out as a moving average makes it that much easier to relax. [That and the ton of work that came in today after this was written, not posted]

Looking at the figure and thinking back to the stoicism of the last post and whether this can be applied more widely. Wild fluctuations of feeling in youth, and then gradually less buffeted by life's ups and downs. One thing against this is that humans are not rational, and specifically not rational accountants of their own well-being. But then the theory of the hedonic treadmill would support the idea of something like a moving average for happiness (I think....my brain fails when it comes to real stretching).

Abstract from a related paper [pdf] with too many numbers for me to really enjoy

There is consent among psychologists and some economists that satisfaction from some events, like income and marriage, is adaptive. We propose a subtle but vital difference: happiness may itself be adaptive. First we present a model to explain the emergence of adaptive stimuli. We test our hypotheses running dynamic happiness regressions based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the British Household Panel Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. Surprisingly, the autoregressive component is positive and significant in most econometric models considered. We propose that the hedonic treadmill may be mixed with what we call the "scale treadmill".

Deconstructing the Hedonic Treadmill Perez, Ricardo and Bottan (2008)

The last word with fate

This was sitting with the draft posts and can continue today's theme of suicide.

Thierry de la Villehuchet -- an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the after effects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money -- it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused

This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.

Entry 106 [On killing oneself] in Nassim Taleb's notebook

Thinking way too much about Seneca on occasions, and fairly simplistic stuff like the deviant thrills of being Nero's tutor and how he made his $ / passed his days compared to how I make mine and pass my own. In addition, he's on the shelf with other long, long dead people, and I'm aware the worlds that their works were intended to acts as guides within were filled with problems that are alien to me in both their concrete horror and wild opportunities. There are no bath house orgies or man vs. hippo fights in my neighborhood, no living gods or slaves.

When you read the classics these are people writing in refined dictatorships ruled by superstition, ritual, intrigue and luck, with arbitrary arrest, exile and death always possibilities, along with the more mundane dental mishaps and trivial accidents / illnesses that get out of hand and prove fatal. In large parts of the world these conditions still prevail, but here I'm safe from nearly everything but traffic and cancer, although on this point I surely lack imagination.

Take all the knowledge now required to be thought of as an educated, informed individual and these writers had almost none of it, and suffered hardly, if at all, for the lack. I don't know what this means for me.

Aren't you rather young to be dying?

'Mr Johnson is a writer of some potential virtue; but this doesn't mean we must yet dote upon his doodles and he does seem perversely bent on making "experiments" of no conclusive, or even incidental interest.'

Guardian review of a B. S. Johnson radio play, 1965, quoted in Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe p183

Halfway through the book, which is very good, but know how it ends.

It's a little depressing because there's no posthumous victory. This is true both in general and specifically. 1) You can't enjoy success after death because you're dead. 2) Unlike Kafka, B. S. Johnson's work doesn't rise after his death, and it never will - it's not that good.

More in another post or two, as there's a lot that can be teased out of the story, but expect Coe will do that as Johnson's own narrative begins to unravel.

Old systems break before new ones are in place

Interesting piece from Clay Shirky on the decline of newspapers. There's a lot there, but it's not too long [which is good], with three cuts below.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

.....

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, Clay Shirky

Run with the above and rewrite the first and last paragraphs with the changes in italics .

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving the Washington Consensus demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for economics to replace the one the banking crisis just broke.

When someone demands to be told how we can replace the current system, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that the existing world order isn't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of assigning capital will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

16 - 28, my troubles with women

All Peanuts strips now online here

To any objective observer the situation is clear: here is a somewhat emotionally arrested young man, hungry for sex but unable to separate it from emotion, and so afraid of being abandoned by anyone who loves him that when a woman shows an interest in him - even when it's obviously just physical interest - he clings to her and makes the most absurd promises...

Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe p65

What you repeatedly do

almost taiwan

Doing a big clean ahead of house guests arriving, listening to two old Mark Pesce talks on the same topic, around the same time [Fall 2002, see links at the end]. He mentions Wolfram's A New Kind of Science [whole book online here] and gives the executive summary as there are no formulas for some processes, but rather only processes that need to be followed from start to end, giving the example of a rose.

The same thing is the basis of wisdom vs. knowledge. Knowledge, as facts, can be downloaded / learned at high speed. For many things it's possible to jump over the process directly to the outcome, which enables people with almost no technological know-how, like myself, to function in a society surrounded by engineering marvels that are essentially black magic boxes. As a user, the process is unimportant and more or less invisible.

So back to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."

The first talk, Memes to an End, is slightly more scholarly, while the second, Bios and Logos, is the same material through a psychedelic lens, and several references to Terence McKenna, with my angle reminding me of this idea from somewhere in his work: most people take 40 years or so to see through the shit, if they ever do, that is culture, and now more people are living longer than ever. I don't really believe the supposed implications of this, as I think the mediated reality is so pervasive and deep that the cognitive dissonance of a mass awakening in middle age would be a break down of society, one that may well be happening, but expressed as alienation and substance / behavioral abuse rather than real recognition and communion. At 40 yrs old there's too much skin in the game to throw it all up for something authentic and better. Absurd, until you look around at what people do day after day after day.

The Pesce talks:
Memes to an End, via Future Hi
Bios and Logos from 2002 [text form here]

Slightly related post, on health:
The process not the outcome

cone shell via wikidepia

Urban metabolism

Really interesting article from The Atlantic that has this as the trailer:

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

Goes well with this lengthy piece from the FT, The travails of Detroit.

Air-conditioned nightmare

Alien circadian, thermal, kinetic, sensory, nutritional and social environments. A presentation by Frank Forencich to go with the occasional paleo theme of this page.

The point about light / darkness as cues for body chemistry was something I'd forgotten since I stopped working night shifts, 13 yrs ago. The current regime isn't as jarring, but still unnatural. After watching this talk I've been keeping to lower lux mood lights and making use of dimmer switches, with the idea being that as much as possible the general evening on environment is kept as well lit as a tribal camp site on a moonlit night. I have a very tolerant wife.

Related posts:
The process not the outcome
Big fat lie
Stochastic jerks
Paleoconservatism

The appearance of time

Sarah Heinrichs

For more than a decade, [Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Marseille in France] has been working with mathematician Alain Connes at the College de France in Paris to understand how a time-free reality could give rise to the appearance of time. Their idea, called the thermal time hypothesis, suggests that time emerges as a statistical effect, in the same way that temperature emerges from averaging the behavior of large groups of molecules.

Imagine gas in a box. In principle we could keep track of the position and momentum of each molecule at every instant and have total knowledge of the microscopic state of our surroundings. In this scenario, no such thing as temperature exists; instead we have an ever-changing arrangement of molecules. Keeping track of all that information is not feasible in practice, but we can average the microscopic behaviour to derive a macroscopic description. We condense all the information about the momenta of the molecules into a single measure, an average that we call temperature.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

Is time an illusion? New Scientist

The utility of slack

tanaka lab

I have a mania for systems, never having given up the childish hope that there's a right way to live and it can be codified and broadly applied. This is not how things appear to be, but appearances can be deceptive, and these things come in waves. On some scales there's chaos, and then you pull back or draw closer and order resolves itself. Further back, closer in, chaos returns, alternating in and out.

My own system broke down either a few weeks or months ago, depending on how the story (fiction) is told, although I didn't really have one to begin with. It was a set of external routines that made little sense on their own, and thus were ready to collapse the moment the external influences (my job) were removed. Left to my own devices I've never stopped being a wayward child, full of hope.

This next stage of the experiment is one that teases out the utility of slack, the need for inefficiency at all points of the system so that the inevitable unexpected stresses can be met without any loss of function. Which means what? More time, energy, money and so on than you 'need'. Just enough is a state of permanent near crisis.

Odds & sods

From a good, long and NSFW (language, crude drawings) cartoon called How to not Fail at Life. Damien Hirst has more good advice.

"...if you're having sex with a fourteen-year old girl when you're fourteen you’re always going to find them sexy, but you're not fourteen any more. You've got to change."

Interview with The Idler, 1995

Homo evolutus

Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

Wikipedia

Related posts on this site:
Venter speaking at the Long Now, 2008

I knew what I wanted to do

I was working for Dow Chemical Company at the time as a research chemist. I had the good fortune of having seen that they were working on an interesting compound. The person in whose lab I was working at Dow had found a very easy way of making an almost unknown compound. They said, “We’d like to find some use for this,” and I said, “Gee, if you added a methyl group on this side instead of on this side, as well as on this side, and put an amine down there and make the carbamate, you’d probably have an insecticide.” “Oh?” So they put the methyl group over here, and put an amine down here—a dimethylamine— and a carbamate, and it became a commercial insecticide. And the attitude there was, “Gee, if you can predict things like that, you can just go do whatever you want to do!” That was about the time I had first tried mescaline, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Sasha Shulgin, interviewed with Anna by Earth & Fire Erowid at Mind States 2007, two parts in one pdf here

UPDATE: Sasha giving a talk in Amsterdam, 1998, with the title How I go about inventing new drugs, with thanks to Lorenzo at the Psychedelic Salon, which has a great archive of related podcasts.

The seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player

Various recent lifestyle choices have left me unable to do what I might want to inre. this blog, with far more freedom granted inre. meat life, and so the next few posts might be hurries to catch up and somewhat less thought out or polished than I'd like.

If you've read Moneyball by Michael Lewis then you need no encouragement to seek out this article he wrote on basketball. I know nothing about baseball [Moneyball] or basketball [that article], but who isn't ready to fall for the revealed truth of the seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player who makes all the difference in a game?

What we're talking about is ideas from emergence, complexity, and so on [what I think of as the psychedelic mindset] filtering down [up?] into real life, with pro sports being the bleeding edge of such things now that high finance's applications of extreme math have been shown to be little more than window dressing in a world that is far more complex than a few men on a court, playing by clear rules for an allotted time.

Better husbandry and informed simplicity

Matthew Frederick in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (The MIT Press, 2007) after saying how to draw a line, also says that there are three levels of knowing:

- simplicity, is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.

- complexity, characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex system in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifying patterns and connection.

- informed simplicity, is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to discern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures.

Text and image lifted from Giorgia Brusadin at density design lab

My wife and I used to be on the same schedule, and then summer 2008 she opened her own workshop and set her own hours, while I kept on working for a boss. This caused some friction, but it rippled through the system and came out in unexpected ways. I tried to deal with seemingly unrelated problems, frustrated by what appeared to be their intractable nature.

Now things are a lot better because I stopped trying to be a clever engineer and made a leap of faith with simplicity. All that was lacking was a confidence in action - changing my routine, going out to bars more, staying out later. My problem now may be drinking too much on an empty stomach, but awareness and general balance - things settling down - should come to arrange that.

1) If the sober life if the alcoholic somehow drives him to drink or proposes the first step toward intoxication, it is not to be expected that any procedure which reinforces his particular style of sobriety will reduce or control his alcoholism.

2) If his style of sobriety drives him to drink, then that style must contain an error or pathology; and intoxication must provide some - at least subjective - correction of this error. In other words, compared with his sobriety, which is in some way "wrong," his intoxication must be in some way "right."

Gregory Bateson, The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p310

Impelled by convention

Bowie '73 - '76 Geoff MacCormack

...there is a very strong tendency toward symmetry in the normal drinking habits of Occidental culture. Quite apart from addictive alcoholism, two men drinking together are impelled by convention to match each other, drink for drink.

Gregory Bateson, The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p325

I like the paper a lot, but I think Bateson never spent much time in Asia or around Asians. I've been in Taiwan for 11 years, and before that a year in China and three in Thailand, and I often drink. In my experience the Asian way of drinking is a lot more symmetrical than that in UK or in the groups of diverse Westerners that I sometimes hang out with. In polite society out here, when you want a sip of your drink you make eye contact with someone else at the table and do a little gesture like you're making a toast, and then you both drink at the same time.

A small point, but things like this - how Asia is so much more spiritual / holistic / healthy / etc than the West - tend to bring me out of whatever I'm reading. Most of the time it's just not true, or not as simple as it seems. The reverse also happens, with Taiwanese people going on about how open Westerners are about sex, when here there are more brothels, love hotels and porn movie stores than I've ever seen outside of Asia. And also Westerners are more free because they don't worry about hard work and money and material things.

The challenge component of alcoholic pride is linked with risk-taking. The principle might be put into words: "I can do something where success is improbable and failure would be disastrous."
...
The principle of pride-in-risk is ultimately almost suicidal. It is all very well to test once whether the universe is on your side, but to do so again and again, with increasing stringency of proof, is to set out on a project which can only prove that the universe hates you.

Same author, paper, book, p322

Fun with zero sums

Photo by Ben McLeod

I don't have a job, but I work. Only back two days after the Chinese New Year break, but it certainly seems slower, and this could be, as everyone thinks, the recession kicking in and people cutting back.

It doesn't really bother me. I've seen this several times before. When times are good I work hard and save money. Then when times are bad I relax and spend money.

Of course, I write the above and save it, cycle out for exercise / lunch and drop off a paper at the university, find a stack waiting for me there and then come home and two more by email, plus a book on Kate Chopin. So much for the days of idling.

My original freelance schedule was getting up early and finishing by noon, and although this works it has a flaw, which is that Tainan is really a night time kind of place, and fading at midnight is no good. The bars open at 10pm and don't pick up until after eleven, then go on until four or five, and there are plenty of restaurants and food stalls open until dawn, when a new set opens up for the tai chi crowd.

So, starting this week I put myself on a different schedule, with the loose aim of sleeping at 4am and getting up at eleven. That way any time I go to bed before four is an early night, and as long as I start work at noon then all's right with the world.

All open systems

"Self-sufficiency" is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice.

Anyone who has actually tried to live in total self-sufficiency - there must now be thousands in the recent wave that we helped inspire - knows the mind-numbing labor and loneliness and frustration and real marginless hazard that goes with the attempt. A kind of hysteria...

...self-sufficiency is not to had on any terms, ever. It is a charming woodsy extension of the fatal American mania for privacy....It is a damned lie. There is no discernible self. Ever since there were two organisms life has been a matter of co-evolution, life growing ever more richly on life...

We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that's our only choice.

Stuart Brand in 1975, quoted in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner, p121

Read What the Dormouse Said... over Xmas, which is a more journalistic account of about the same story - LSD and the evolution of PCs/ the Internet - with less focus on Brand and his connections. At first I thought From Counterculture was too dry, but [2/3 through] the picture that's emerging is of Brand as a master networker, turning up and being present / setting things in motion at various events that can be seen as key to how things turned out. The cybernetic side of things.

Of course, this is only one story, and very often the supposedly key event or movement could be written off as a dead end, like the move to self-sufficient communes in the Whole Earth Catalog which he's rejecting in the quote above. In the long range view of things, even dead ends have their value as the various permutations of being are played out - how not to live - but it must suck to be stuck in a bad one [e.g. N Korea].

Related post:
Haruki Murakami and a long range view of things

Related link:
The Long Now Foundation, one of Brand's current projects.

off the grid

The thinking system

...we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system - that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behavior of a man or any other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits of the "self" - as this term is commonly (or variously) understood.

...

...it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the thinking system and the "self" as popularly conceived"
1) The system is not a transcendent entity as the "self" is commonly supposed to be.
2) The ideas are immanent in a network of causal pathways along which transforms of difference are conducted. The "ideas" of the system are in all cases at least binary in structure. They are not "impulses" but "information."
3) This network of pathways is not bounded with consciousness but extends to include the pathways of all unconscious mentation - both automatic and repressed, neural and hormonal.
4) The network is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. It also included those effective differences which are immanent in the "objects" of such information. It includes the pathways of sound and light along which travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other people - and especially in our own actions.

Gregory Bateson, The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p317 & 319

The rich on vacation

Hara Kiri covers [unpleasant]

When the actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson “answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck”

Possibly untrue anecdote about Dr Samuel Johnson from here

Stories better never told

Over the new year we went to Funky, a Taipei gay bar that gives you eight cans of Budweiser for your NT $500 entrance fee. If that sounds like a good idea, then it's your kind of place.

It is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

From The Odyssey, via the NY Times