Fear: How It Affects Actions

If an asteroid were headed for Earth, we'd all band together and figure out how to stop it, just like in the movies, right? And yet, when faced with major, data-supported, end-of-the-world problems in real life, too often we retreat into partisan shouting and stalemate. Jonathan Haidt shows us a few of the very real asteroids headed our way -- some pet causes of the left wing, some of the right -- and suggests how both wings could work together productively to benefit humanity as a whole.

Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and open-minded.


Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them. Fiction writer Karen Thompson Walker explores the connection between fear and the imagination.

Hope Against Hope

by Eric Utne

Note: This is an essay by Eric Utne in the Utne Reader, Nov-Dec, 2012, p92. I don't often copy someone's essay and place in on my blog, but this was so well stated I wanted to share it with you without my interpretation. Please subscribe to Utne Reader. It's a wonderful, valuable asset.

I don't know about you, but I've been very disappointed by Barack Obama's presidency. Yet, despite of my disappointment' I'm going to do everything I can to support his reelection. 

Like so many people, I was inspired by his "hope" speech at the Democratic National Convention eight years ago. And I was truly engaged by his promising "Change You Can Believe In" campaign four years ago. In his Grant Park victory speech, President-elect Obama spoke directly to the young people who'd done so much to win him the vote: "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there:'

The joyous faces of the people who flocked to Washington for the historic inaugural reflected the county's deep longing for the change that Obama's election promised. That election seemed to herald a new era that would get our country back on a more democratic and progressive path. Our expectations were high. We looked forward to stronger environmental protections, the development of renewable energy
and the creation of green jobs. We assumed that the growing threats to civil liberties, most grievously on display at Guantanamo Bay, would be reversed and that our government would once again champion the cause of social justice. We were thrilled to think at long last that Americans would have universal health care. I even assumed that the Serve America program, which advocated volunteer service for all ages, would be implemented. We began to imagine that the U.S. could have more harmonious and collaborative relations at home and abroad. Most urgently, the U.S. and world financial system had nearly collapsed and we expected that at the very least the fiscal recklessness of the financial sector that had caused such harm would lead to prudent and stringent financial regulations. I even half-expected leading Wall Street bankers to be put in stocks and publicly pilloried in Zuccotti Park. Wouldn't that have been satisfying?

Like many people, I'm appalled by the political gridlock in Washington and the cynicism that infects the political process. It is hopeless, you might say. But it was Bill Clinton, the man from Hope, Arkansas, himself, who turned me around by his speech at this year's DNC, with comments like this, "President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No president-not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the President's contract you will feel it. I believe that with all my heart"

But Clinton won me over not so much by what he said as by who he is as a human being. It's not his gift for "splainin' stuff," or his ability to work with people from all sides to get things done that impresses struggles-his characteristic "I feel your pain”

I believe that Clinton's social compassion and empathy for others hold the key to what we need to do to get past the polarization and divisiveness that distorts our democracy. Social and emotional intelligence. Empathy. The ability and willingness to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes. This is not the laissezfaire, survival of the fittest, AynRandian way that currently grips some leaders of the Right.

Mystic philosopher and social innovator Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), predicted that modern society would become ever more individualistic, eventually reaching a paralytic point of divisiveness- "a war of all against all.” He saw individuation as an evolutionary step beyond group identification based on blood kinship and ethnicity. Individuation allows people to develop their unique gifts and abilities. But, Steiner said, individuation is not the end point of human evolution. Individuation tends to lead to isolation, alienation, and loneliness. We evolve beyond individualism when we develop our capacity for empathy and by creating diverse communities based not on blood kinship but on our common humanity.

When accepting his party's nomination for a second term as president, Obama echoed his 2008 Grant Park speech with these words, "America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer-but we trawl it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up .... "

This is the language for the future. Our hope lies in our compassion for our fellows and our recognition that we’re all in this together. E pluribus unum.

The Gardens of Democracy

This little book is a "must read" for every thinking citizen of America. It offers some fresh thoughts about the issues we face and potential solutions. In actuality, it is neither liberal nor conservative, but a third position, a new progressive based on the newer sciences, especially complexity. The central paradigm shift described in this book is from "machine brain" to "garden brain".

“The failure of American politics to address and solve the great challenges of our time-climate change, debt and deficits, worsening schools, rising health care costs, the shriveling of the middle class-is not just a failure of will or nerve. It is equally a failure of ideas and understanding. And the failure to address these challenges isn't just a matter of politics, but of survival.

To begin with, we labor today under a painfully confining choice between outmoded ideologies on both the left and the right. On the left, too many remain wedded to paradigms first formed during the decades between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. They are top-down, prescriptive, bureaucratic notions about how to address social challenges. These state-centric approaches made sense in a centralizing, industrializing America. They make much less sense in the networked economy and polity of today.

On the right, we hear ideas even more historically irrelevant: laissez-faire economics and a "don't tread on me" idea of citizenship that might have been tolerable in 1775 when the country had 3 million largely agrarian inhabit-ants, only some of whom could vote, but is at best naive and at worst destructive in a diverse, interdependent, largely urban nation of over 300 million.

Our politics has become an over-rehearsed, over-ritualized piece of stage combat between these two old ideologies. False choice after polarizing false choice emanates from Washington. Both ideologies-indeed, the surrender of American politics to ideology itself, and the abandonment of pragmatism as a guiding political philosophy- make it harder by the day for America to adapt.

We wrote this short book to offer a new way. We aim to reach not "moderates" or "centrists" who split the difference between left and right. We aim to reach those who think independently. That might mean those who claim no party affiliation, though it also includes many loyal Democrats and Republicans. It definitely means those who are uncomfortable being confined by narrow choices, old paradigms, and zero-sum outcomes.

If you can hold these paired thoughts in your head, we wrote this book for you:

• The federal government spends too much money. The wealthy should pay much more in taxes.

• Every American should have access to high-quality health care. We spend far too much on health care in the United States already.

 • We need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to ensure our economy continues to grow.

 • Unions are a crucially important part of our economy and society. Unions have become overly protectionist and are in need of enormous amounts of reform.

 • We need strong government. We need strong citizens.

Contemporary American political discourse sees these pairings as either-or. Independent-thinking Americans see them as both-and. Our goal in these pages is to push past the one-dimensional, left-right choices of contemporary politics-between more government or less, selfishness and altruism, suffocating collectivism and market fundamentalism-and find orthogonal approaches to our challenges. The great challenge of this age-and the point of this book-is to rethink how we as citizens create change, how the economy truly works, and what government fundamentally is for. The great challenge of this age is to change how we see, and by so doing, improve our ability to adapt.”

 I don’t personally think that the metaphors of machinebrain and gardenbrain as all that useful, and may be confusing, if it helps people to understand the concepts, then OK.

 “This is not just about economics or politics; it's about imagination and our ability to conceive of new ways of conceiving of things. It is about our ability to adapt and evolve in the face of changing circumstances and the consequences of our actions. History shows that civilizations tend eventually to get stuck in the patterns that had brought them success. They can either stay stuck and decay, or get unstuck and thrive.

We posit in these pages that this country has for too long been stuck in a mode of seeing and thinking called Machinebrain. We argue that the time has come for a new mode of public imagination that we call Gardenbrain.

Machinebrain sees the world and democracy as a series of mechanisms-clocks and gears, perpetual motion machines, balances and counterbalances. Machinebrain requires you to conceive of the economy as perfectly efficient and automatically self-correcting. Machinebrain presupposes stability and predictability, and only grudgingly admits the need for correction. Even the word commonly used for such correction-"regulation"-is mechanical in origin and regrettable in connotation.

Gardenbrain sees the world and democracy as an entwined set of ecosystems-sinks and sources of trust and social capital, webs of economic growth, networks of behavioral contagion. Gardenbrain forces you to conceive of the economy as man-made and effective only if well constructed and well cared-for.

 Gardenbrain presupposes instability and unpredictability, and thus expects a continuous need for seeding, feeding, and weeding ever-changing systems. To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to tend. It is to accept responsibility for nurturing the good growth and killing the bad. Tending and regulating thus signify the same work, but tending frames the work as presumptively necessary and beneficial rather than as something to be suffered.

Machinebrain treats people as cogs: votes to be collected by political machines; consumers to be manipulated by marketing machines; employees to be plugged into industrial machines. It is a static mindset of control and fixity, and is the basis of most of our inherited institutions, from schools to corporations to prisons.

Gardenbrain sees people as interdependent creators of a dynamic world: our emotions affect each other; our personal choices cascade into public patterns, which can be shaped but rarely controlled. It is a dynamic mindset of influence and evolution, of direction without control, and is the basis of our future.

 Machinebrain allows you to rationalize atomized selfishness and a neglect of larger problems. It accepts social ills like poverty, environmental degradation, and ignorance as the inevitable outcome of an efficient marketplace. It is fatalistic and reductionist, treating change as an unnecessary and risky deviation from the norm.

Gardenbrain recognizes such social ills and the shape of our society as the byproduct of man-made arrangements. It is evolutionary and holistic, treating change as the norm, essential and full of opportunity. It leads you to acknowledge that human societies thrive only through active gardening.

Gardenbrain changes everything.”

The authors write:

“We acknowledge that we could have written separate books on these three topics: citizenship, economy, role of government. But our aim was precisely to show that these things are connected-not least by a need for new thinking and new seeing. In making our book short, we know that we trade detail for perspective. We simply believe this is a time when perspective matters most.

Thus we close the book by trying to put into historical context the need for America now to grow up-and the need for us to understand freedom not only as personal liberty but also as the collective force that fuels adaption and survival. Our extraordinary experiment in democracy and capitalism is over 230 years old. We Americans are not children anymore. Indeed, some think that the nation is in rapid decline. We completely disagree. We think of America as an adolescent or young adult coming into our prime, full of promise, energy, and enthusiasm for the challenges of our times-but in need of maturation of thought, habit, and awareness. The words enshrined in the Jefferson Memorial, written 40 years after the Declaration and 43 years before Darwin authored Origin if Species, capture this spirit perfectly:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Later, they write:

“Our century is yielding a second Enlightenment, and the narrative it offers about what makes us tick, individually and collectively, is infinitely more sophisticated than what we got the last time around. Since the mid -1960s, there have been profound advances in how we understand the systemic nature of botany, biology, physics, computer science, neuroscience, oceanography, atmospheric science, cognitive science, zoology, psychology, epidemiology, and even, yes, economics. Across these fields, a set of conceptual shifts is underway:

Simple → Complex

Atomistic → Networked

Equilibrium → Disequilibrium

Linear → Non-linear

Mechanistic → Behavioral

Efficient → Effective

Predictive → Adaptive

Independent →Interdependent

Individual ability → Group diversity

Rational calculator → Irrational approximators

Selfish → Strongly reciprocal

Win-lose → Win-win or lose-lose

Competition → Cooperation

These shifts, of course, are not as clean or simple as they may appear in such a list. We acknowledge that there are volumes of nuance condensed here. But at a macro level, these shifts are real, consequential, and too often unseen.”

In my opinion, most of these shifts are encompassed by complexity science, game theory and evolution.

A summary of the concepts developed in this book are:

• Self interest: true self interest is mutual interest

• Great citizenship: society becomes how you behave

• True capitalism: we're all better off when we're all better off

• Self government: big what, small how  

The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2011, 173p

Open Science

What if every scientist could share their data as easily as they tweet about their lunch? Michael Nielsen calls for scientists to embrace new tools for collaboration that will enable discoveries to happen at the speed of Twitter.

A physicist turned writer, Michael Nielsen believes online communication and collaboration tools are revolutionizing the way we make scientific discoveries.

Hedy Lamarr: Inventor

Hedy Lamarr(real name Hedwig Kiesler) was an Austrian-American actress celebrated for her great beauty and a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age". During my childhood, she represented the popular image of beauty.

You can image my surprise to find in reading a review entitled “Brainy Beauty” by John Adams in The New York Times Book Review, 12/18/11 of new book, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes, Doubleday, 2011, that she was also an inventor.

She collaborated with George Antheil, known as a musical anarchist, to create new weapons systems.

“What drew Rhodes to the twin story of the Bad Boy of Music and "the most beautiful woman in the world" was their invention of a radio-controlled "spread spectrum" torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Antheil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for "out of the box" problem solving.

Over several years the composer and the movie star spent countless hours together drafting and redrafting designs, not only for the torpedo system but also for a "proximity fuse" antiaircraft shell. In reality, their patent was an early version of today's smart bombs. The device as they made it employed a constantly roving radio signal to guide the torpedo toward its target. Because the signal kept "hopping" from one frequency to another, it would be impossible for the enemy to lock onto. To solve the problems of synchronizing receiver and transmitter, Antheil proposed a tiny structure inspired by the workings of a piano roll. This was a feat that years later would be used in everything from cell phone and Bluetooth technology to GPS instruments.

On Aug. 11, 1942, United States Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to them for their design. But persuading the Navy to take it seriously proved insurmountable~ Pentagon bureaucracy, coupled with the fact that the design's co-inventor was a movie star, resulted in their idea being ignored. Hedy's folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Conservative and Liberal Moral Values

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.



The Righteous Mind

Bill Moyers and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the psychological underpinnings of our contentious culture, why we can’t trust our own opinions, and the demonizing of our adversaries. Also, a Bill Moyers essay on why Newt Gingrich might be afraid of Saul Alinsky.

Collaboration

“Say to yourself at break of day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and ungrateful men. All these vices have fallen to them because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have beheld the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seeing that his nature is akin to my own - not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares with me in mind and a portion of the divine - I, then, can neither be harmed by any of these men, nor can I become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, or eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another and turn away from him is surely to work against him.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1

I expect that I will share more from Meditations as I found that it speaks to me. I do not agree with all of his philosophy, but I think that most of what he writes is still applicable today.

Meditations is organized into books and chapters. Each chapter is only a paragraph or two long. The first book is an acknowledgment to writers, teachers, friends and relatives of Aurelius and how they influenced him. This selection is then actually the opening words of his book.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1997; translated by Robin Hard with Introduction and Notes by Christopher Gill. Marcus lived from 121 to 180 AD (CE).

Leaders and Non Zero-sum Logic

"Leaders who can harness non-zero-sum logic to draw people into cooperative effort prevail in competition for status and other social resources, inviting future leaders to do the same on a larger scale." Robert Wright

Sublime Collaboration

An innovative and beautiful demonstration of international collaboration.


In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, "Sleep," with a video choir of 2,052.

Lux Arumque

Sleep

The Power of the People

The Power of the People, Dave Munger, Seed Magazine, 12/22/10

"Some of the most influential scientists in history, from Franklin, to Lavoisier, to Mendel, weren’t formally educated in their fields of study. They just took an interest, and started conducting experiments, sometimes in their own back yards. But more recently, the specialized tools of science have put new discoveries out of reach for ordinary people. Now that dynamic is beginning to change again.

The internet has spawned a fantastic explosion in science that allows non-experts to actually participate in science by interacting with scientific data itself. I wrote about several such projects last year. Now, in just the past week, two new public tools for analyzing data have been unveiled, from two very different fields of study.

First, the Zooniverse project has released its newest endeavor, called The Milky Way Project. One of the astronomers working on the project, Sarah Kendrew, explained how the project works on her blog last week. Users from among the hundreds of thousands registered with Zooniverse log in to their accounts and are shown images of the Milky Way from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Their job: To identify regions known as “bubbles,” areas of gas and other debris that appear to be arranged in nearly-spherical structures."

***

"But the Milky Way Project was upstaged a bit last week by another project that allows anyone to dig deep into data of a different sort: a significant percentage of the entirety of books that have ever been published. The project’s founders are calling it “culturomics,” and their first journal article on the topic was published last week in Science. The research has been discussed extensively on blogs, but the best way to experience the work might just be to visit the tool Google developed that allows anyone to see a cross-section of a vast dataset: the Books Ngram Viewer. Type in any word (or several words or short phrases separated by commas), and you’ll instantly be presented with a graph showing the how frequently that word has been used over the past two centuries. Here’s the graph I made for macaroni and spaghetti, showing that macaroni was the more popular term until about 1950, and spaghetti was essentially unheard of before 1880."

***

"Projects like Zooniverse and Google’s Ngram Viewer represent crowd-sourcing on the grandest scale yet achieved. What I’d like to see next is an analysis of the crowds who are using these tools. What words do people look up? What methods do they use to identify galaxies and bubbles—and how long do they persist at it? The answers to these questions may, in turn, lead to even more powerful tools—and a greater understanding of our world."

Read More

Here's an example that I tried of the Books Ngram Viewer. I searched for two words that I think should go together: innovation and commons:

You can see that the word commons has been dropping for a long time, and innovation has been rising. Interesting. Don't know what it means but it's another cool tool.

On Competitive Collaboration

On Competitive Collaboration, Rolf Heuer, Seed Magazine, 11/26/10

"Fundamental science drives technology and innovation, laying the foundations for progress and improvement. It’s hard to find a company that does not rely on the fruits of basic research in carrying out its day-to-day business. Basic research is the lifeblood of industry—without it, there would be no science to apply, and any commitment to improving the state of the world would be bound to fail.

The timescale from lab to marketplace is often long, far longer than any political cycle, and for that reason basic science is rarely a top priority for government decision makers. So, under pressure to deliver quick results, science policy frequently strives to identify those areas of applied science that can mature before the next election. Thankfully, humans are curious by nature, so basic research continues to attract some of the brightest minds, and a reasonable share of the funding. It’s just as well, since without it progress would slowly come to a halt."

***

"Science and its technological spin-offs are not the only ways in which the LHC* community can contribute to improving the state of the world. Since taking up my mandate as director general of CERN, I have found myself responding to as many questions about the management of the particle-physicists community as about the science itself. Can you run a $10 billion project with hundreds of partners on the basis of consensus? Does competitive collaboration really work? Are there lessons for the business community in how basic science is adapting to an increasingly globalized world? The answer to all these questions is clearly yes. As well as generating knowledge and driving innovation, the way we manage “big science” can serve as a role model for a wider section of society.

Globalization comes naturally to particle physicists. Traditionally, the big labs such as CERN have provided infrastructure that has been open to scientists from around the world. Typically, there have been at least two such facilities in the world addressing the same scientific questions from different angles and engendering a spirit of collaborative competition—two words that do not usually sit comfortably together. What this has shown is that governance by consensus, fueled by collaboration and competition, can deliver outstanding results.

A deeper understanding of the universe, new technologies, and a role model for managing broadly distributed and culturally varied organizations: These are outcomes of basic science that are valuable to society. And it’s reasonable to expect the scientific community to deliver them in the short term. The most valuable in terms of sustained improvement of the world is the one closest to my heart—understanding the universe and in the process laying down a new seam of fundamental scientific knowledge for future generations to mine. Human ingenuity being what it is, the future will undoubtedly bring applications based on discoveries made with the LHC. Although, as with Newton’s gravity, it may be some time before we’re privy to all of them, and to their implications. For our children and grandchildren, however, I am sure that the wait will have been worthwhile."

Read More

* LHC: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature. Wikipedia

On the Next Internet: Grid Computing

On the Next Internet, Bob Jones, Seed Magazine, 2/9/11

"Charles Curran, a physicist who recently retired as the longtime storage consultant at CERN, remembers the old days of data access: when filling a request from a researcher was often a labor-intensive, daylong misadventure.

In the 1970s, information from CERN’s accelerators and experiments was stored on tapes, held in a huge library in the IT department, originally retrieved manually by operators and then copied to disk for the researcher. Overworked operators fell asleep, went missing for hours at a time, invented trickery to make the machines work faster, and overloaded the conveyor belts, causing tapes to fall off and disappear. Tape-retrieval robots squared off against mice (in one documented case, the mouse was found months later, desiccated) or overheated when they couldn’t reach tapes, melting their wheels in frustration. A request to see a certain tape often took 24 hours to fill.

Now the wait is about two minutes, hardly enough time to get a cup of coffee."

***

"The fundamentals of grid computing, first developed to allow complex physics projects, has led to a related technology known as cloud computing, heavily virtualized distributed computing, which has been adopted for many commercial applications. The public may not know they are using a cloud—but they are. Online banking, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and web-based email are all examples of heavily virtualized services that exist “out in the cloud.” Making a full cycle, grid computing itself is adopting aspects of cloud technology, making more use of virtualization and setting up grid sites in the cloud. However, true grid infrastructure still excels at collaborative sharing of resources belonging to different institutions; clouds spread the resources of one domain to the rest of the world for remote access. Collaboration is the basis of all the large-scale scientific challenges (e.g., CERN has 20 member states). Projects like the LHC are too big for any one organization or one country to do alone; collaboration is the only option. The same holds for the major challenges facing society across other disciplines (energy, climate change, food production). Now that we have excellent ways to reach and share data, we have a whole new set of problems, albeit more sophisticated. Who owns freely shared data? How long should it be kept? What besides the data must be kept so we can use it? Who pays for the energy to store data? How can researchers or disciplines resistant to sharing—afraid their ideas will be poached—be encouraged in a “publish or perish’’ world?"

Read More

On Closing the Culture Gap

Paul Ehrlich, Seed Magazine, 2/9/11, 2/9/11

"Many are aware that climate disruption may cause horrendous problems, but few seem to realize that this peril is not the only potentially catastrophic one and may not even be the most serious threat we face. Humanity finds itself in a desperate situation, but you’d never know it from listening to the media and the politicians. Loss of the biodiversity that runs human life-support systems, toxification of the planet, the risk of pandemics that increase in lockstep with population growth, and the possibility of nuclear resource wars all could be more lethal. We are finally, however, starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating is the result of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself."

"That’s why a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities decided to inaugurate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). It was so named to emphasize that it is human behavior, toward one another and toward the ecosystems that sustain us all, that requires both better understanding and rapid modification. The idea is that the MAHB might become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-power issues, and sponsor research on how to turn that knowledge into the required actions. Perhaps most important, the MAHB would stimulate a broad global discussion involving the greatest possible diversity of people, about what people desire, the ethics of those desires, and which are possible to meet in a sustainable society. It would, I hope, serve as a major tool for altering the course of cultural evolution."

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Crowd Accelerated Innovation

TED's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter.

After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth disseminating.

This commons based innovation, a concept I've been pursuing for years.

Stigmergy

Stigmergy – the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment – was first conceptualized by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in his ground-breaking work on termite colonies (Grasse 1959). It wasn’t until 1999 that Grasse’s work was brought to a wider audience by Eric Bonabeau et al (1999) in a special issue of Artificial Life. Since then interest in stigmergic systems has blossomed with researchers recognizing the application of Grasse’s insights to stock markets, economies, traffic patterns, supply logistics, computer networks, resource allocation, urban sprawl, and cultural memes. New forms of stigmergy have been exponentially expanded through the affordances of digital technology: Google’s recommendation algorithm, Amazon’s filtering algorithm, wiki, open source software, weblogs, and a whole range of “social media” are now deemed as essentially stigmergic.

Though the concept of stigmergy has typically been associated with ant- or swarm-like “agents” with minimal cognitive ability or with creatures of a somewhat higher cognitive capacity such as fish (schooling patterns) or birds (flocking patterns) or sheep (herding behavior), stigmergy offers a powerful tool to be deployed in the human domain. The editors of this special issue are thus looking for contributions that have human-human (social, organizational, and socio-technical) stigmergy as the main focus.

Proposals are invited from social scientists, social epistemologists, cognitive scientists, economists, group decision theorists, collective intentionality theorists, computational sociologists, network theorists, multi-agent modelers, and indeed researchers from any discipline that has social complexity and coordination as a core topic.

Papers that are theoretical, experimental, or computational in orientation are welcome. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to lesliemarsh [at] gmail [dot] com with “Stigmergy/Cognitive Systems Research” in the subject line. The deadline for proposals is Nov 1, 2010.

All papers will be subject to double blind review by a least two referees and accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research

Seattle video game teaches complexity of protein structures

Millions of people participate in online science projects. Foldit takes things to a new level, using an online game to leverage the forces of human creativity, intuition and spatial reasoning against a scientific task that flummoxes silicon brains.

By Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times science reporter

Susanne Halicki's last science class was in high school — and that was a long time ago.

She's got grown children now and works as an office administrator.

But every evening, Halicki slips on a cyber lab coat and immerses herself in molecular biology via a video game developed in Seattle.

The British woman is among 150,000 people worldwide who have tried their hand at the game called Foldit. She's also part of an elite subset of players who have become so skillful at sussing out the structures of biologically important proteins that they frequently outperform supercomputers.

"I like solving puzzles," Halicki said. "It was hard at first, but I persevered."

Insights from the citizen scientists are already helping in the quest for new drugs and green-energy technologies, and could become an even more powerful tool in the future, said University of Washington biochemist David Baker.

"This shows that people who don't have a scientific background can solve very challenging scientific problems," said Baker, co-creator of Foldit. He's now enlisting the players to design potential drugs from scratch.

Read article.

Related Information

Foldit: http://fold.it/portal

GalaxyZoo: http://www.galaxyzoo.org

Other projects: http://boinc.berkeley.edu

How We Make Choices

This is a very interesting talk by Sheena Iyengar based on studies of how people in different cultures view and make choices. It's important on two levels:

1. Our consumer based economy is driven by choice. The relationship between choice and economic growth is not covered in this talk. But, it gives you a lot of insight into how our equating freedom of choice with a good life is trapping us.
2. It's important to collaboration, community efforts and the understanding of an innovation commons. For these types of efforts to work, choice is not a freedom but a responsibility toward the group. This is most often seen in how we look at ecology and the future.

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.



We all think we're good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisio nmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

Iyengar's research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. But she and her team at the Columbia Business School throw a much broader net. Her analysis touches, for example, on the medical decision making that might lead up to choosing physician-assisted suicide, on the drawbacks of providing too many choices and options in social-welfare programs, and on the cultural and geographical underpinning of choice. She's just published her first book, The Art of Choosing, which shares her research in an accessible and charming story that draws examples from her own life.

The Use of MBTI in Online Facilitation

Nancy White, the moderator of the Online Facilitation Forum, posted this item:

Author: Tony Di Petta
Date: 1988
URL: http://www.thenode.org/tfl/notes/dipetta.html

I indirectly found this article this morning while reading about an online facilitate challenge in a private community. Tony was mentioned so I googled and found this article. It seems to be another way in to the archetype issue without using the sort of labels like Gahran did in her piece.

Digging down, it is about finding ways to understand each other enough to have successful communications or do things together. We generalize as a way of making sense, but in the labels we use generate end up creating more misunderstanding. Quite the opposite of the intent, I suppose. Finding ways to "hear" the other person without being triggered by their style or language choice is a key goal in an online facilitation practice. Di Petta points out one really key part of the practice: knowing your own style/self first.

The article on this site is an abridged version of a paper published in
Cranton, P. (ed.) (1998). Psychological Type in Action. Sneedville, TN:
Psychological Type Press.

abstract

This paper examines the use of psychological type as a group process "tool" for moderators of on-line discussion groups. In February of 1997, The Personal Effectiveness through Type (PET) Inventory ®, was provided as an on-line tool to ten computer conference moderators working for the Education Network of Ontario (ENO). The ENO is a Canadian telecommunications service that provides internet access and computer conferencing services to the kindergarten through secondary school education community, in the province of Ontario.

Ten ENO conference moderators volunteered to use the P.E.T. inventory to determine their personal type "preferences", that is, their most ingrained and frequently used strategies and methods for making sense of, and interacting with, the world around them. The volunteers then participated in an on-line discussion forum that focussed on how their newly acquired type awareness might be used in their professional work as on-line conference moderators. The discussions about type and its use in facilitating on-line discussion groups led to a set of recommendations and suggestions for using type data to facilitate the on-line leadership and interaction efforts of computer conference moderators.

Snippet:
"One of the greatest concerns of the on-line moderators who considered
using type theory in their work was that type should not be used to "label" people, that is, to limit or judge others, or to suggest what they can and cannot do well. Type information can and should, however, be used to identify the kind of moderator leadership that is required by specific on-line situations and groups. Knowing what is needed in terms of leadership helps moderators plan or adapt strategy to help individuals or on-line groups meet their goals. By understanding their own preferences, moderators reduce the chances of letting those preferences dictate how to work on-line or relate to other members in the on-line group. "

Nancy White - Full Circle Associates - http://www.fullcirc.com - 206-517-4754, http://public.xdi.org/=nancy.white
Blog: http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/onfacblog.htm


Claire Brooks posted this comment:

"Digging down, it is about finding ways to understand each other enough to have successful communications or do things together. We generalize as a way of making sense, but in the labels we use generate end up creating more misunderstanding. Quite the opposite of the intent, I suppose. Finding ways to "hear" the other person without being triggered by their style or language choice is a key goal in an online facilitation practice. DiPetta points out one really key part of the practice: knowing your own style/self first."

This discussion of type reminded me of when I first came across *Choconancy* in an online group space, later taken over by yahoo groups, I think. When joining up participants were invited to fill out a *type* quiz that returned a description of how people of that type would make pumpkin soup. It was light hearted and gave an insight into oneself and at the same time served as a reminder that other people would approach the same task completely differently. I still use version of the technique, depending on the type of online group. For example in formal learning situations it can be useful to people to complete a learning preferences quiz, and that can also be a way for some safe self disclosure to take place. In other groups it might be a modified MBTI quiz (http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory2.html), or simply a fun thing from tickle http://web.tickle.com/

In Gahan's article it is possible that the sci fi clash was an interaction between someone who valued rationality above feelings a T rather than an F in MBTI terms, and being able to *label* differences in that way can be helpful. ( Still doesn't deal with all the issues tho' because this approach assumes that everyone has a reasonably good intent and unfortunately that is not always the case , so I am still looking forward to the next instalment on dealing with Trolls)..{aside} is that a barb? am I really a porcupine?:-). A big difference is that these activities are about self labelling....maybe there needs to be a quiz that allows people to reveal their self perceived tendencies towards to conflict, control, power relationships and other sensitive topics even if it is only for personal consumption/self awareness.
Claire ( ~sort of INFP/INTP)

Dianna A. said...

I believe the make up of the group is critical to its ultimate success or value to each participant. For example, if I have a fledgling idea to develop, there's no point in hearing from a bunch of people who think like me. The best solution or evolution will come from hearing from people with a different perspective or way of thinking than mine. So I believe it's critical to welcome a wide variety of people of different backgrounds and personalities to "the party" in order to get the most out of the process. That said, I also belive it's critical to weed out people who have an inability to listen well, or who cannot offer constructive feedback. Thinking of Daniel Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence, it would seem to me that strong "scoring" or development in that area would be far more important than specific academic, business, or level of intelligence details.

Chris T said...

Interesting point Paul. I'd say the role is to be different in as many dimensions as possible. Contradict me, take me to a higher / different plane, enhance me, add weight to my point etc.

No matter how much effort I put into thinking about a particular issue, I can guarantee that as soon as I start talking to someone else they will open up new lines of thought.

The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon of finite resources, however we have the "problem" of infinite resources in innovation related opportunities - this is where I think we can add value to the innovation commons.