Archive for the ‘emergent’ Category
Got to Get Back to the Garden
Filed under: emergent, quanta | Tags: conservatives, gardening, liberals, paradigms
Leave a Comment We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
- “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell
We all have paradigms by which we understand the world around us. The ruling paradigm from the Newtonian age of science has been the world as a machine- the clockwork universe. We reflect this world view when we talk about being a “cog in a machine” or say we’re “running on all cylinders.”
Within the larger context, our personal, cultural and political values lead us to view the world in certain ways.
Some people tend to view the world as a jungle – filled with many scary things like terrorists, socialists and “feminazis.” Unless it concerns sex, drugs or other people they disagree with, these folks believe nothing is controllable and everything should be left to its own devices. To them, attempting to meddle and fix social, economic or environmental problems is both foolhardy and doomed to failure. They would also strongly argue that it would be an intrusion on individual freedom.
Other people tend to view the world like mechanics – if there is a problem with something, you fix it by tinkering with this, twiddling with that, and somehow or other gaining control over the situation so it can be corrected. To them, every problem is controllable if you have enough information and resources.
As I have previously argued, we need to learn to look at the world as a garden. Unlike a jungle, a garden can be managed, given sufficient expertise by the gardner and sufficient resources like water, nutrients, etc. However, unlike a mechanic, a gardener does not have direct control over the outcomes of his or her efforts. A gardener can’t precisely determine how many seeds will sprout, how many flowers will appear on a shrub or how quickly a tree will grow. In addition, a gardener can’t succeed when his or her efforts conflict with the garden’s environment: it’s not possible to grow bananas in Minnesota or weeping willows in Death Valley.
Instead, a good gardener focuses on creating the optimal conditions for a garden to flourish…then leaves it up to the plants to respond to those conditions.
“Pants” on the Web
Filed under: emergent, interconnected, quanta | Tags: linked world
Leave a Comment Over the past week a guy no one had ever heard of burst onto the scene, becoming a national – if not international – celebrity. He vowed to change things, and through his sudden fame he may be doing just that.
I’m talking of course about “General” Larry Platt, who appeared a week ago on American Idol and belted out his song “Pants on the Ground.”
As sometimes happens in today’s hyper-linked world, before you could say “Simon Cowell” Larry’s song became a world-wide phenomenon. People as diverse as Malaysian teenagers and Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings were soon singing “Pants on the Ground.”
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly and easily a performance like Larry’s can become such a big deal in so many different places. It reminded me of that guy Matt and his video Dancing 2008, which became a huge sensation a couple years ago.
These things are clearly a phenomenon of today’s world, and can teach us a couple of things:
1 – People from different walks of life and in different places can quickly find a common bond based on something they see and like, and
2 – This kind of thing often doesn’t last all that long. After all, whatever happened to Matt? And how many people regularly go back and look at that music video? (It’s still pretty cool though; I re-watched it while writing this post.)
So when we see some new phenomenon burst on the scene and become the talk of the nation, we need to maintain some perspective. Something that may seem like a big deal today – like, say, the results of a Massachusetts Senate race – may not be such a big deal tomorrow.
It certainly wouldn’t be wise to overreact to it.
Fixing the System
Filed under: complexity, emergent, holism | Tags: economy, government, systems thinking
Leave a Comment Many of the problems confronting the US today involve systems that aren’t working properly. Examples that come to mind include financial services (the banks), the economy in general, American healthcare, the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and global climate change.
In the recent past the solutions offered for such problems were simple and straightforward: deregulate, cut taxes, create healthcare savings accounts, change regimes, and…well, the Bush administration didn’t really talk much about climate change. Unfortunately, these solutions didn’t solve these problems. In fact, in many cases the problems only got worse. (A prime example would be Wall Street, in which deregulation enabled the buildup of some of the problems that led to last year’s financial meltdown.)
In today’s world we need to understand that problems with systems cannot be solved by simple-minded solutions that ignore the dynamics of the system. To adequately address such problems, we need to address the system as a system.
I don’t often agree with the NY Times’ David Brooks; I’ve found he can be perceptive in identifying an issue, but then his ideology often steers him away from what I consider to be reasonable solutions. But I was intrigued by an observation he made in today’s Times:
…there are several things the government can do to improve the economic ecology.
I wasn’t intrigued by a conservative columnist actually saying the government can do something – though that can be a bit of a shocker. What I found interesting was his term “economic ecology.” I don’t think he was talking in terms of ecological economics, which focuses on the interrelationship of economics with societies and the environment. I think he was just talking in terms of the economy as a living system.
It’s not clear in Brooks’ column if the solutions he lists are from a report from President Obama’s National Economic Council that he mentioned in the column, or if they are from Brooks himself. But they do appear to be focused on ways to enhance the economy as a system, much the way a farmer might improve his fields to increase the chances of a better harvest. Rather than having to choose between government control and market chaos, the solutions Brooks lists are aimed at letting progress emerge naturally:
This sort of agenda doesn’t rely on politicians who think they can predict the next new thing. Nor does it mean merely letting the market go its own way. (The market seems to have a preference for useless financial instruments and insane compensation packages.)
Instead, it’s an agenda that would steer and spark innovation without controlling it, which is what government has done since the days of Alexander Hamilton. It’s the sort of thing the country does periodically, each time we need to recover from one of our binges of national stupidity.
In a similar vein, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein takes a systems-based look at one aspect of America’s healthcare system: employer-provided health insurance. Specifically, Klein looks at the relationship between this insurance benefit and employee wages, and how people’s perception of that relationship can shape how they feel about controlling healthcare costs:
But health-care coverage is not a benefit. It’s a wage deduction. When premium costs go up, wages go down. When premium costs go down, wages go up. Yet workers don’t know that. In fact, the information is hidden from them. That means that cost control seems like all pain and no gain, which makes it virtually impossible for Congress to pass. It’s like asking someone to diet when they don’t realize it will help them lose weight.
Like Brooks, Klein presents a possible solution that doesn’t seek direct control of anyone’s behavior, but instead strives to increase people’s understanding of the system:
Perhaps the easiest way to dramatize the issue for workers would be to attach health-care costs to each paycheck. If employers listed the cost of health care alongside the bite taken by payroll taxes, it would be much clearer to workers that health-care coverage was coming out of their wages, not out of their employer’s largess. That, at least, could help them see the costs of the system more clearly, which is, unfortunately, something that all the congressional debate isn’t helping anyone do.
The expectation inherent in Klein’s solution is that an increased understanding of the system would lead people to see their own interest in increasing the system’s efficiency and sustainability.
With so many systems in crisis in our world today, it’s heartening to see that at least some of the solutions being discussed reflect at least some awareness of system dynamics.
Flu In The Time Of Globalism
Filed under: complexity, emergent, interconnected | Tags: bottom up, flu, health
Comments (1) The big news item of the moment is the growing threat of a swine flu pandemic. The speed with which this disease has spread is yet another reflection of our interconnected world. In earlier times diseases tended to travel slowly from place to place, often with localized events; the Third Pandemic started in China in 1855 and slowly traveled around the world until the 1950s. With the availability of cheap air travel, things can happen much faster today.
The primary question is what do we do about this risk? The New York Times columnist David Brooks observes:
In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.
He goes on to present two possible approaches:
So how do we deal with these situations? Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states?
After providing a brief discussion of both options, he comes down in favor of the decentralized, bottom-up approach:
A single global response would produce a uniform approach. A decentralized response fosters experimentation.
The bottom line is that the swine flu crisis is two emergent problems piled on top of one another. At bottom, there is the dynamic network of the outbreak. It is fueled by complex feedback loops consisting of the virus itself, human mobility to spread it and environmental factors to make it potent. On top, there is the psychology of fear caused by the disease. It emerges from rumors, news reports, Tweets and expert warnings.
The correct response to these dynamic, decentralized, emergent problems is to create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.
I’ve written about emergent phenomena before, and I’m generally in favor of approaches that promote it. But it’s important to realize that the outcome of a bottom-up approach is tied to a larger context. Without proper guidance and values, free-wheeling emergence can lead to anarchy.
There’s an excellent article – Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory – that offers an interesting take on Brooks’ dichotomy. The author John Schmitt starts with a discussion of traditional command and control theory, which he says is based on a mechanical world view inherent in classic Newtonian physics. This approach relies heavily on a top-down approach, with those on top striving to control both their organization and whatever larger situation they’re confronting. The “centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats” that Brooks talks about reflect this traditional kind of command and control.
However, like Brooks, Schmitt has problems with this approach. He starts by describing traditional command and control:
The natural result is a highly proceduralized or methodical approach to the conduct of military operations—war as an assembly line. Newtonian command and control tends to be highly doctrinaire—heavy on mechanistic and elaborate procedures. The mechanistic view recognizes that war may appear disorderly and confusing but is convinced that with sufficient command and control we can impose order, precision, and certainty. We can eliminate unpleasant surprises and make war go “like clockwork.” Just as the Scientific Revolution sought to tame nature, the Newtonian approach to command and control—especially with the help of the information-technology revolution—seeks to tame the nature of war.
But there’s a problem, as Schmitt notes:
The Newtonian paradigm offers a neat, clean and intellectually satisfying description of the world—and of war. There is only one problem: it does not match most of reality.
Schmitt goes on to describe war – and the world – as an open, dynamic, complex system. As such, it is impossible to control in a traditional, top-down way:
One of the defining features of complex systems is a property known as emergence in which the global behavior of the system is qualitatively different from the behavior of the parts. No amount of knowledge of the behavior of the parts would allow one to predict the behavior of the whole. Emergence can be thought of as a form of control: it allows distributed agents to group together into a meaningful higher-order system. In complex systems, structure and control thus “grow” up from the bottom; they are not imposed from the top. Reductionism simply will not work with complex systems: the very act of decomposing the system—of isolating even one component—changes the dynamics of the system. It is no longer the same system.
All of this is pretty much in line with what Brooks said in his column. However, in viewing our options as either “centralized control” or “decentralized control,” Brooks misses another alternative. Schmitt presents an approach that encompasses input from those at the top and those at the bottom:
Rather than thinking of “command” and “control” both operating from the top of the organization toward the bottom, we should think of command and control as an adaptive process in which “command” is top-down guidance and “control” is bottom-up feedback…All parts of the organization contribute action and feedback—”command” and “control”—in overall cooperation. Command and control is thus fundamentally an activity of reciprocal influence involving give and take among all parts, from top to bottom and side to side.
From this perspective, we might agree with Brooks’ argument to “create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.” However, we should also have in place institutions – like perhaps the World Health Organization in the case of a pandemic – that can serve as resources for relevant information and avenues for collaboration among those decentralized authorities.
Such an arrangement assures that all involved are seeing the whole picture – both the forest and the trees.
How the Internet Got Its Rules
The New York Times had an article recently, “How the Internet Got Its Rules,” which offered an intriguing glimpse of the beginning of a phenomena that is an integral part of life today. The article was written by Stephen Crocker, one of the people involved with creating those rules forty years ago in 1969.
One thing that’s striking is how the way the underlying rules for Internet programming were developed is reflected in the very nature of the Internet. As the group working on this matter proceeded, they were concerned about not “sounding presumptuous.” As a result, the process for making rules was open to all; bulletins on what was being discussed and decided were labeled “Requests for Comments,” or R.F.C.s. Crocker notes:
The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m sensing a bit of a “60′s vibe” in this paragraph. “Power to the people” indeed…
Anyway, the rules for the Internet were apparently an early form of open standards, which are integral to open source software today. This openness was key to the rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web:
This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.
Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be both useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. This was the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, which actively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.
The way the rules for the Internet were encouraged to emerge through open collaboration is reflected in the emergent nature of the Internet itself. Recognizing the power of this approach, Crocker has a suggestion regarding the issues we face today:
As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether it’s in health care reform or energy innovation, the largest payoffs will come not from what the stimulus package pays for directly, but from the huge vistas we open up for others to explore.
An Illuminating Paradox
Filed under: complexity, dual nature, emergent | Tags: bottom up, individualism, regulation, traffic safety
Comments (2) One time, while driving on an interstate highway when the weather was gray and misty, I noticed a curious paradox.
Although it was only sprinkling occasionally, nearly every car had its headlights on, complying with an obscure New York Sate law requiring headlight use when it rains. However, nearly every car was also going 65-75 miles per hour. This was certainly not in compliance with the well-known and publicized 55 miles per hour speed limit in effect at the time. It also didn’t make sense. Why would people obey a law they were unlikely to get ticketed or punished for breaking, while at the same time they disobeyed a law that they could easily get ticketed for, with substantial costs in fines and higher insurance?
This question stuck with me for a long time. While the behavior I witnessed did not seem logical, I was inclined to believe there had to be some reasonable explanation for it. After all, I was doing the same thing most of the other drivers on the road were doing. But beyond that, I sensed this observation might provide a key to getting people to be better drivers. This was particularly relevant to me at the time, as I was on my way to a traffic safety conference when I observed this paradox.
Around this time, I was reading M. Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity.” While I was vaguely familiar with the concept of entropy, in which things are seen to be perpetually running down, I was totally unfamiliar with the new science of complexity, in which things are seen to be perpetually evolving into ever more complex and sophisticated ways of being.
And yet, while I had never heard of complexity, I recognized many examples of the phenomena it focused on. The cars we drive today are much more complex than even those I had admired in the 1960’s. Likewise, the economy we work in that enables us to produce and purchase those cars has also grown in complexity from that of the seemingly straightforward days of the 60’s; that economy in turn was much more complex than that of say, 100 years ago.
Perhaps, I thought, the paradoxical behavior I had observed on the highway was somehow a reflection of this tendency to evolve to increasingly more complex patterns of behavior. One of the qualities that Waldrop discussed was the “bottom up” nature of self organizing systems. Increasing complexity comes about because that is what the users of a given system want; it is not imposed from on high somewhere. Cars today are increasingly complex largely because we expect more and more from them.
This seems to be a natural function of the way we are. The more something like a car can provide us, the more we tend to want. Even if our present car is reliable, luxurious and sporty in its performance, after some time has passed we are likely to be drawn to a newer car that is better designed, more luxurious and sportier. And to provide us with such qualities in a car, manufacturers have to continually strive to use more refined and complex technology to improve on their product.
I felt this “bottom up” quality was important in understanding the motorists’ behavior I had observed. Clearly, the authoritative power of the State, conveyed both through the raw power of the police and the cajoling power of slogans like “55 Saves Lives” did not seem to be greatly altering their behavior. Something within each motorist seemed to be propelling them forward in the behavior they were pursuing. But what? And how?
Some time later I stumbled upon what is arguably one of the most revolutionary concepts in modern science. This is the dual, wave/particle nature of matter. I vaguely remembered something from the few weeks’ of high school physics I’d had about the dual nature of light, and how it behaved as both a particle and a wave. But I had always assumed, as most people do, that some things were particles while other things were waves. In a foggy kind of logic, I had presumed that tangible things like a table or a chair were made up of particles, while forms of energy like light or sound were composed of waves. However, modern science has discovered that, at it most basic level, everything is both particles and waves simultaneously.
At first I found this concept hard to understand. But with more reading and thinking, I gradually realized that the world around us is full of examples of this dualism. The catch is that at any one time you can only perceive something as either a particle or a wave. For example, you can see the ocean’s wave quality in the way it rhythmically crashes on the shore. Take a drop of sea water and put it under a strong enough microscope and you would see the particles that water is made up of. But you cannot see the particle and the wave nature of the ocean at the same time; you have to adjust your focus to perceive either one or the other.
The same is true of a crowd creating a “wave” in a stadium. You can either focus on the movement of the wave or you can focus on some individuals participating in it; you cannot focus on both at the same time.
With this new awareness, I realized what had been happening on that highway that morning. Viewed from the individual, particle perspective, the behavior of those motorists did not make sense. They were obeying a minor law while flagrantly disobeying a much more important one. This did not seem to be in their own, individual/particle interests. But viewed from a group/wave perspective, there suddenly appeared a logic to their seemingly inconsistent behavior. In terms of both the minor and the more important law, their behaviors reflected those of the other motorists they observed on the highway.
If I see many other drivers turning on their headlights because it is raining, I will feel an inclination to do the same. If I see them going ten miles per hour over the speed limit, I will feel an inclination to do that as well. In both cases, the behavior reflects the “bottom up” quality complexity science focuses on. The drivers themselves create the norms for their behavior. While the State may establish a context for this behavior, through headlight laws or speed limits, the actual behavior has an ad hoc quality to it.
The reason often given by traffic safety authorities for drivers mirroring others’ behavior is because they (the drivers) feel there is less possibility in a group of being caught. However this reflects only the self interest, particle perspective, which leads us back to the original paradox. It might explain the speeding, but what about the minimally enforced headlight law? Why did they obey that?
I believe the answer to this question lies in recognizing the group/wave side of our behavior. We are individuals, yes, but we are also social beings with a strong inclination to synchronize our behaviors with those of a larger group. Even when that group happens to consist of anonymous motorists on a superhighway.
A version of this post was originally published on the web site Quantum Age in October, 1996.
What Do Libertarian Farmers Grow?
Filed under: dual nature, emergent | Tags: future, individualism, libertarianism
Leave a Comment Washington Post writer and blogger Joel Achenbach recently wrote a piece called “Inventing the Future” for his alumni publication. It’s about a brainy fellow Princeton alum named Nathan Myhrvold, who according to Achenbach is brilliant in many areas – physics, software design, cooking, photography, etc. In his article, one quote by Myhrvold caught my attention:
“Broadly, overall, the way society works is emergent, and it is built on progress — it generally runs downhill toward something better,” Myhrvold says as we get deep into the philosophical weeds on all this stuff. The world is a better place now than it was 500 years ago, he declares. Driving that improvement is, he believes, technology. He’s an unabashed technophile. And he seems to have a strong libertarian streak.
A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:
Many of the visionaries today talk of building a “sustainable” society, a word that seems to rile Myhrvold. “The most sustainable thing about human society is that we innovate,” he says. Later, he elaborates in an e-mail: “The answer is not to pine for a past golden age when things were better (there was no such place or time), but rather to ask how we can use more technology and innovation.” Change, he thinks, is intrinsic to our nature. The future will be different. Survival will not involve preservation of things as they existed before: It will require their creative destruction and replacement.
OK…first of all, I’d love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T – as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed – as in “we all are…”). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate – in an intellectual “fight club” kind of way.
Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.
I suspect Myhrvold’s sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: “just get out of the way and let things emerge!” Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state – sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don’t – like the current financial crisis – libertarians just write it off as “creative destruction.”
There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that’s one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we’ve seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.
What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don’t just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.
Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.
Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer’s success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs – water, nutrition, etc. – of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.
In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.
This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It’s dual-natured.
The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It’s just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a “wave” in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.
The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It’s all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn’t see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many “experts” were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.
If a person tried to farm with a libertarian’s blindness to context, they’d most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the “invisible hand” of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn’t; being averse to “regulatory meddling,” it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.
With a blindness to context and an aversion to “meddling,” there’s only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.
Restoring Science – and Democracy
Filed under: emergent | Tags: democracy, George W Bush, Obama, science
Leave a Comment In a New York Times essay “Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy,” Dennis Overbye ponders the significance of President Obama’s inaugural promise to “restore science to its rightful place.”
Overbye believes that “Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.” How do people find that truth?
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.
He notes that these values are also integral to a properly functioning democracy, and observes:
It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.
President Obama’s promise to “restore science” reflects a belief, shared by many prominent scientists, that the Bush administration frequently devalued or distorted scientific findings, especially when those findings conflicted with its political interests.
In other instances, Bush revealed an antipathy towards scientific values by supporting decidedly non-scientific theories like “intelligent design.” While supporters of “intelligent design” describe it as a valid alternative theory to evolution, they can’t seem to grasp the fact that ID is really a form of what Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science.”
When Feynman introduced the concept in a 1974 speech, he was arguing against bad scientific practices he’d observed in various studies in fields like education and psychology. In explaining what made them “bad,” he compared them to cargo cults:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
So what’s that essential ingredient of good science?
It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated…
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
It’s hard to imagine any politician of any stripe embracing THAT kind of integrity in their daily political doings. In many ways politics is a lot like sales: there are objectives to be achieved – not the least of which is gaining and maintaining power – and politicians are inherently geared towards “closing the sale.”
But if the Obama administration can at least revive a respect for science and its values, that would do more than help us confront problems in areas like medicine, energy and the environment. It could also be a start towards restoring democracy in America. As Overbye noted in his NY Times essay:
If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy.
Stephen Colbert has his own unique take on this matter.
On Track to Saving Gas
Filed under: emergent | Tags: bottom up, CAFE, energy, gas tax, regulation
Leave a Comment According to Slate, there’s a growing push to raise the Federal gas tax to reduce our dependence on foreign oil (and to combat global warming, though they don’t get into that).
It’s not too surprising to find an argument like this on a brainy site like Slate. But I was surprised to discover one of their article’s links was to a “horsepower-addled car magazine editor” promoting the same idea.
Still more surprising was to find that, in skimming the comments section, many “horsepower-addled car magazine” readers actually seemed agreeable to the concept. I was struck by one entry in particular, by an apparently erudite commenter – “Trackaholic” – who argued for what I believe would be a wise approach to promoting fuel economy in our nation’s vehicles:
I agree with DrCruelty: Change the CAFE rules from artificial limits placed on the Auto MFG’s, to taxes/rebates geared toward the consumer. Change the “gas guzzler” tax on new vehicles to affect trucks as well as cars, and make it more progressive, so that more vehicles are affected. Provide incentives for people to get rid of old, inefficient vehicles and move into smaller cars with better mileage. Increase the tax on petrol to be more similar to the tax on deisel.
The overriding goal is to provide consumers an incentive to move towards more efficient vehicles and to make them think twice before purchasing something that they might not need. In the end, they still have the choice to buy a large truck or SUV, and they will still have the choice to buy a high powered sports car or sedan, and the auto MFG’s will not have artificial constraints about trying to build a 35 MPG vehilce if everyone still wants to buy a truck.
Basically, encourage people from the bottom up, rather than trying to force them from the top down.
-TH
First, a couple of minor points:
1 – Whoever DrCruelty is, he didn’t sound quite as erudite as Trackaholic. DrCruelty’s suggestion was straightforward, but his argument was less developed: “Axe CAFE, tax gas.”
2 – I’m not sure how one reaches the formulation that “TH”=”Trackaholic.” Or vice versa. And what is this “petrol” of which he speaks? In spite of his NASCAR-like nom de plume, is he really a Brit?
Nevertheless, I applaud the idea of replacing a top-down regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE with the bottom-up approach proposed by TH. This approach is very much in line with a basic facet of our quantum world.
Such an approach offers a number of pluses. It sets values (higher prices for gas and inefficient vehicles) that are aligned with our nation’s interest (reducing dependence on foreign oil), while still giving individuals the freedom to drive whatever their hearts desire (and their wallets can afford). It also gives automakers a clearer and more consistent market environment to produce for – instead of one that swings wildly, salivating for SUV’s one month and then hot for hybrids 6 months later.
Finally – and not a small thing – removing a cumbersome regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE will do away with one source of automotive agita for “horsepower-addled car pundits” (and scourges of the “nanny state”) like Brock Yates. Not to worry – I’m sure they’ll still find plenty of other things to get rev’d up about.
The Word from the Street
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: bottom up, conservatives, future, internet, linked world, media, world wide web
Leave a Comment As I noted in my last post, times are hard these days for the mainstream media. But it’s not all a matter of digital change, greedy owners and shrinking balance sheets. There’s also the fact that many in the MSM don’t seem to have a handle on what’s going on.
Washington Post Columnist E.J. Dionne has a recent column titled “Coming Soon: The 21st Century,” in which he starts off by noting:
Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe’s 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call “The Sixties” in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year’s election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
This is all well and good, as far as it goes. However, he never presents any clues as to how things will be different in 2009. Instead, he just catalogs a variety of ways in which the Bush administration has dealt with current problems – like terrorists and the financial markets – from an outdated 20th century perspective.
Meanwhile Mr. Dionnes’ fellow Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson – in “Humbled By Our Ignorance” – pursues a pastime popular these days among conservatives: basking in ignorance. When confronted with the massive failures of their governance, conservatives fiercely proclaim that the source of such failures was totally unpredictable.
For them, no one could have foreseen 9/11 (except for those warning bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States). No one could have known there were no WMDs in Iraq (except for the UN inspectors who made that point). No one could have known the levees would fail (except for engineers familiar with their limitations). And no one could have predicted that people preoccupied with maximizing profits rather than acting responsibly could bring the economy to its knees (except for economists like Paul Krugman who warned of impending disaster).
Apparently, to conservatives the idea they couldn’t predict what happened absolves them from responsibility for the failures they provoked. I guess being conservative means never having to say you’re sorry.
Contrary to Mr. Dionne, I would argue (as I often do) that the 21st century has been with us for some time. If we want to point to a particular event that defines a break from the 20th century, I would point to the development of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990’s. Up until that time it might have been said we were in the Information Age, but that information was generally controlled by powerful gatekeepers like the mainstream media.
Contrary to Mr. Samuelson, I would say that paying attention to what’s happening now – and borrowing some ideas from the science that has shaped our hyper-linked world – can enlighten us about the workings of current events. Ignorance is not inevitable.
An example of the 21st Century in action is presented by the brief article “The Tools Of Citizen Journalism.” It’s about Demotix -
…a London-based startup that allows users to upload pictures (and soon video) that are in turn sold to news outlets. The recent events around the Israel/Palestinian conflict were a perfect showcase of this type of user-generated content site (though, obviously, a tragic one).
This is just another example of how the source of information has changed. The mainstream media has limited space and time to devote to any of the many news topics today. But if you look for them, you’ll find all kinds of other sources that have emerged to give you an idea about what’s going on in places like Iraq and Wall Street .
There’s a great deal of concern these days about corporate control of the news media (for example, see here and here). This is indeed a serious problem – although some sound like prime candidates for the tinfoil hat brigade.
But compared to pre-web days, the mainstream media has much less control today over what we know about current events. And as long as the web is free to all the tide of content will continue to turn from a top-down model to one that is more bottom-up.
Ironically, the mainstream media will probably remain clueless about this shift for some time. Fortunately for them, Robert Samuelson can someday write a piece glorifying their ignorance.
Maybe not everyone in the MSM is clueless. Time has a piece by James Poniewozik – “An End, and a Beginning, for the Media” – that gets it right:
Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they’ll need to see their new-media “problems” as part of the solution. Internet users don’t hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer–and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.
This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive–it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.
