Posts Tagged ‘ Complexity ’

The Eightfold Way as a Social Model

Finally, the book Complex Adaptive Systems by John H. Miller and Scott E. Page is getting down to pay dirt  - halfway into the book! It quotes Buddhist scripture:

Now what, monks, is the Noble Eightfold Path? It is as follows; right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

No doubt Buddhist scholars would object to his interpretation of Buddhist scripture, which is facile – but no matter, it is useful anyway. It maps them as follows:

View – Information and connections
Intention – Goals
Speech – Communication among the agents
Action – Interaction
Livelihood – Payoffs
Effect – Strategies and actions
Mindfulness – Cognition
Concentration – Model focus and heterogeneity

I personally have a problem with the interpretation of Mindfulness. It is clear that the authors have no idea of what that means in Buddhist practice. It is also true that the Buddha had no idea what models and agents would mean over a thousand years later.

Overlooking these minor matters, however, the authors (note the plural case) go on to explain what these mean in Complex Social Theory.

As I said in my other posting today The Worship of Wonderful, Complexity Science tries to be wonderful – but fails. No matter, it is useful, and that is all that matters. Here are three paragraphs (out of six) for Right View:

Right View encompasses the information that an agent receives from the world. Such information can influence agents in both direct and indirect ways. Directly, incoming information will often cause to immediately react to what was received by taking some action. Indirectly, information is often “memorized” via some change in the agents internal state, and such changes may set the stage fore actions that will only be realized into the future…

A further complication is that the networks that agents receive often come from other agents. As such, agents may be able to manipulate, at least partially, their outputs so as to influence the actions of others. As we will see, models where such manipulation is possible can lead to some very interesting behaviors…

Networks may also be important in terms of view. Many models assume that agents must be bunched together on the head of a pin, whereas the reality is that most agents exist within a topology of connections to other agents, and such connections may have an important influence on behavior.

Most people react to this complexity by turning off – and refusing to notice anything at all.

I have been enjoying the Tico Times ever since came to Costa Rica. But this week it decided to call it quits, because it couldn’t afford to continue. I think the situation is worse than that – few want to know about anything.

They seem to think if they ignore their problems they will go away.

2012
09/29
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Religion
Technology
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Computation vs Mathematics

I’m amazed by how poorly this distinction is understood. The Computer changed everything because it abandoned mathematics and replaced it with algorithms.

The book Complex Adaptive Systems, Chapter 5, Computation as Theory, has two excellent quotes, the first from Robert Hooke,  in his Micrographia:

By the addition of such artificial Instruments and methods, there may be, in some manner, a reparation made for the mischiefs, and imperfection, mankind has drawn upon it self, by negligence, and intemperance, and a wilful and superstitious deserting the Prescripts and Rule of Nature, whereby every man, both from a deriv’d corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, Is subject to slip into all sorts of errors.

The second is from Stanislaw Ulam in his Adventures of a Mathematician:

The use of computers seems thus not merely convenient, but absolutely essential for such experiments which involve following the games or contests through a very great number of moves or stages. I believe that the experience gained as a result of following the behavior of such processes will have a fundamental influence on whatever may ultimately generalize or perhaps even replace in mathematics our present exclusive immersion in the formal axiomatic method.

You may have to lift up your pants as you wade through that last quote. He is saying the computer is affecting the practice of mathematics itself – a real revolution in Science!

The book goes on to discuss models in housing construction, and the invention of balloon framing in Chicago in the 1830s. This is how most houses are still constructed in America: using 2x4s and nails.

In Costa Rica, prefabricated concrete walls and posts are used with metal rafters and roofing – because of the earthquake hazard, and also to make them fire-proof and termite-proof.

In either case a construction model is used – which makes construction easier. But using a model has its drawbacks – all the houses tend to be the same.

2012
09/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
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Complexity in Social Worlds

This topic forms a chapter in the book Complex Adaptive Systems. Here is the opening paragraph, on page 27:

We see complicated social worlds all around us. The being said, is there something more to this complication? In traditional social science, the usual proposition is that by reducing complicated systems to the their constituent parts, and fully understanding each part, we will then be able to understand the word. While this sounds obvious, is this really correct?

Is it the case that understanding the parts of the world will give us insight into the whole? If the parts of the world are really independent from each other, then even when we aggregate them with should be able to predict and understand such “complicated” systems.

As the parts begin to connect with one another and interact more, however, the scientific underpinnings of the approach begin to fail, and we move from the realm of complication to complexity, and reduction no longer gives us insight into construction.

He then goes on to consider if social behavior is complex – a point I already take for granted. He asks these questions:

  • How much agent sophistication is required?
  • How much heterogeneity?
  • What about social niche construction?
  • The role of control?

These are all huge questions, and I am not satisfied that Complexity Theory is capable of answering them. It overlooks too many basic issues, such as greed and destructiveness – which hardly require any theory at all.

And of course, people’s refusal to consider any theories whatsoever.

2012
09/22
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Science
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Can the World be Understood?

People have very definite ideas about this – but they are not usually aware of them. In the pre-modern world the answer was “No,” and to pretend it was possible was a religious heresy. In the post-modern world the answer is also “No,” for much the same reason, but the religion has changed and become much more complicated. But the attitude is the same: only belief is acceptable – and people make it very clear that they believe. Anyone who has his own ideas is in big trouble.

In the modern world the answer was “Yes!” and everyone wanted to understand. This was the goal of science in particular.

From the book Complex Adaptive Systems, from the chapter Modeling (page 35):

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand. But we must build as if the sand were stone.
Jorge Luis Borges

We begin with the basics of scientific modeling. This topic is so fundamental to the scientific enterprise that is is often assumed to be known by, rather than explicitly taught to, students (with the exception of a high school lecture or two on the “scientific method”. For whatever reason, learning about modeling is a lot like learning about sex; despite its importance, most people do not want to discuss it, and no matter how much you read about it, it just doesn’t seen the same when you actually get around to doing it.

All modeling requires the faith that, as Borges expresses it, we can occasionally turn the sand of the real life into stone. Effective models require a real world that has enough structure so that some of the details can be ignored. This implies the existence of solid and stable building blocks that encapsulate key parts of the system’s behavior. Such building blocks provide enough separation from details to allow modeling to proceed. For example, Mendel was able to develop his key ideas about heredity without knowing anything about DNA, and economists have been able to generate useful theories of individual and firm behavior without having to delve deeply into the human mind or the organization of the firm.

Climate Science depends heavily on models, and it arouses the wrath of our present religion and its believers like nothing else. Their cardinal rule is “Don’t think!” and it the attempt to understand violates this all-important rule.

This implies something even more important, since thinking is a vital part of us. The more general commandment is “Do not be!” And sure enough, people no longer exist in any vital sense.

They are no longer aware of (or understand) themselves. And they consider this a big improvement.

2012
09/18
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
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Things We Cannot Resist

We have a problem, and it is this – we are emotionally and mentally unstable; we go crazy for all kinds of reasons – and all kinds of ways, some of them seemingly harmless.

Nothing could be more obvious – but nothing could be denied more vigorously. This is our worst fear, and one we don’t want to think about. But not thinking about it only makes the problem worse – much worse.

Thinking is a flawed weapon, to be sure, and too much dependence on it is fatal. But it is the biggest weapon in our arsenal, and we have to use it – whether we like it or not. In fact, being aware of our reluctance to use it – on any of life’s problems, small or big – is one of our most important skills. When we feel this reluctance, we can be sure there is something going on that we need to look at – right away, and not sometime later, when the feeling will have gone away.

But I can hear people whining “I am a busy person, I don’t have the time to do all this thinking!” If this is true, you are in big trouble – and you better so something that will give you more time. Time is life, and if we don’t have that, we might as well through in the towel.

In most societies now, however, changing is impossible. Society is locking into its problems so much so it considers them its solutions – which it must have and cannot give up. It realizes this dimly, but it is in the grip of forces much too strong for it to handle.

Individuals in these situations have only one solution – to get out. The classic case is that of Germany in the Thirties, when Nazism was gaining force. The smart Jews simply got out of there in a hurry, and went as far away as they could get. One family I knew went to South America – to later return to Germany in easy stages after the war.

I ended up in Costa Rica – not because I was so smart, but because that was the easiest, most sensible thing to do. Abandoning the American Way of Life, for me, was not that difficult – indeed, I couldn’t wait to get out of it.

Now that I have some distance from America’s problems, I can more easily see them. And one thing I am seeing is how people cannot resist technology. This is normal, our technologies gave us all kinds of enormous advantages. But too many of them too fast is more than we can handle.

Here again, we are dimly aware of this – but insist we can do nothing – they are too irresistible, and we have to have them no matter what. It is almost as if these technologies are evil forces in their own right – demanding that we serve them, and not ourselves.

As a matter of fact, I am going, right now, to make this assertion – that the combination of them and us amounts to an evil force. One that we haven’t recognized before – but must recognize now. The idea is not new, far from it, only one thing is new – recognizing that the combination of technology and society forms a complex – and that complex is evil.

We can no longer separate the two, and treat them separately. They are the same thing, and have to be seen that way and dealt with that way. This will be a little stretch for our minds, who only want to deal with simple things – but not too much of a stretch.

We now have big problems, and we need big minds to deal with them.

2012
01/16
CATEGORY
Morality
Sociology
Technology
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Instant Publishing

Wired Magazine - Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

This is what blogging is; this is why it is so popular; and this is why it is mostly ignored. Everyone still wants to be published, even though there are now far more things being published than anyone could possibly read. Even an online bookstore like Amazon, which has, in effect, bookshelves of infinite size, only contributes to the information overload that plagues us.

An intermediate solution, and an old one, is to be published in a periodical, in a newspaper or a magazine. The problem, for a reading person like me (a rare breed, these days) is to limit the number of these one reads. I have resisted Wired Magazine, but I may have to add it to my list. Fortunately, this is extremely easy – in Windows 7, just add it to your taskbar – where it joins all the other fine online publications vying  for your attention.

Somehow or other, I can’t remember just how, I ended up looking at this article in Wired – and I was impressed by it. Evidently a lot of people were also impressed and had to add their own six-cents worth – with the result that only 82 of the 162 comments are shown.

I won’t bother, any comment of mine would be lost in the noise, but I will add my noise here – and I will make it brief. The interesting thing for me about this article is that it addresses the problem of complexity. In nature everything is complex – many things effecting many other things – but we had greatly simplified this into a simple cause-and-effect chain of events (which, among other things, eliminated people from the picture).

I can remember my Grandfather in prayer meeting, rocking up on his toes to make himself bigger, repeating over and over “Cause and effect! Cause and effect!”

I could not help but noticing (although not very clearly at first) that his world, and that of my parents, was in the process of destroying itself – for the simple reason that it was not noticing how the world really was: complex - not just complicated.

2012
01/14
CATEGORY
Science
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Using the Computer to Empower Our Minds

This is a continuation of my posting The Only Important Thing in Our World Should be Us. I ended by wondering if some wild card in the deck could save us. Unexpectedly, I may have stumbled on to it, when reading Too Big to Know: rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room. 

I have poo-pooed the idea that computers could help us think – not realizing that I had already been doing just this. This is what I use my blog for – a much better way of writing, and organizing my ideas. If the computer was only useful for that, it would be invaluable. But it is good for much else – enhancing our thinking. Let me explain.

For awhile I was interested in botany – but I could not understand why botanists did not use databases to store their botanical information. They do exist, but in my opinion they are pathetic, and do not begin to use their potential. The object of a database is to gather and store information in its raw form. The structure of a database can be used to organize its data – but one database can contain many different structures – and should. It should have many links tying everything together.

Botanists (and Zoologists) are still obsessed with the system invented by Carl Linnaeus. From Wikipedia:

The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: “Tell him I know no greater man on earth.”[2] The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.”[2] Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist”.[3] Among other compliments, Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists), “The Pliny of the North,” and “The Second Adam“.[4]

They may have been impressed because his system relies on recognized experts – you have to spend some time around them to see how impressed they are with their experts. It also doesn’t take much time for someone like me (an outsider) to discover that these experts often disagree with each other – but that is overlooked.

A database system can use many experts – with links to their references and their areas of expertise. Each expert can have his own system – without caused the database any trouble at all. All this data can be examined in many different ways – depending on the examiner.

Computers (or their software, to be more accurate) can be used to develop models that consider far more than our brains can – because huge amounts of data can be considered, and very complex algorithms can be used on this data. Climate science is a case in point. Usually, several different models are developed, and greater credence is given to those whose predictions overlap.

Will this save us? Probably not, because people will simply misuse science’s findings, or ignore them. Instead of using the computer to help themselves, they will use it to destroy themselves instead – and it is very capable of doing that too.

2012
01/02
CATEGORY
Science
Technology
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How Can We Understand an Ever-More Complicated World, When We Cannot Even Understand Ourselves?

Maybe you are different, but I can’t even begin to understand myself. And I am hardly the the most messed-up person out there. There are billions of us competing for that honor.

The gap between what we need to know and what we actually know keeps getting worse.

Some of us actually believe this problem will be solved when our computers become super-intelligent – and do our thinking for us. As if  the defective beings we are – and we always have been, and always will be defective, since this is part of being human. As if all this could be overcome so easily.

2011
12/29
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
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Few Organizations Know How to Use the Internet Well

When I speak of the Internet I mean the complex of computer, software, and the Internet. And I use the word complex in its scientific sense – a system of interrelated forces with feedback loops and a lot of non-linear behavior.

The requirements of the computer affect the software for it, which in turn affects the computer – and the Internet affects both of them – a system of three interrelated, by-directional forces. This is kind of thing traditional science avoided like a curse, because its mathematics could not begin to cope with it.

But software, which is inherently non-linear itself, has no trouble. It can model nearly anything in theory. In practice, it does have difficulty in two ways – some stuff is difficult to model because how it behaves is poorly understood. This is particularity true with people, who are almost impossible to understand, by their very nature. And some processes, such as the weather, are are chaotic by their very nature, and nothing can be done to change that.

That being said, there is an even bigger problem – organizations, which are composed of people, are by their nature stupid. This can be stated more politely, but that is the basic fact. Human nature was formed long ago, and though we are remarkably adaptable creatures, our adaptions are limited, as psychologists are beginning to discover, in embarrassing detail.

This in itself should not be an insurmountable problem – once we understand our limitations, we should be able to work around them. But at this point we seem to get stubborn and insist on making the same mistakes, over and over. However, I have gotten off the subject here, with my explanations.

What I started to write about was how few organizations really know how to use the computer/software/internet. And this includes software organizations too – who should be the most adept at this – being the man in the middle, so to speak.

I recently decided to learn the Python programming language. Which is not too hard if you stick with the most elementary of programming interfaces – the command prompt. This is how computers started out, way back when. The computer types some simple text for the user, for example:

python
Python 2.7 (#1, Feb 28 2010, 00:02:06)
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>>

Believe it or not, this is the interface many programmers love – as impersonal as possible. They want to get as close to the hardware as possible – being hardware persons themselves.

But ordinary persons, such as me, want the computer to be more human – or at least to seem human. And a huge amount of work has been done to do this produce this illusion – which computer users have gotten used to (such as Windows operating system). For programmers, the Integrated Programming Interface (IDE) was developed to make all kinds of programming tasks easier and more trouble-free. I love them and I need them. And this gives me an excellent window into how screwed-up the software industry is.

Bear in mind that I am talking about the software industry here – which should be the most advanced industry on earth – if not the entire solar system. Believe me, it is far from that, as anyone in the know knows. Why? Because programmers (or whatever else they like to call themselves) are nothing but ordinary humans with a little external polish – which doesn’t change who they are basically in the least. If anything, they are even less socially adept than the average bear. And anyone watching them in action together can easily see this. They can act like the Keystone Cops.

The one exception here is Amazon, which not only has first-class technical expertise, but also first-class customer support. They really work at making the customer feel good, and this pays off. Expect them to be around for awhile.

The main gripe I have about the effect of high-tech organizations on people, is how we have been shunted to the sidelines. This problem is biting them in the ass – and will result, I am sure, in a total wreckage of the human world – high-tech or otherwise.

2011
12/09
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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When the Human Race Gradually Faded Away

This happened mainly during the 19th and 20th Centuries but started in the late 18th Century with two events – the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. How these two were connected is a mystery, no doubt there was something more basic going on – something that McGilchrist has identified as the coming to power of the left hemisphere, Ortega y Gasset associates with the coming of mass man, and the destructiveness and the unconscious behavior that Freud and Eric Fromm have commented on.

I am poorly qualified to analyze anything so complicated, all I can do is point out the obvious – that this is not just complicated, it is complex (with many interdependent variables and feedback loops).

As an example of this see Who’s Responsible For the Euromess? on Mother Jones. Or any of the ongoing debates about Climate Change. The response of most is to simply throw up their hands, and say, in effect “This stuff is so complicated I am going to ignore it and pretend that it (reality) does not exist, only my fantasies about it exist.” Which only makes the situation worse.

In other words, as human reality has become more complex, people have become more simple, even simple-minded. The worst possible situation.

These same people will insist on asking “So what’s the solution?” Not realizing (consciously at least) that this an inappropriate question. Unconsciously they know full well that this question is a trap meant to discredit you.

The only answer is to more carefully define the problem, in all its complexity - a strategy they will reject completely as too much work.  As spoiled children, they want everything easy – and reject anything else. But let me get back to my original thesis – that the human race has gradually disappeared.

The world gradual is important here, this happened over many generations, and people have almost no ability to detect such gradual changes. They think the way things are now is he way it has always been – something historians warn about constantly. But they have no interest in history. They only live in the present.

In other words, what we have here is a feedback loop: the Industrial emphasis on production, produced simplified (more mechanical) people, who were less capable of understanding what is like to be human (but more capable of being a mechanical part of the Industrial machine) – and also incapable of understanding their increasingly technical world – which went out of control, since there were no people to control it.

I hope that makes some sense. If not, please ask me about it.

2011
12/09
CATEGORY
Economy
Philosophy
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