Culpability?

Why should lawmakers and taxpayers be angry at car companies, when lawmakers OK and taxpayers buy/drive guzzlers each time gas costs go down?

Positive thinking

Count on management to be (i) ignorant, (ii) incompetent, and (iii) self-aggrandizing. That way you can look forward to pleasant surprises when you occasionally get less than three out of three.

Sustainable ed

Teach for today's jobs too, and not only to yesterday's tests.

Undamped oscillation

Someone I know was heading west on the interstate just past downtown when ahead they saw a pickup pulling a trailer, veering a bit left then right then left as it traveled down the road. It was clear that the driver was aware of the problem, and figured that his job was to keep returning the truck to its own lane. This logic, as simple and impeccable in intent as it was, was alas dead wrong because the driver's response-time fit beautifully with the resonant-frequency of the weave. Like someone kicking one's legs at exactly the right time to pump up the motion of a playground swing, the driver's logic loop repeatedly pumped energy into the weave, which got wilder and wilder until all of a sudden the truck and trailer spun out into a parked position across five lanes of traffic.

So what?

Think about the stock market. The news media reports where it's at every day if not every minute. Like the truck driver above, however, attention is not being focused on dynamics, like the system's resonant frequencies. A kid on a playground swing knows that you can make the oscillation bigger by kicking at the right point with the right frequency. The truck driver above found this can happen inadvertantly if you pay attention only to displacement.

If you don't want the oscillation to get bigger, you can either (i) not act, or (ii) act at a different frequency. Even better computer programs that paid attention to frequency amplitude and phase as well as displacement, or even more sophisticated dynamical models, might be programmed to actively damp oscillations. So could the newsmedia.

What might be some useful first steps to this end, so we don't spin out the truck just 'cause we and our computer programs are paying attention to the wrong thing?

Clue from the past

In explaining their project 10¹⁰⁰, Google says that never in history have so many had so much information. This may have been true once before. Until nervous and circulatory systems came along, never had so many (cells) had access to so much molecular information.

Cells so blessed thankfully learned to inform their reactions with those molecules to processes going on: (a) in and outside their membranes, (b) in and outside of the tissues they grew up in, and (c) in and outside of the organism supported by those tissues. What if we too learned to cultivate the six community connection layers that look in/out with respect to those boundary types important to us i.e. our skin, our gene pool, and our idea pool?

In that case then, unlike cancer cells searching for oxygenated blood, we could confidently look beyond warnings (e.g. about money becoming tight) to a layer-multiplicity that counts YES ANSWERS to six bottom-line questions: Do you have chances to: (i) find food, shelter, medicine and education, (ii) cultivate long-term friendships, (iii) support family and raise children, (iv) help build residential and work-oriented communities, (v) choose a set of beliefs and interests by which to live, and (vi) develop and take pride in a profession? Good news: The number is above zero! It's also not 6 on average, so how can we bring it up?

If media outlets and surveys measured their balance by the extent to which they support developments on all six of these levels, if political accomplishment was gauged by quantitative impact on these chances for everyone, and if individuals considered their connections in all six areas together, there would be much less to be frightened or depressed about but also much more work to be done.

Code/excitation soup

This week I've noticed two narratives that drop an important ball: They blur the distinction between: (i) excitations in the world around and (ii) the concepts that we use to communicate about those excitations.

The first one, no surprise, involves the current (perennial) focus on national politics. Here, with new intensity, candidates are being cartoonified as media monkeys while the opportunity to discuss data and concepts for dealing with the world around passes by. If questions like "Do you have the needed experience?" have no operational meaning, why on earth would people keep asking them while questions about our affect on the global pool of ideas go unasked?

The second, interestingly enough, arose with media discussions (in NPR's On Point) about the large hadron collider (LHC) coming on-line at CERN. It was fun to listen to some top physicists try to answer questions for the lay public, one element of disconnect being expressed in the query: Are the questions that will be answered mainly for physicists?

In this case I was reminded of the invisibility of "concepts as tools" in the way that theorists often talk. Let's translate this to a question that everyone understands: "How many extended spatial dimensions do you experience?" The answer, of course, is that three is an operationally-useful everyday answer to this question. The collider might help identify conditions under which different answers will be useful as well.

However, the question is normally posed by theorists not as "What answer is useful when?" but "How many ARE there?". It's almost as though they think that ideas shared by humans don't model the world, but instead constitute the world. Is that as bad as pretending that candidates are no more than their response to a journalist's ill-defined question?

Hoot Hoot

Hooting may be a useful positive response to actions and remarks that, like those portrayed by David Attenborough and others in non-human primate communities, aspire to being informed to self, friends, family and community i.e. to correlations focused inward and outward from metazoan skin and molecular code pool. In fact, this response (and related ones) might be said to capture the spirit and scope of such actions and remarks.

Hoots may also help us distinguish these responses from those elicited by actions and remarks that aspire further to inform themselves to culture and profession i.e. to correlations focused inward and outward from one's idea pool boundaries. Might these instead, for instance, be associated with exclamations like Hallelujah and aHah? In what kinds of community is the spirit of these responses typically found?

Equity and health

The recent WHO report about the impact of social inequities on individual health suggests that a human's abilities to pursue correlations directed inward and outward with respect to skin, family and culture are intertwined. Of course this is not a surprise, but they also make the case that the effects are dramatic.

They further argue that the first line of attack against this problem is not the hiring of more doctors, but the empowering of individuals. The good news there is that the former will take lots of money, but that a great deal may be accomplished in the latter regard with only the help of globally mobile ideas.

What's the best way to proceed from here? Some viral videos or catchy tunes? How about programs that consider the everyday citizen? Where are the latter already helping at home and abroad?

Organism centricity

As organisms ourselves, it's natural for us to think that the world centers around the structure and survival of organisms. The structure of processes, and survival of codes, may seem incidental in this context. As a result the organism story might get more than its share of attention.

Codes that don't get their share of attention include idea codes. These can now find their way into hearts and minds across the globe, in less time than it takes to shake a stick. Of course we transmit them willy-nilly, but we discuss their role as agents much less.

Processes that don't get their share of attention include those of correlation building that each of us does in (a) developing friendships, (b) maintaining families, (c) supporting communities, (d) honoring beliefs, and (e) extending human awareness of the world around. The effect of disasters and policy changes on these things doesn't normally show up in the body count, but that doesn't make them any less important.

The greater good

Fans of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, or A. E. van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle", may imagine that science will one day help us find the correct "equation of greater good" with which to guide policy decisions. Don't count on it.

If idea pools in cultural communities are like gene pools in communities of social animals, then "greater good equations" will compete with one another. In fact, they already do. Rather than being given or deduced, such equations evolve by selective replication just as nucleic acid strings evolve in complex multi-species communities (like a tide pool).

Although science can still offer sound insight into elements of the greater good, rather than dictating the equation it will be up to science to make its case for consideration by cultures across the globe. The good news is that this can have very positive results. The bad news is that some still see science as a (good or bad) replacement for culture, rather than as a natural complement.

Multiscale traditions

Here's the technical question: What are some elements of existing culture that nurture awareness on multiple scales of space, time and organization, and how might we evolve them so that they do this better downstream? Let's start a list...

Idea-toriality

How does claiming credit for an idea compare to territorial marking by wolves? How does it differ?

Does such marking affect your intuition about potential value? Does it prompt others to examine an idea more carefully? Is there any context where it also chases interlopers away?

Do wolves and/or people ever mistake this marking ritual for a goal in and of itself? If so, what real tasks at hand might they be distracted from as a result?

Lightly salted

I'm not sure how to take the product label: "lightly salted". Is that good news, or bad news dressed up to look good? Compare to "only a touch of sweetness" and "rarely kills patients with no warning"...

Salsa mystery

Many of the issues discussed in this blog relate to the tomato salmonella problem currently in the news. One of these, of course, is the delocalized nature of our food supply and the ignorance about where that tomato came from.

Perhaps a more important issue is our failure to put facts into media communications to help consumers take responsibility for their decisions. When the FDA is not sure about a cause, they should tell us the facts rather than pretend to protect us with vague and global pronouncements e.g. "distrust tomatoes". In other words, share data with consumers as though they are responsible decision makers (like which of how many salsa eaters got sick where), and then don't speculate but wait until you have more that's worthwhile to say.

Another key role for the media, after they first convey some specifics, is to discuss with consumers ways to make decisions in the face of quantitative as well as qualitative information. Earlier entries on bytes of risk, and everyday nanodecisions, touch on that area. Given that the avenues to inform consumers and voters are potentially broader than they used to be, we'll try to spend more time on that downstream.

Bubbling life away

The idea that some folks are subhuman and thus fair game is a familiar runaway idea in this age of electronic communications. A more serious runaway idea in the short term may be that "corporations serve only a few shareholders".

Historically corporations in the developed world (on the bright side) have provided significant multiscale value in the form of secure jobs for employees, economic benefits to their regions, as well as a stream of innovative and reliable products to their customers. Alas under the guise of global competition, a new type of corporate management (not yet everywhere) has emerged that preys on such companies.

Hence the new "bubbles" are not in startups, but in companies with established value. This is because the management approach referred to above has a monoscale focus: Convert the multiscale value of established companies (in the form of the employee skill base, regional loyalty, and product reliability) into cash leaving value-free husks in their wake. Do any recent examples come to mind?

Just as multiscale thinking on the part of newsmedia, voters, politicians, and consumers is crucial to our collective long term future, so multiscale thinking on the part of stockholders (particularly the larger ones) may be crucial to many lives in the days ahead. Even if media of the past half decade overlooked the collective stupidity of feedback-amplified xenophobia, in the next can they nonetheless help us slow the continued loss of reputable businesses?

Ill-posed questions*

The spoken word, like the expressed protein, is a means by which living things communicate. Sending a poorly-chosen enzyme through the body will get an organism in trouble, just as a poorly-chosen question (or statement) broadcast by the media will get a community in trouble.

Media representatives often pretend that poorly-chosen questions have well-defined answers, when in fact they deserve wiggly answers or no response at all. Flip-flop accusers who ask ill-informed questions are like molecule pushers who send enzymes for clotting into their customers' brain. Don't be shy about pointing it out when you see it happen.

* for some earlier more technical examples see "The well-posed problem" by E. T. Jaynes (Foundations of Physics 3, 1973, pages 477-493).

Modernizing content

The least costly path from point A to B depends on where both A and B are located. Does this sound like a useful fact in this age of rising gas prices?

Now imagine that A is the set of concepts and skills initially in hand and that B is the set of skills needed to address current challenges. If either the starting tools (A) or the skills needed (B) change, the best path to gaining the latter may also change.

Does that mean that in a world where both A and B continuously change, educators might want to be always looking for new ways to bridge the gap? In order to overcome the inertia associated with a more familiar path, does it also mean that content modernizers had better specify for which values of A and B an alternate path is taylored?

Example: Students familiar with the meaning of bits and bytes in everyday life might benefit from introductions to probability that use powers of two so as to build on that familiarity, for instance by thinking of probability as 1/2^#bits. Does this mean that methods to teach use of probabilities today might be simplified with examples that 50 years ago would have made things worse and not better?

Similar opposites

Math folk may tell you that exact opposites are often similar, especially when multiple dimensions are involved, since they differ by only a sign. For instance, taking the negative of an image does little to obscure the information it contains. Photographers who capture and store images on negatives will likely agree.

This is also true for idea codes: If someone says that you're exactly wrong, the implication is that you are asking the correct true-false questions but assigning the wrong answers. Taken literally this means that, except for a sign change, they see the world precisely as do you. This is one reason that those who see themselves as polar opposites often find themselves serving the same set of bad ideas.

Unfortunately our ideas about the world often differ from the world itself by a lot more than a change of sign. Thus for example when you hear talk about one person or idea being the exact opposite of another, your monoscale-thinking alarm should probably go off.

Acuity multiscale

One statement in favor of awareness on more than one scale is this old adage: Think globally, act locally.

Objective balance?

Wouldn't it be nice if folks with diverse perspectives could agree on integrative elements of an approach to regional policy, regardless of disagreements about how to weigh and accomplish those goals. What if this approach also: (i) puts the full range of issues on the table, (ii) outlines ways to objectively monitor progress toward those goals, (iii) helps explain past difficulties at coming to agreement, and (iv) has deep roots in more than one field of science and mathematics?

Layered-niche network models, that track correlations with respect to skin, family and culture, may be able to do all of these things. However, it will take critical input from all perspectives to put them to use. If you want to hear more, or better still to inform these approaches to your perspective, now is a good time to speak up.

Question etiquette

Is it a good idea to answer any question asked by the media? My answer to this question is no, since the idea-set that underlies the question may not be well chosen.

The above question IS hopefully worth answering. Ideas now travel the globe in very short times. Those who reinforce bad idea-sets by obediently manning any side of a weak or ill-posed question both: (i) help the bad idea propagate and (ii) falsely legitimize un-informed pursuits by those lined up on both sides of the question.

Do people ever make this mistake? It seems to me that among others, "stereotypers" (who cartoonify folks and often champion single-scale causes) and "progressives" (who attempt in sometimes muddled ways to address challenges on more than one scale) both make the mistake frequently. The latter often do it thereby aiding the former with their xenophobic labels, while the former often do it thereby aiding stereotypers against whom they discriminate.

What are some examples of this? I'll offer two. According to linguist George Lakoff, progressives often take the wrong side of a bad issue (like whether to set a date in advance for withdrawal from some conflict or election) instead of attacking the poor choice of question while offering a better one. This may require standing up to mono-scale cartoonifiers (including media reps) who claim that arguing against a bad question is beating around the bush. Such reframing of bad questions had thus better be done clearly and succinctly.

Another example involves possible responses to non-government violence against citizens. The strongest narrative may not involve "wars against terror by an axis of evil", especially if such phrases help groups with no (or poor) track record at governance to act like governing adversaries either militarily, or in their ability to bring order to the lives of everyday folk. Instead it might be better, for example, to ridicule those making the neolithic claim that "it's OK to treat others as subhuman" and to demonstrate that we can better help sustain folks' lives on multiple levels than can they.

Monkey missions

Depending on your point of view, you might think of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV as EITHER a bad thing for kids OR as cutting-edge information technology. Regardless a comparison of "missions" in GTA4 to the primate activities illustrated by David Attenborough in the "Social Climbers" episode of BBC's Life of Mammals might convince you that the economic success of GTA relies on the creative placement of neolithic stereotypes (and projectile weapons) into a jungle rich in modern human structures and styles.

Before being hasty and turning up your nose up at such marketing strategies, you might want to consider the universal primate-appeal of other aspects of your behavior. From competitive social hierarchy, through family loyalties and play with friends, to the enthusiasm for a good meal, our communities are built on niche structures familiar from primate communities, as well as on commitment to loftier cultural and scientific goals.

One step toward moving beyond such strategies may be to recognize the legitimate basis for their appeal. That is, moving past our neolithic limitations may be helped by recognition that we have them to begin with.

Collaborative coding

Wiki collaboratives are one of various new and important processes that are evolving as I write this, on the back of emerging technology for electronic communcation. To see what I mean, create a user ID on Wikipedia and add pages of interest to your watch list so you can monitor developments and discussion about them from day to day.

The evolution of these processes is exciting (and problematic) because they could help to organically regulate the expression of idea codes, much as metazoan cells regulate the expression of molecule codes, by informing them to processes operating on multiple scales. There is still a long way to go on this, however, and each spare neuron that we can offer counts!

Taking the bait

One of those neolithic buttons, that globe-trotting ideas push, triggers xenophobia. Taking the bait means that, once pressed, the drumbeat that "subhumans threaten" competes for attention with sustainability issues like community health.

For instance "lose-lose" situations now unfolding in Africa suggest that taking the bait is a long-term recipe for state failure, through oscillatory cycles of indiscriminate response and reactions thereto. Jared Diamond points to older examples in his book "Collapse". Have you noticed other examples say in the past 100 years?

Unfortunately focus on community health is not a useful sound byte, since it involves multiple scales of time, space, and organization. Nonetheless avoiding the bogeyman button could help us do what we can to strengthen all communities involved.

Dollars and longevity are not the whole story. The most robust measure of progress (or its lack) may be niche-layer multiplicity i.e. the extent to which individuals in a community are able to: (i) stay fit, (ii) cultivate friendships, (iii) care for a family, (iv) function as a citizen, (v) participate in a culture, and (vi) contribute as observer to our understanding of the world around.

What fraction of your time have you managed to spend on each of these things in the last week? If your ability to do some of these things is starting to suffer, then perhaps you too will benefit from a collective effort to make these things possible for all. How can I help?

Monoscale thought

James Fallows' November 2002 article in The Atlantic Monthly on Iraq as "The fifty-first state?" described the long-term commitment that later materialized. Institutions making sub-prime loans at this time were also selling long-term commitment while thinking on only one scale.

The arguments given at the time did little to inform resulting decisions to the consequences they would have in other places, at other times, and on other levels of organization. Considering more than one opinion in these cases may have helped.

Such examples might also say this about second opinions: If those who disagree with you look like cartoons, then you may be mistaking the world that you live in for a cartoon world. The real choices that we have are seldom so simple.

Reproducing codes

Only since the middle of last century has it become apparent that life is intimately connected to the ability of codes to replicate. These codes are variously written in molecules (e.g. DNA and proteins), in memorized actions (e.g. tradition), in sounds (e.g. song and speech), on paper (e.g. text and images), and in digital media. Codes evolve through selective replication, and in that sense play a role which is complementary to that of organisms and cultures.

If the foregoing is true, then we might want to pay attention to the fact that new kinds of codes are easily replicated on the web. In addition to letters for making words, whose replication took a giant leap with invention of the printing press and libraries, and sounds whose replication took a giant leap with the invention of audio recording and radio, two dimensional videos with sound are now recorded and able to traverse the globe in seconds. Although this doesn't change organisms per se, it may change the nature of communities just as circulatory and nervous systems (YouTube for molecules?) changed how individual metazoans get by.

How does this changing picture of code replicability serve to modify the various narratives by which we live?

Neolithic habit

An important ancestral use of language was probably the use of ideas to represent other humans. Do you know any folks who act as if the reduction of human beings to code was a perfect fait accompli?

Representing people with ideas is a useful, even necessary, approximation in today's immense global community. However the dangers of taking the equivalence, between a human and a category or stereotype, too literally are legion as well. What examples of this pop into your mind?

The fact that egregious examples of "human abuse via stereotype" seem to effectively employ radios, TV, and the internet may be telling us this: Ideas that can replicate by taking advantage of a neolithic trait will do so, whether it's in the interest of humans or not. If so we might want to figure out which fun-to-replicate ideas serve our collective interests, and which don't. How can we do that?

Missed perspective

Diverse behaviors, from the kamikaze behavior of worker bees protecting the hive to the tradition of female praying mantids who dine on their mates, serve not individual survival but the ability of molecular codes (like DNA) to replicate. Now that idea codes can replicate electronically, we should keep an eye out for things that serve the interest of ideas but not the interest of individuals.

For example, consider the idea that we should treat certain folks as subhuman. If someone says that it's OK to treat you in this way, then you might either: (A) echo the idea by saying that folks should treat them as subhuman, or (B) downplay the idea as an ill-informed reaction that we must guard against given our neolithic heritage in this electronic age.

Note that in case A, by imitating those with the bad idea you serve the idea. Moreover, by ignoring the real shortcomings of the promoters (ie. that they offer no solutions) or by treating them as worthy adversaries, you might help distract from the real challenges that we face while lending credibility to those with the bad ideas.

In case B you might illustrate how those who promote the bad idea have no solutions to offer anyone, if indeed that's the case. This helps to put the bad idea and those who promote it in their place. It also puts the onus on you to offer balanced solutions, e.g. which tangibly support public health, individual freedom, family values, informed politics, cultural diversity, and scientific awareness.

Which of these two choices do you like best?

Scoping ideas

Satellite radio, like national TV, is a platform for non-local content. Thus hidden behind its market attractiveness (and potentially high production values) is a capability for purveying spectacle only on a national scale.

Is this a benign fact, or does it bring with it fundamental changes in what folks spend their time thinking about, and the ways they might interact through communications?

Imagine cells in your body trying to respond in an informed way to the world around. They communicate with one another using a finite set of recognizable molecules.

Hence they represent objects in the world around in those terms: "If that's an adrenaline siren, we had better run to shelter quickly!" "Hello, serotonin, long time no see." "Did testosterone just walk in the door?"

So already it's clear that living things, when they communicate, necessarily reduce things in the world around to molecular (or idea) codes that only silhouette what they're intended to represent.

Now let's complicate things by creating new channels for distribution of those molecules. When you cut your finger, instead of keeping the blood-clotting enzyme released in the area of the wound, imagine that it's instantly made available by "molecule youtube" everywhere in your body. If that enzyme is not somehow tagged as "meant for the cut and not the brain", this could cause some trouble.

In other words, just as our bodies need molecules made for local distribution (e.g. within a cell or within an organ) and other molecules for distribution throughout the body, so do our minds need locally-tuned ideas as well as ideas marked-up for global distribution. If we don't label them accordingly and ask folks to respect the difference, in these days of rapid electronic communication we should not be surprised if locally-targeted broadcasts are having bad effects globally, and vice versa.

Can you think of any recent examples of this in the news?

Your nanodecisions

If I thought my insurance provider was managing my risks, I'd be wrong. Every time I decide for or against: (i) eating an apple, (ii) walking through a cloud of smoke, (iii) putting my hand on a newly-encountered surface, (iv) taking a short-cut to work in my car, (v) clicking on a weblink, or perhaps even (vi) reading a book title, I am encountering new excitations and/or codes and therefore taking a physical risk. Hopefully, I'm also taking responsibility for the decision.

Is this a trivial fact that pertains only to me, or to you? Quite the contrary. Our communities are built on our individual ability to observe critically, and make these decisions in an informed way. They count on each of us as professional observers and decision makers, daily choosing a balanced trajectory along paths strewn with a million unavoidable risks.

As these risks become more complex and perhaps more challenging, it's crucial that we leverage our evolving abilities to communicate. In other words, this is an important question: How can we help one another think and communicate about our everyday choices, and how they relate to the risks we (and our communities) encounter on various scales of space, time, and organization?

Here a few ideas that sound good to me:

• Budget some extra time for talking with folks who have different perspectives.
• Learn about how the world is different to lifeforms on different size scales, like ants in the milliworld, microbes in the microworld, and viruses in the nanoworld.
• Read about processes that affect our world on different time scales, like solar evolution on the billion year scale, geological change on the million year scale, climate change on the thousand year (and shorter) scale, resource depletion on the hundred year scale, carbon dioxide emission on the ten year scale, and information technology whose global impact changes annually.
• Finally, discuss the impact of these processes on public health, the nature of friendships, family interactions, community participation, cultural involvement, and our understanding of the world around.

What other things might help?

How many levels?

There's input that directs your attention, and then there's input that's useful on more than one level. Which do you find more satisfying?

For example, saying "The new kid in school talks funny" highlights separation between a newcomer to class and the kids you've known for a while. That's about all.

On the other hand, "Oscar said his uncle taught him to dive for pearls" if true is informed about the newcomer on more than one level. Specifically it tells us that he comes from a place that is different, but like us he has a name, a gender, an uncle, an ability to learn, and some cool technical knowledge to boot.

I bring this up, because there may be solid scientific reasons to prefer communications of the second kind over the first. For instance, baby plants and animals today depend on cells biased toward molecular communication of the second kind for their embryonic development.

Group balance?

On this blog we've mentioned the challenge of getting our act together on six layers of organization: looking in/out from skin, family and culture. This isn't easy, at least not for me.

Giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I figure that by and large folks in any organization might come up a bit short. This shouldn't be a problem, as long as we move beyond individuals and focus on making behaviors of the group informed to all six levels instead.

The multiscale awareness discussed here is like political correctness. When folks are un-PC it's often entertaining and easy to empathize, even though it's disastrous when the behavior of institutions ignores due respect for facts, cultural and political diversity, or family and individual rights.

In this sense political correctness poses a similar challenge. Can we respect the innate tendency to speak our mind willy-nilly while ensuring that our institutions as a whole don't degenerate over time?

What does it take, and what situations can YOU list where we've managed to pull this off?

Media & leader-tales

Early human communities didn't have writing, and the behavior of local leaders was an important and practical topic of everyday talk. Fast-forward to the 20^th century. Weekly local newspapers adapted this oral tradition to print, in small towns even as national TV arrived on the scene. It didn't take long for electronic media to pick up on our passion for leader-talk.

It's much cheaper to create one story of interest to 300 million people, than to create a million stories each written for only 300. No surprise then that the focus on local and non-politcal issues is eclipsed (especially during a quarter of every 4 year US national election cycle) by a focus on news about only one of the 300 million jobs that hold the nation together.

Like the world series, the national election is a shared cultural event. However in places struggling to counterbalance discontent (like Kenya most recently), such a national focus can have its downside.

Let's recap. Thanks to their layered structure, communities are immersed in unfolding stories about: (i) public health, (ii) the nature of interactions between individuals, (iii) the state of families, (iv) citizenship (including leadership) in corporate as well as governmental offices, (v) the evolution of culture (sports too) in its many forms, and (vi) reports on systematic study of the world we live in. Each of these stories has neighborhood, village, county, provincial, national and global takes.

If each of these 6 topics were covered on 5 levels (lumping national and global together), this would give each local venue 30 stories to capture audience with per week. For a nation of 300 million people this means national stories in 6 topic areas, a couple of hundred state-level stories on those topics , maybe 6000 county-level stories, more than 100,000 village-level stories, and over 2 million neighborhood stories i.e. say in total 2.6 million stories in these 6 topic areas per week: Lots of stuff to write that is of interest somewhere.

Those fewer national and global stories carry the weight of more interested listeners. With 5 levels to cover (is that too many?) then national stories deserve 20% of total production effort and coverage, with national politics a sixth of that if one allocates time also to national matters of public health, relationships, family, culture, and science. Compare this <4% of time warranted on citizenship at the federal level to what big media venues spend on only the alpha-wolf leadership part of that story e.g. on tales about the job of US president.

Thus time spent pursuing old-style leadership-talk at the national level decreases coverage for the other matters listed above. NBC's "Meet-The-Press" session with pundits, on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami, stuck out like a sore thumb in this way. It keeps our eyes off the ball, even if we ignore the local stories that individual communities miss out on and the reporters not employed as a result.

When it comes to news, we get what we ask for. If there are better ways, no need to wait for big media. Internet and wireless communications open many new doors for making our information environment multiscale-smart. What can you and I do to help?

Beyond money?

Money and markets mirror an organic component of the world around, namely ordered energy i.e. energy available to do work. How are they similar?

The first law of thermodynamics guarantees that you can't create ordered energy out of thin air. The second law says you have to spend "thermodynamic availability" to get it. In principle, that's how money works too i.e. somebody has to earn it.

That second law also says that ordered energy is easy to waste. For instance the heat in a cup of hot coffee gradually thermalizes to room temperature, just as does the work available from those ice cubes in your tea if you let it sit out on the table all day. Money's also easy to waste, even without inflation. The successful use of money and markets likely draws strength from these organic roots.

However, money is one-dimensional. It maps everything onto one scale. The communities we live in, by comparison, are multilevel structures like our bodies. Molecules build cells that build organs that build individuals that build families that build cultures.

The question then is this: After monoscale money, multiscale what? Are there idea sets as deeply reflected in nature as that of ordered energy, which can take our concept of earnings and even health beyond money's one dimension?

The answer is yes. They involve the emergence of order in nature on all levels. They have deep roots in cosmic evolution and the natural history of invention. And they are just getting off the ground. Hopefully, this is one place that you can find out more about them in the days ahead...

...to bits of evidence

We talk bits and bytes when buying computers and video games, but few think of bits and bytes as tools of gambling theory. Actually that's where information units got their start in the 1940's. The statistical ideas behind them had been in use long before that.

If you enjoyed our earlier note about using bits and bytes to track everyday risks, then you might also be happy to hear that "there's not a bit of evidence" has literal meaning too. The bits of surprisal discussed earlier work best for unlikely occurrences. If you have a yes-no statement, however, subtracting the surprisal that it's true from the surprisal that it's false gives you the evidence (ebits) in its favor.

If the odds of a question being true are 2:1 = for:against, there is only 1 ebit of evidence in its favor since ebits obeys for/against=2^ebits. If the odds for:against = 4:1, then there are 2 ebits of evidence for it, while if for:against = 1:4 then there are 2 ebits of evidence against it.

The cool thing about ebits is this: Independent chunks of information simply add (or subtract) ebits from any case that you are trying to make. Thus ebits follow the common sense about levels of proof developed by folks with no background in statistics at all.

That's a good sign! So then what does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean, in bits? For example, do you think the standard of proof in a civil court is more, or less, than 14 ebits in favor to make the case?

The uncool thing about ebits is that it provides no clue as to whether it makes sense to ask the "yes-no" question to which it's being applied.

From bytes of risk...

See if you can identify the pattern here: If the odds are 50:50 that something bad won't happen, then that happening carries only one bit of surprisal. If the odds against are 3:1 (i.e. "three to one"), then the surprisal is two bits. Make sense yet? Odds against of 7:1 means surprisal is 3 bits, 15:1 against means 4 bits of surprisal, etc.

If you think you've got it now, suppose the odds against something bad happening are 255:1. How many bits of surprisal does that unlikely event carry?

Those of us into computers may have noticed that when the odds against are something:1, then something+1 = 2^#bits. Since 255+1 = 2⁸, the surprisal of such an unlikely event (same as the surprisal of throwing heads on eight coins at once with a single toss) is 8 bits or one byte. If you prefer probabilities over odds, then the probability of an unlikely event is just 1/2^#bits.

OK, so why am I bothering you with this? The reason is that everyday we all make decisions which weigh one tiny risk against another. Very few of us, however, are either taught to or interested in multiplying a set of ridiculously small probabilities every time we decide to eat an apple, cross the street, or (heaven forbid) smoke a cigarette.

But what if weighing our alternatives just involved adding a few numbers typically smaller than two dozen? This is about the surprisal in bits of winning the lottery with a single ticket. More folks could then easily make (and take responsibility for) informed decisions about the risk of unlikely events, and they could enjoy the unavoidable gambling involved in the process at the same time.

For example will you risk the 16 bit surprisal of getting a disease whose surprisal of doing you in is only 2 bits, or will you go for the vaccination whose surprisal of bad consequences is up at 22 bits instead? If you pick the first, you are living more dangerously than necessary (by 4 bits of surprisal) but you will also most likely gain some satisfaction from dodging the bullet. Either way, the decision was informed and it was yours.

If you like this approach, then how can we get media and product labelers to give us numbers about risk so that we can: (i) stop being scared by one broadcast after another and (ii) be more informed about the responsibilities that we shoulder?

Connection spiders

Here's one way to picture your emphasis on the six scales of interaction (i.e. out/in from your idea pool, gene pool, and skin) mentioned here. You look like a spider in a web!

In terms of time spent on these various things, where does your web of connections find its current balance?

Multiscale acuity

Communities define themselves by relationships directed both in and out from 3 physical boundary types. Working up from the smallest scale these are the metazoan skin, the family or gene-pool boundary, and (especially with humans) the culture or idea-pool boundary.

Thus you are multiscale smart if your actions are informed by respect for (i) self, (ii) friendship, (iii) family, (iv) consensus, (v) belief and (vi) observation. Such awareness is humbling, however, since it usually requires tradeoffs. Also, multiscale smart actions are tough to frame with a single soundbyte. This brings me to the opposite of multiscale smart...

Multiscale ignorance happens when you aren't multiscale smart. Uninformed action is easy (it comes naturally for me) and can be entertaining. Your behavior might be multiscale-ignorant when you:

• wake your neighbors up at 3am by going outside and beating a drum,
• keep redirecting your trailer-pulling vehicle so as to unwittingly add energy to a growing oscillation,
• treat others as subhuman egged on by media-assisted disrespect,
  
• ignore our need for belief systems to support idea-pool diversity,
• support ideas that contradict careful and earnest observation,
  
• pretend that consensus trumps either observation or belief, and
• ignore one or more of your six hats listed above e.g. by not acting as careful observer, cultural representative, active citizen, family member, loyal friend, and fitness enthusiast all at once.
  

Avoiding multiscale-ignorance is tough! What kind of stuff would you add to this list?

The newfound ability of ideas to travel across the globe at near lightspeed means that multiscale-ignorant ideas can be dangerous in today's inter-connected world. What ideas do you think have already proven this? Check out future posts here for more on ways to help keep such ideas from causing further trouble downstream...

Bad ideas or people?

When you are pulling a trailer with your car and it starts to veer to left then right then left, you may think the problem is your vehicle's direction (which you keep correcting) rather than the frequency of your response (which is pumping energy into a resonant oscillation).

I've seen vehicle drivers who made this mistake spin out sideways across 5 lanes of interstate highway traffic.

Likewise modern electronic media's ability to spread ideas across the world willy-nilly may confuse us into thinking that a problem is being caused by people, when in fact it's being caused by a poor choice of ideas (unwittingly reinforced by our echoing of them in response).

Multi-celled plants and animals long ago learned to express their molecular codes in ways that are informed to multiple levels of organization. This is key, for example, to the magic of embryonic development.

If communities are going to get a grip on the problem of runaway ideas, they'll have to do the same with their idea codes.

The good news: Scientific study of complex systems is pointing the way to strategies for dealing with this problem, about which more in days ahead...