targeted clotting

Our bodies generally do a pretty good job of sending molecules (like blood thickeners) where they are needed (like the site of a wound) and not where they aren't needed (like in our brain).  Our body's circulatory system for molecules is like society's electronic ideastream.

For sustainable use of either molecules or ideas, explicit awareness of the multi-layer structure of our communities as well as the scope of a given communication is crucial. 

Like chemical concentration differences from point to point in our bodies, gradients in social access to information are necessary.  Intelligent packaging of communications is also important, so that the damage due to occasional spills is minimal.  For example confusing countries & corporations with individuals is just as irresponsible, whether you do it as a reporter or as a supreme court justice.

Thus we're all responsible for what we say, what we repeat, and what we listen to.  Let's set some better examples downstream...

pros & cons

Theorem: 

Moving toward the negative of anything embedded in a higher-dimensional space reduces the orthogonality (and hence dimensionality) of your path with respect to the postive of that same thing.

Corollary:

X and anti-X are in cahoots, even when they don't act like it.

baseball & innovation

"Baseball professionals" might be seen as folks who love the game (in whatever field), and who may aspire to the discipline's hall of fame. 

That said, experts in the game are often the last to see opportunities to adapt to new information and developments. 

Can you think of any examples of this?

technical question

More generally, what sub-system correlations have you been buffering of late?

layered self-concepts

The cells of animals and plants in practice each maintain their own microbe, tissue & organism selves just as each of us maintain our own organism, family & culture selves.

One difference, of course, is that we each have unique organism, family & culture self-concepts that we can talk about to help us buffer correlations which look inward and outward from the boundaries of our self, our family & our culture.

What fraction of your time are you able to spend looking inward & outward from each?

Bayesian inference

Modern approaches to making decisions about concepts, models and parameters based on partial information require that you make the underlying assumptions explicit. This is key, for example, to understanding where the ideal gas law, equipartition, and mass-action work well, and to figuring out what to do when they don't.

It might help folks put political broadcast and pedagogical strategies to better use as well.  What kind of entries would you put into a table which outlines important assumptions that folks make everyday, as well as where those assumptions do and don't apply?

A sample table of this sort follows, to perhaps inspire your ideas:

Bayesian inference in political media

Concept	Assumption	Application Area
focus bandwidth on who's boss	leader choice solves problems	social hierarchy is a key for only select vertebrates
dollars spent is value lost	financial value is conserved	the household scale but not the national scale
treat unbelievers as inhuman	idea-pools always serve humans	may help only if unbelievers are few & can't hear
vote makes right	consensus is well-informed	only w/both incentives & time to update awareness
you're measured by your finances	all means to money are of value	this works in worlds w/o ways to prey on communities

e-culture possibilities

Authentication-accessed archival joint-editing space may allow families, schools, and cities to craft digital-space content useful for future as well as for current generations.

This is important because there is a key role (if our planet is to sustain a large sentient population) for parallel competition between individuals, between gene pools, and between idea pools.

For example, to families an archival wiki cloud-database might be a place for:

• family stories,
• genealogy information,
• recipes,
• operating protocols,
• links e.g. to other resources of interest to family members,
• and what else?

Resources (and developing business models) able over the long haul to host and manage access to such collaboration spaces may be possible to develop with existing technology (like cell phones) already available across much of the planet.

position vs frequency

I was heading west on highway 64 just past downtown St. Louis when ahead I saw a pickup truck 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.

Likewise there's a danger when political communities run into problems whose natural response time is comparable to the election cycle.  Like the truck driver who was focused only on position on the road and oblivious to the response time of the system, the community could easily pump energy into an instability by reacting naturally from one election to the next.  

Can you think of places where this might be relevant today?

the joy of ideas

For those motivated by passion, love for ideas (3) is an important complement to love for family (2) and love for self (1).

Non-byline contributions motivated by love for elements of the idea-world could be crucial, if our large human population is to move toward sustainability on this planet.

What ways do you see for beefing up such contributions?

Passion aside, others for good reason might struggle to do only things that bring in reward on a linear (e.g. economic) scale. They may have little or no time for non-byline contribution.

For these folks, how might such value-scales also serve to catalyze (i.e. to help encourage with only loan rather than expenditure of resources) time spent on:  (1a) fitness, (1b) friends, (2a) family, (2b) home/work community, (3a) culture and (3b) profession?

layer multiplicity

Niche-network layer multiplicity analysis sets up a unified context:

• for recognizing the parallel importance of culture, family, & health,
• for defining (i) poverty without reference to dollars, & (ii) community health across species, 
• for respecting the contribution to earth's complexity of every individual, microbe, & raindrop on the planet.

Of course, much work (across disciplines and perspectives) remains to be done in putting it to use effectively.

self-concept layering

What social systems recognize the need for us to separately buffer our own idea-pool & gene-pool, as well as our organism, self-concepts?

Put another way, in what settings (delicate though they may be) is it NOT better to assume that everyone will be looking out for their own individual self-interest first?

politics & education

Last night there was a discussion on NPR about the challenge of getting politicians in Africa to allocate resources to schools for children.

Suppose that citizens were routinely polled about the mix of their time spent on the 6 correlation-layers that look in/out from skin, family & culture.

If from these community inputs politicians were graded on what they do to increase niche-network layer-multiplicity and the size of the middle class (i.e. individuals able to direct their time toward things like culture and profession), this would create a numerical incentive for them to help educate kids as well as to minimize social-network disruptions.  It might also provide a more robust and quantitative definition of poverty, reigning in deniers and at the same time explicitly valuing opportunity to interact with friends and family independent of participation in the monetary economy.

Without this, of course, politicians may do better for themselves and their family by figuring how to make the rich (including themselves) richer as the middle class shrinks. If we don't lessen the temptation, isn't this like putting the goldfish bowl in reach of the cat?

What do you think?

paradigm shifts

Can you imagine...

• ...living with a ton of air sitting on you,
• ...in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
• ...among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
• ...which attract/repel enough to levitate from length-contraction,
• ...while you move timeward at the speed of light
• ...relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty?

Do you perhaps know someone who's actually been in this situation?

information upgrade

Everyday uses for information prompt one to think of it as something like a string of characters which takes up space e.g. in a book or in a computer's memory. However these uses depend on context, since one person's information is another's meaningless gibberish. In fact the idea of information as a collection of isolated objects misses out on important physical aspects of the concept. As a result it has for instance distracted discussions of idea-evolution with questions about "particulate storage" in the brain, when the conversion of idea codes to digital storage is clearly taking place outside of our brains.

Even in its earliest communications-theory apps, information was an element of structure (like a string of characters delivered to the far end of a communications line) that was correlated with another element of structure (like the string of characters typed in to be sent at the near end of a communications line). This correlation value is delocalized i.e. dependent on the existence of structures at both ends of the comparison. Thus the information value of a map of the sky can be taken away by either destroying the map, or by randomizing the positions of stars in the heavens.

All quantitative applications of the information concept, like the "mutual information" described above, may be seen as special cases of a correlation measure known as KL-divergence. This is a kind of net surprisal, whose units are proportional to the logarithm of a multiplicity as for example in: #choices = 2^#bits.

A particular advantage of this definition (with roots in Bayesian inference) is that it works regardless of whether or not the elements of structure take the form of replicable code strings. In the language of the introductory note to Shannon and Weaver's 1948 book, this broadened definition can deal with more complex questions of correlation, meaning, truthfulness, and fidelity than the "Level A" problems associated with the communication of replicable codes.

Thus for example it applies to the evolution of complexity (like the accretion of planets in the solar nebula) before elements of correlation-storage associated with it "go digital" e.g. in the form of nucleic acid or ASCII strings. Moreover this definition works for quantum systems e.g. qubits, and "it has second law teeth". As a result for example acquired knowledge in general, and even a blank storage device on which to write, extracts a minimum price in thermodynamic availability.

digital sand tracks

What fraction of us are still analog jellyfish of the idea world, and unlikely to leave fossilized tracks let alone bones in the digital sand?

Here "bones in the digital sand" might be entries which start out with your by-line, while "tracks in the digital sand" might be edits to something with a separate digital life even if these too are traceable to you through document histories, etc. Although literature publications are being converted from analog to digital, the universe of abiding fossils in the digital sand may downstream be found in many other places as well (at least until net neutrality disappears).

In a larger context, one might consider six types of legacy (analog or digital) for an individual metazoan. These include actual bones & footprints in the sense of (i) its physical self & (ii) objects that it shaped, bones & footprints in the gene-pool sand which correspond to (iii) its offspring & (iv) its impact on the success of other families in its community, and bones & footprints in the idea-pool sand which correspond to (v) its by-line contributions to culture & (vi) its spiritual and intellectual impact on those around.

nnlm tweet

Community health (like information, complexity & dollar value) is conserved not like energy but like available work: Only with care...

balance vs. symmetry

Social movements that systematically deny the importance of a balance between subsystem correlation layers associated with consensus (iv), belief (v), and observation (vi) generally become politically totalitarian. This is true of movements which elevate enterprise (iv) over the greater good (vi) and vice versa, as well as those which assume that religion (v) reigns supreme.

By compressing three independent "ways to wiggle" (degrees of freedom) down to a smaller number, they provide a structure for occupancy by organisms evolved in a neolithic setting that's degenerate in the same way that electron states around an atom might acquire energy degeneracy in the absence of a magnetic field.

attention-slice status-updates

The "never-negative" quantity mutual information (a special case of KL-divergence, which also underpins measures of perceived rarity, available work, and species diversity) can be broken down across subsystem boundaries. This allows one to experimentally define constrained multiplicities for all sorts of layered complex systems.

This project examines the multiplicity of correlation-layers looking inward and outward with respect to three physical boundary types of special interest to (at least some) metazoans on earth, namely: skin, family and culture. In particular, average niche-network layer-multiplicity (NNLM) characterizes the breadth of niche-responsibility carried by individual organisms, while NNLM center-of-mass M_cm characterizes the correlation breadth of the community in which they live.

The foregoing can help define robust ad-hoc measures of community health with deep roots in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. Objectively monitoring the state of communities via these measures is a future challenge, to which input from individuals in those communities will likely be important. Individual attention-slice status-updates, using social media now accessible via mobile-communications across the globe, can help bring these multi-scale inputs on-line today.

physical economics

Economics can be given solid roots in physical-science with a bit of help from modern-day information theory. This lets one assign objective (long-term exchangable) value to assets, thereby adding stability to markets otherwise based on media-manipulated confidence, computerized trading-algorithms, and e-trader typos.

For instance, in this context the objective physical-assets (as distinct from credit-assets) that humans offer to the layered niche-network that they comprise are their knowledge and their ability to do work.

Similar KL-divergence based yardsticks for the value of other physical assets (relative to ambient or expected) may be developed and applied:

• to energy assets (like gasoline & food) in context of their available work (with or without considering their surprisal on other levels),
• to mineral assets in terms of their utility and abundance,
• to information assets (including species diversity) in terms of their accessibility as well as the time and effort needed to acquire them,
• and what else?

In this same context money, "assigned property", and even some types of "assigned responsibility" may be in essence credit for prior work i.e. a different type of information in structure. Like all forms of subsystem correlation, the value of these things is also delocalized (i.e. removable on either side of the correlation) and by the second law unlikely (but still able) to grow by accident.

Translating the physical assets mentioned in paragraphs 2 and 3 above into (i) other physical assets, and (ii) into liquid and/or long-shelf-life credit assets, may be positive-sum (correlation enhancing) objectives. Finding ways to latch onto credit generated others with minimal constructive effort on your own part may be zero-sum or negative-sum instead.

hoop-hopping hoots

We occasionally bring up the subject here of broadcasts that reduce others to code by pandering to our primate instincts for gratuitous cartoonification. Hoot hoot!

But of course, us primates didn't evolve with an internet that could mindlessly broadcast hoots willy nilly to play with the feelings of millions. Is this a potential concern?

Would a program of hoot-stamps help to let consumers know which, if any, hoops hoots have hopped through before they were broadcast? This might for instance help folks filter toots and tweets too according to their own niche, rather than being beset with broadcasts informed to their listener's species alone.

non-zero-sumness

Robert Wright in his book Non-Zero discusses the relationship between "non-zero-sumness" and evolving organic & social correlations. Non-zero-sumness arises whenever mutual information (I_AB) is used to measure the correlation between two systems A and B. This is because uncertainty about the whole (S_AB) becomes less than the sum of uncertainties about individual parts (namely S_A+S_B), since I_AB = S_A+S_B-S_AB ≥ 0.

The practical bureaucratic need for categorization notwithstanding, putting others in their place via "in the box" cartoonification may remove the sense of collaborative perspective (e.g. over time) from the interaction between organisms. This could well threaten non-zero-sumness, negatively impact niche-network layer-multiplicity (NNLM), and eventually take its toll on life's future standing crop.

These insights also relate to the logos of evolution's direction. The natural and physical sciences on many levels confirm that complexity in the form of layered subsystem-correlations depends on a source of available work (or more generally on KL-divergence). Hence increasing complexity is not the inevitable destiny of any physical system. It's instead a delicate opportunity that might be enjoyed if and only if we: (a) work at it, and (b) are gifted with continued blessings from the world around.

cost/benefit change

E-communications have preferentially increased the manipulative impact of, and funding for, non-local appeals to fear, anger & xenophobia.

There is multiplicative (i.e. runaway dI/dt ∝ I) potential here, particularly when such non-local appeals seize on this opportunity to warn you vociferously about other non-local appeals, as when the lawless rail against evil, bigots against totalitarians, etc.

Constructive local action (e.g. washing dishes, or developing locally-relevant resources not accessible to the open web) might be one way to minimize the number of your clock cycles wasted on long-distance cartoonification.

What are some other tools that might help us mitigate this corollary effect of rapid information flow?

food and fuel

Decreases in locally-available free-energy/capita often result in loss of niche-network layer-multiplicity & genetic/memetic diversity.

Key elements to counter the impact of such reductions in the short term (likely to take place on a myriad of time scales), as well as the eventual global collapse likely in the long run, include:

• targeted support of subsystem correlations on multiple scales of space, time, and organization,

• constructive development of information resources in concert with collaborative action,

• and what else?

modernized maxim

There is no sustainably free lunch, i.e. all net surprisal extracts a cost in thermodynamic availability.

What's new here is that:

• we've added sustainably, since in the short run free lunches can be obtained from time to time but not in a steady-state fashion,

• thermodynamic availability (e.g. in bits) and net surprisal (KL-divergence) are used to restate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in way which applies nicely to complex non-equilibrium systems,

• and what else?

starsmoke droplets

Tiny interstellar-onion spaceships were filled with unlayered sheets of fresh-baked carbon atoms & delivered to our corner of the Milky Way.

This tasty tweet refers to recent laboratory study of micron-sized starsmoke spheres whose carbon atoms were cooked up in red giant stars across the early galaxy, condensed in those cool star atmospheres, and delivered to earth by primitive meteorites to be extracted by cosmochemists at U. Chicago and studied in labs of the midwest.

Many of your carbon atoms also arrived here in spaceships like this. Recent developments suggest a role for supercooled liquid carbon droplets in their process of formation.

closing the loop

Charity like first-aid can meet short-term needs, but strategic no-profit loans may be key to sustainability at home and abroad.

it's easy for cats

Most metazoans buffer correlations directed in/out from skin and gene-pool boundaries. Worrying about idea-pool boundaries too is not easy, even for organisms as talented as us!

expensive sci-fi

The "jump to lightspeed" might empty your gas tank quick, given that >40 Olympic pools of powder are needed to make a 45 slug relativistic.

survival symmetry

Ice floats so that aqueous life on our planet survives freezing water, thanks to the quantum preference of H2O molecules for 4 neighbors.