moving past success

Have you noticed that apparently-successful folks sometimes miss the fact that operating-procedures need to evolve?

This is a natural handicap, and one whose potentially-disastrous effects we're working to help eliminate via refinement of the concept-sets that folks use.

For more on this subject, stay tuned...

conserving value

The values of money, community, reputation and culture are all measures of subsystem-correlation. These things are not automatically conserved like, for example, momentum is in the physical sciences.

For example money is often thought of as an analog to total-energy, whose numeric value (like that of momentum) remains the same as it is passed from one form to another. Of course money is really an analog for available-work (what the energy crisis is about), whose value is in fact expected to decrease over time in the absence of new ordered-energy and/or information.

More importantly, uninformed action is likely to erode the usefulness (independent of its numeric quantity) of money, available work, as well as the other measures of subsystem correlation listed above. Hence humility has to accompany hard work if we, as fragile beings in a seriously unfriendly universe, are to make the most of the resources available to us.

feeling vs. logic

The organism-focused world of behavioral ecology perhaps long ago pointed out the behavior modes common to many animals as "four F's", namely feeding, fleeing, fighting, and having sex. More recent work in neuroscience suggests that our behavior is indeed governed by such modules, elicited via a kind of (hopefully) just-in-time spreading-activation (JITSA) by ongoings in the world around. With respect to these activations even today our conscious "press secretary" is at best an observer/advisor, and is sometimes even kept in the dark.

Rapid-response capabilities generally rely on instinctive-reactions (sometimes refined by training and practice in contemporary settings) of neolithic or earlier origin, like the four F's mentioned earlier. Long-term response strategies tend to have more contemporary (and "cerebral") origins. This tension between feeling and logic is a familiar theme in popular culture.

In this context, how about a less "organism-centric" framework in which we consider that natural selection may be operating on all behavior-modules that look in and/or out from one of the three symmetry-defined layer-boundaries (i.e. skin, family & culture) in metazoan communities. Hence there may be (and have been) reasons for the emergence of both short & long term modules for taking care of self, friends, family, community, culture and profession.

The four F's mentioned above are among those behaviors that serve self, friends & family, but of course this task-layer formalism leaves room for stuff that is not included in that original four. The behavior modules which serve culture and profession may be of special importance in human communities.

evolving narratives

Weak, confusing or ill-posed choices/statements/questions, with ways to move past them, might include...

• Drop "Choose one: mano-a-mano OR state-paid healthcare." for "Nurture responsible health-management for & by all citizens.",
• Trade "Organisms do/don't evolve?" (since replicable-codes do that instead) up to "How do code-organism systems change over time?",
• Replace "Either un-tax the rich, or give money to nuts." with "Spend group-funds on well-defined social-goals with checks/balances.",
• Change "Mass increases with speed." into "Proper (not coordinate) time/speed/acceleration underlie dynamics when v ~ c.",
• Substitute "Choose one: support abortion OR prevent birth control." with "Help avoid unwanted pregnancies and abortions.", 
• Exchange "entropy increases" for "correlations decrease" over time, with sub-systems from which you are isolated.
• ...and what else?

Once folks agree on a set of objectives, and are mature enough to put aside gratuitous-cartoonification of one other, different ideas about tactics and strategy for meeting those objectives can be addressed by testing and observation over time.

social heartbeat

Is the pulse of a social organization related to how much time members get to spend taking care of self, friends, family, community, culture & profession?

If so how might we track this for neighborhoods, businesses, and social networks in general e.g. to see how it is impacted by unfolding challenges, and the strategies used to address them?

4 cups of anything?

At an average of say 17,280 normal breaths per day, about how many exhalations are needed to recycle the carbon-weight gained from each tablespoon of food? Stuff we eat (like meat, veggies & yogurt) has about the density of water, so a tablespoon of food has about 15 grams mass. If most of that mass (say 85% neglecting roughage) is carbon with between 4.5 to 9 kcal of energy per gram that is (eventually) turned into CO2, then we're talking about ~0.85×15/0.048 ≈ 265 normal breaths of exhalation per tablespoon of food.

Does this mean that about 17,280/265 ≈ 65 tablespoons (~ 4 cups or 2 lbs) of food provides all the carbon that you exhale with normal-activity in a day? More food than that, and you either need extra activity or you add carbon weight that will have to await exhalation some other day. Less than your limit, and you may find yourself losing carbon weight or taking steps to conserve energy instead. More (or less) than 4 cups a day might then add (or subtract) as desired. If nothing else, carbon-tracking might help put good-old available-work (i.e. Calorie) tracking into more concrete weight-for-weight terms...

learning to exhale

Since the only way to lose carbon weight after it's metabolized may be to send it out from your lungs as carbon dioxide, one might recast the problem of weight-balance in the simple maxim: Eat what you plan to breathe out, no less no more!

The various energies widget below might help one get calibrated on how much intake is needed for a given amount of exhalation.  For instance, if you plan to do fifty pushups then you probably should consume the 5 Calorie equivalent of a single m&m (plain not peanut).  Likewise what would be needed for 5000 steps of walking, or a quarter-mile run?

Getting in the habit of planning each day's respiration, and then ingesting the carbon-based energy needed to support that activity whether we are hungry or not, might thus be good habit to get into...

re-ward/sponsiblity?

In academic settings, it seems that the "teaching culture" sometimes leads participants to think of grant-awards and manuscript-authorships as accomplishments instead of as responsibilities.  This has a number of interesting consequences.

In the area of grant-awards, that reward emphasis puts the focus on how much money one manages to capture instead of what one actually does with it. Instead of being an incentive to get as much done as possible with as little expenditure, it therefore serves as an incentive to attract as much funding as possible to spend.  To the extent that getting stuff done is a pre-requisite to attracting funds, the two are coupled, but the approach nonetheless may put the cart before the horse.  One consequence is that skill at doing stuff with minimal cost may be far from priority one.

In the area of manuscript-authorships, the reward emphasis puts the focus on the author instead of on the ideas in a manuscript.  Again the importance of the two may be correlated, but not always. One prediction in this context is that papers which evolve conventional wisdom are likely to first be made available e.g. on e-print archives before they are considered worthy of awards to their authors.  This is a good thing, since it gives ideas (the horse) a chance to spread before folks start worrying about which author (the cart) deserves what.

race to the bottom

One-celled organisms will eventually outlast fragile metazoans on this planet, as our sun moves toward it's "cool red-giant" phase. Meanwhile the delicate layers of social structure in communities of social-metazoans (like us) may be dismantled as well. Put another way, border-checkpoints between states and even cities may be in our long-term future as well as in our past.

However there's no need to let new-found electronic communications catalyze a race-to-the-bottom, via its ability to echo neolithic-ideas that are naturally attractive to humans in tough times. Runaway-cartoonification (e.g. bad-mouthing) of others is one of those idea-patterns whose seductiveness we discovered when part of our house was being used by a business, with the incidental consequence that patterns of employee-behavior unperturbed by the observation-process itself were impossible to miss.

Put simply, humans are not always by nature constructive. The ability of ideas to quickly spread themselves across the globe means that a close look at the idea-types that we echo may be quite important in the years ahead.  In this context what idea-types would you put on a list of "likely constructive", and what types on list of "possibly de-constructive"?

definitions of life

An organism-centered definition of life, inspired by an article on semantic consensus, is that " life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations".  This definition is organism-centered (betraying the pre-occupation of its definers) in that it fails to mention life's place as a hierarchically-ordered multi-layer interface between availability-flows and a substrate. 

Perhaps someday this dream of being substrate-independent will be realized, but we are probably not there yet.

information ethics

A layer of internal-community ethics that modulates the behavior of its members toward information provided by others can likely be justified on scientific grounds, if one recognizes that niche-network layer-multiplicity is an important part of a community's physical structure.  The precise form of this ethics, of course, is likely to differ from community to community and from one culture to the next.

This observation is inspired by the utility of a similar layer of ethics (as a complement to contractual non-disclosure agreements) when working with privileged information in the development of best-practice guidelines for analytical support.  Today's news-media, of course, has been tempted to ignore the ethics of information management altogether, in spite of its changing (and growing) relevance to everyday practice.

Look for more on this topic, hopefully soon...

just-in-time or not

According to Inside jokes (Hurley et al., MIT Press, 2011), humor is likely an evolved reward for shifting the target of our idea-driven just-in-time spreading-activation (JITSA). If so, media-assisted solutions to the adaptive-evolution of institutional-cultures ala Learning to eat soup with a knife (Nagle, U. Chicago Press, 2005) will likely have to take this into account.

In other words: our collective skill at comedy may prove to be a key element of our path to a sustainable future, since comedians are among the few who can give us a visceral reward now (to accompany the benefits that we and our offspring might get long-term) for cleverly changing our tune.  Moreover the capacity for mirth is a tool with which humans are especially well-equipped.

N'est pas?