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.