bovine bents

It's easy to imagine that large mammals capable of domestication, in context of their preference for a hierarchical social structure as discussed by Jared Diamond in his book Guns germs and steel (W. W. Norton, 1999), might be preoccupied with royalty (e.g. their selection as savior, or their behavior as distraction) even if that meant ignoring issues that were impacting tens, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of closer community members.

I'm sure glad we don't act like that...

the answer to...

..."What's the most important question?" is often not "How do we answer the obvious?" but rather "In what terms can the problem be most simply addressed?".

In math, this is the challenge of finding the right variable. In science this is the inverse problem of selecting a model given observational data, as distinct from the forward problem of prediction with model in hand.

The forward problem is easier to do and to teach. Moreover ability to solve it has survival value, so it's no surprise that ideologues abound in all walks of life.

As a result we may spend too few neurons implementing (and developing) ways to choose our questions with care. According to Sharon McGrayne's The theory that would not die (Yale University Press, 2011) there is a whole science of model selection for making the most of limited data.

This science, namely Bayesian inference, has a spectacular track-record of practical problem-solving. There is also a long tradition of idealogue disinterest.

Even today methods for idea-selection in a given field oft fall through the cracks of higher ed, in spite of their relevance to everyday life. That's the way things work, so expect it & adapt e.g. with ways to compensate for this tendency.

quality of life tests

News of the day tends to focus on one layer of organization at a time, whether it be e.g. public health, family life, the state of the economy, or cultural beliefs.  When you are only thinking about one layer at at time, it's often easy to cartoonify things in terms e.g. of good guys and bad guys.

Life's quality of course involves simplification, but it also involves subsystem-correlations that look in and out from the physical boundaries of skin, family and culture.  Folks who are greedy on one layer (e.g. in their job) may be acting prudently on another (e.g. for their family).  Hence multi-layer thinking about community health is more likely to be about the balance between different (and sometimes competing) perspectives than it is about good versus bad.

How can we: (i) track what we can know about the health of all six of these correlation layers, and moreover (ii) use that information to optimize quality of life across the board?  This might make for some fun (and constructive) regional competitions in the process.

ideastream science

In addition to perturbing an individual's attention-focus (toward e.g. the buffering of correlations that look in/out from skin, family or culture), unscoped electronic-broadcasts (in any of various forms) can also affect the choice of concepts in terms of which one thinks. Folks unfamiliar with the power of concept-sets to leave blind spots in our awareness (as well as to manipulate neolithic-feelings) may be especially vulnerable to this effect.

Examples of "broadcasts willy-nilly" (i.e. communications to everyone regardless of their mandate) that often do this include:

• xenophobic, fiscal, and/or territorial threat broadcasts, 
• health-risk warnings not accompanied by observational data,
• cartoonifications of individual people as well as lifeform types, etc.

For this reason education in most fields should likely include an explicit discussion of tools for choosing one's concepts and models, as well as the more reliably covered model-based skills of  e.g. informal reasoning and algorithmic implementation.

StL Beacon quote

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer in The North American Review, May 1904

Of course, the means by which ideas travel may have changed a bit between then and now...

ideastream pH

The bloodstream in multicelled animals facilitates asynchronous communication between cells and organ systems.  Even though each end-user can put out, and read in, what it wants from the bloodstream there exist mechanisms to regulate total concentrations of things like hydrogen ions, salt, glucose, etc.

This suggests an interesting way that governments might regulate constructive use of electronic ideastreams without interfering with either consumer choice or freedom of expression.  Look for more on possible specific strategies in this context, here, in the days ahead...

fact free reporting

Does a dispute about topics (e.g. brain cancer caused by cellphones) become newsworthy just because a familiar name brings it up?  Should competent news organizations respect the critical observer in each of their subscribers by referencing relevant observations (e.g. the decline in brain cancer as cell phones proliferate) when technical topics come up in a context whose primary value (for one party or another) may be to pull neolithic strings?