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?

mono-layer crisis?

Is the national debate about suicide in South Korea, in spite of economic growth, a symptom of media-promoted single-layer thinking that greater emphasis on the value (and challenge) of niche-network layer-multiplicity might help out with?

data & models paired

Are folks tempted in the quantitative sciences to present too much theory sans observation, reflected e.g. implicitly in this recent article? This counterpoint on poorly designed high school tests suggests a need for more robust content at the high school level as well.

One fix may be to introduce inverse (algorithm-selection) challenges in parallel with the usual forward (algorithmic-reasoning) challenges. In other words, give students data to measure and interpret while they are also learning the models used to predict what's going to happen, so they at least know there's a science of choosing (as well as of using) models in the subject at hand.

This would help close the loop on concreteness, and call into play complementary skills that deserve attention during the crucial period in which students are deciding their major. Our NanoScience Practicals course is example of a cross-disciplinary offering designed to explicitly confront students each week with new data, as well as with topic-specific concepts & models.

This is also consistent with recent requests in the biological sciences for the development of better principle-based as distinct from informal reasoning skills. The importance of principle-based tools for selecting models is perhaps even more obvious in life-science than in physical science areas.

amazing humans

Prairie dog barks about foxes afoot may be a timely reflection of danger, but who would pretend that reality is a pale shadow of their bark?