Your nanodecisions

If I thought my insurance provider was managing my risks, I'd be wrong. Every time I decide for or against: (i) eating an apple, (ii) walking through a cloud of smoke, (iii) putting my hand on a newly-encountered surface, (iv) taking a short-cut to work in my car, (v) clicking on a weblink, or perhaps even (vi) reading a book title, I am encountering new excitations and/or codes and therefore taking a physical risk. Hopefully, I'm also taking responsibility for the decision.

Is this a trivial fact that pertains only to me, or to you? Quite the contrary. Our communities are built on our individual ability to observe critically, and make these decisions in an informed way. They count on each of us as professional observers and decision makers, daily choosing a balanced trajectory along paths strewn with a million unavoidable risks.

As these risks become more complex and perhaps more challenging, it's crucial that we leverage our evolving abilities to communicate. In other words, this is an important question: How can we help one another think and communicate about our everyday choices, and how they relate to the risks we (and our communities) encounter on various scales of space, time, and organization?

Here a few ideas that sound good to me:

• Budget some extra time for talking with folks who have different perspectives.
• Learn about how the world is different to lifeforms on different size scales, like ants in the milliworld, microbes in the microworld, and viruses in the nanoworld.
• Read about processes that affect our world on different time scales, like solar evolution on the billion year scale, geological change on the million year scale, climate change on the thousand year (and shorter) scale, resource depletion on the hundred year scale, carbon dioxide emission on the ten year scale, and information technology whose global impact changes annually.
• Finally, discuss the impact of these processes on public health, the nature of friendships, family interactions, community participation, cultural involvement, and our understanding of the world around.

What other things might help?

How many levels?

There's input that directs your attention, and then there's input that's useful on more than one level. Which do you find more satisfying?

For example, saying "The new kid in school talks funny" highlights separation between a newcomer to class and the kids you've known for a while. That's about all.

On the other hand, "Oscar said his uncle taught him to dive for pearls" if true is informed about the newcomer on more than one level. Specifically it tells us that he comes from a place that is different, but like us he has a name, a gender, an uncle, an ability to learn, and some cool technical knowledge to boot.

I bring this up, because there may be solid scientific reasons to prefer communications of the second kind over the first. For instance, baby plants and animals today depend on cells biased toward molecular communication of the second kind for their embryonic development.

Group balance?

On this blog we've mentioned the challenge of getting our act together on six layers of organization: looking in/out from skin, family and culture. This isn't easy, at least not for me.

Giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I figure that by and large folks in any organization might come up a bit short. This shouldn't be a problem, as long as we move beyond individuals and focus on making behaviors of the group informed to all six levels instead.

The multiscale awareness discussed here is like political correctness. When folks are un-PC it's often entertaining and easy to empathize, even though it's disastrous when the behavior of institutions ignores due respect for facts, cultural and political diversity, or family and individual rights.

In this sense political correctness poses a similar challenge. Can we respect the innate tendency to speak our mind willy-nilly while ensuring that our institutions as a whole don't degenerate over time?

What does it take, and what situations can YOU list where we've managed to pull this off?

Media & leader-tales

Early human communities didn't have writing, and the behavior of local leaders was an important and practical topic of everyday talk. Fast-forward to the 20^th century. Weekly local newspapers adapted this oral tradition to print, in small towns even as national TV arrived on the scene. It didn't take long for electronic media to pick up on our passion for leader-talk.

It's much cheaper to create one story of interest to 300 million people, than to create a million stories each written for only 300. No surprise then that the focus on local and non-politcal issues is eclipsed (especially during a quarter of every 4 year US national election cycle) by a focus on news about only one of the 300 million jobs that hold the nation together.

Like the world series, the national election is a shared cultural event. However in places struggling to counterbalance discontent (like Kenya most recently), such a national focus can have its downside.

Let's recap. Thanks to their layered structure, communities are immersed in unfolding stories about: (i) public health, (ii) the nature of interactions between individuals, (iii) the state of families, (iv) citizenship (including leadership) in corporate as well as governmental offices, (v) the evolution of culture (sports too) in its many forms, and (vi) reports on systematic study of the world we live in. Each of these stories has neighborhood, village, county, provincial, national and global takes.

If each of these 6 topics were covered on 5 levels (lumping national and global together), this would give each local venue 30 stories to capture audience with per week. For a nation of 300 million people this means national stories in 6 topic areas, a couple of hundred state-level stories on those topics , maybe 6000 county-level stories, more than 100,000 village-level stories, and over 2 million neighborhood stories i.e. say in total 2.6 million stories in these 6 topic areas per week: Lots of stuff to write that is of interest somewhere.

Those fewer national and global stories carry the weight of more interested listeners. With 5 levels to cover (is that too many?) then national stories deserve 20% of total production effort and coverage, with national politics a sixth of that if one allocates time also to national matters of public health, relationships, family, culture, and science. Compare this <4% of time warranted on citizenship at the federal level to what big media venues spend on only the alpha-wolf leadership part of that story e.g. on tales about the job of US president.

Thus time spent pursuing old-style leadership-talk at the national level decreases coverage for the other matters listed above. NBC's "Meet-The-Press" session with pundits, on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami, stuck out like a sore thumb in this way. It keeps our eyes off the ball, even if we ignore the local stories that individual communities miss out on and the reporters not employed as a result.

When it comes to news, we get what we ask for. If there are better ways, no need to wait for big media. Internet and wireless communications open many new doors for making our information environment multiscale-smart. What can you and I do to help?

Beyond money?

Money and markets mirror an organic component of the world around, namely ordered energy i.e. energy available to do work. How are they similar?

The first law of thermodynamics guarantees that you can't create ordered energy out of thin air. The second law says you have to spend "thermodynamic availability" to get it. In principle, that's how money works too i.e. somebody has to earn it.

That second law also says that ordered energy is easy to waste. For instance the heat in a cup of hot coffee gradually thermalizes to room temperature, just as does the work available from those ice cubes in your tea if you let it sit out on the table all day. Money's also easy to waste, even without inflation. The successful use of money and markets likely draws strength from these organic roots.

However, money is one-dimensional. It maps everything onto one scale. The communities we live in, by comparison, are multilevel structures like our bodies. Molecules build cells that build organs that build individuals that build families that build cultures.

The question then is this: After monoscale money, multiscale what? Are there idea sets as deeply reflected in nature as that of ordered energy, which can take our concept of earnings and even health beyond money's one dimension?

The answer is yes. They involve the emergence of order in nature on all levels. They have deep roots in cosmic evolution and the natural history of invention. And they are just getting off the ground. Hopefully, this is one place that you can find out more about them in the days ahead...

...to bits of evidence

We talk bits and bytes when buying computers and video games, but few think of bits and bytes as tools of gambling theory. Actually that's where information units got their start in the 1940's. The statistical ideas behind them had been in use long before that.

If you enjoyed our earlier note about using bits and bytes to track everyday risks, then you might also be happy to hear that "there's not a bit of evidence" has literal meaning too. The bits of surprisal discussed earlier work best for unlikely occurrences. If you have a yes-no statement, however, subtracting the surprisal that it's true from the surprisal that it's false gives you the evidence (ebits) in its favor.

If the odds of a question being true are 2:1 = for:against, there is only 1 ebit of evidence in its favor since ebits obeys for/against=2^ebits. If the odds for:against = 4:1, then there are 2 ebits of evidence for it, while if for:against = 1:4 then there are 2 ebits of evidence against it.

The cool thing about ebits is this: Independent chunks of information simply add (or subtract) ebits from any case that you are trying to make. Thus ebits follow the common sense about levels of proof developed by folks with no background in statistics at all.

That's a good sign! So then what does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean, in bits? For example, do you think the standard of proof in a civil court is more, or less, than 14 ebits in favor to make the case?

The uncool thing about ebits is that it provides no clue as to whether it makes sense to ask the "yes-no" question to which it's being applied.

From bytes of risk...

See if you can identify the pattern here: If the odds are 50:50 that something bad won't happen, then that happening carries only one bit of surprisal. If the odds against are 3:1 (i.e. "three to one"), then the surprisal is two bits. Make sense yet? Odds against of 7:1 means surprisal is 3 bits, 15:1 against means 4 bits of surprisal, etc.

If you think you've got it now, suppose the odds against something bad happening are 255:1. How many bits of surprisal does that unlikely event carry?

Those of us into computers may have noticed that when the odds against are something:1, then something+1 = 2^#bits. Since 255+1 = 2⁸, the surprisal of such an unlikely event (same as the surprisal of throwing heads on eight coins at once with a single toss) is 8 bits or one byte. If you prefer probabilities over odds, then the probability of an unlikely event is just 1/2^#bits.

OK, so why am I bothering you with this? The reason is that everyday we all make decisions which weigh one tiny risk against another. Very few of us, however, are either taught to or interested in multiplying a set of ridiculously small probabilities every time we decide to eat an apple, cross the street, or (heaven forbid) smoke a cigarette.

But what if weighing our alternatives just involved adding a few numbers typically smaller than two dozen? This is about the surprisal in bits of winning the lottery with a single ticket. More folks could then easily make (and take responsibility for) informed decisions about the risk of unlikely events, and they could enjoy the unavoidable gambling involved in the process at the same time.

For example will you risk the 16 bit surprisal of getting a disease whose surprisal of doing you in is only 2 bits, or will you go for the vaccination whose surprisal of bad consequences is up at 22 bits instead? If you pick the first, you are living more dangerously than necessary (by 4 bits of surprisal) but you will also most likely gain some satisfaction from dodging the bullet. Either way, the decision was informed and it was yours.

If you like this approach, then how can we get media and product labelers to give us numbers about risk so that we can: (i) stop being scared by one broadcast after another and (ii) be more informed about the responsibilities that we shoulder?