quantifying risk

Use of probabilties p and surprisals k ln[1/p] in communicating and monitoring risks to medical patients could make patient decisions about actions with a small chance of dire outcomes as informed as possible. This could reduce the costs of medical malpractice in the long run by empowering patients with tools to make informed and responsible choices, making the need for legal redress less frequent. Thus the media could play a key role in reducing the costs of defensive medicine.

The same may be true of defensive practices e.g. in food and chemical distribution. Instead of all bakery goods saying "manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts" so that folks with a peanut allergy (not to mention teachers wanting to bring a treat to class) are thrown under the bus, instead teach the population to quantify risk (using surprisals or probabilities) and then develop guidelines for putting the risk into context based on real data. In this way, folks who use a product take ownership of the risk that it confers at the outset, taking personal injury-suit lawyers out of the loop except to the extent that they can contest the data used to report the risk to begin with.

The bad news is that every thing you do brings with it a finite risk of almost any dire outcome. The good news is that this risk is likely to be much smaller than you might guess, from the non-quantitative hype that the media brings to every problem that it decides to fan flames on today.

balanced imperfection

Any society that perfects reproduction of molecular or idea codes, to the point where it is accurate, may be in deep trouble. This is because tradition, most likely, will always need to evolve. As a result (along with accurate replication) communities may also benefit from a healthy amount of diversity, in both genes and in ways to think!

tech vs. manners & skill

Technology, writ large, opens new doors for good and for bad.  Concentrating on the latter here, technology can make us weak and ill-behaved, so that we may want to work to correct for these effects. For example, rely on automatic parking and GPS directions and our population's spatial awareness and spatial management skills may suffer.

Ethics and manners also suffer. For instance, in the first half of the 20th century, it was by & large good manners not to bring a stick to a fist fight, not to bring a knife to a stick fight, not to bring a gun to a knife fight, etc. This ethic was there to correct for the opportunity that technology provided for devaluing fitness and bypassing time-honored skills. Respect for these levels of engagement, as well as our obligation to have manners and to respect skills, is today strangely absent from popular narratives.

Laws themselves are a form of technology that can in turn prompt us to ignore our cultural obligation to be ethical as well. Reliance on any one technology, including laws, smartphones, or guns, can in this way nurture a population that gives short shrift to spatial and social awareness, fails to reward physical fitness, and selects against cultural and professional morality. Dropping free-energy per capita may eventually lead to the decline of our social systems, but we may want to try to keep new technologies from helping expedite that decline.

highlighting o-centricity

What are a list of places where our preference for focusing on "organism agents as the cause of everything" shows up, for the better and for the worse?

Examples might include:

• The Olympics, and the enjoyment we take in thinking about sports heroes in general,
• Our blindness to "the medium as the message", highlighted in that specific context by Marshall McLuhan,
• The media's obsession with treating whole countries and corporations as organisms, personified by a single leader,
• Madame Curie's comment that we should "be less curious about people and more curious about ideas".
• The way our "public relations module" often caters to a homunculus theory of the way that our own minds work,

and what else?

making fallibility work

Government administrations often serve up leadership examples which are culturally, and sometimes professionally, flawed. The message to take from this is not that we are better than our leaders, but that we all are obliged to nurture "6-ways nested" communities (i.e. that buffer sub-system correlation layers looking in/out skin, family, and culture) which however are made up of individuals who do this well on only 4 or 5 of the 6 layers of organization. This is not just "our lot". An average of only about 4¼ layers per person may be key to maximizing individual opportunity or "task-layer diversity", something that could well be a key survival trait for communities in the days ahead.

bigger than your branch

One way to inject a bit of humility into the kinds of arguments that modern media elicits (by "modern" I'm talking here speech, writing, print, radio and TV as well as the internet) is to recognize that each of us only sees the forest we live in from the branches on which we've spent time. Unfortunately, in most cases the forest we live in extends well beyond our current branch.

Hence even when it's obvious that other observers are missing something, it's probably better if all parties listen to each other, and then pay attention to what nature has to say about what actually works. N'est-ce pas?

nestedness & politics

Does some of the tension between humans on matters of group policy result from the fact that our social systems involve 6 layers of organization, but the individuals within them have only adapted (e.g. paleolithically) to do a good job with 4 or 5 layers at a time? If so, one consequence might be that unbalanced narratives are too easy to embrace.

Thus we've seen at various times tension between groups that prefer to focus their attention either inward or outward (but not both) from their boundaries of skin, family, or culture. For example looking only inward toward the interests of one's own culture, or looking outward too much toward questions of harmony between cultures, are both ways that this inward/outward balance sometimes fails.

On the adaptation of codes (molecular or idea) by trial and error i.e. concerning our approaches toward statistical inference, one might have also seen groups in which the above shortcoming manifests as a bias toward old data (as in tradition), toward new data (as in new opportunities), or in some cases even toward no data (as in "a mind made up").

What groups do you think of as falling into one of more of these unbalanced categories?