Save the Madagascar Rain Forest

Last night, I was lucky enough to get a personal tour of the California Academy of Sciences from Dr. Brian Fisher, a taxonomist specializing in ants.  He’s doing some amazing work trying to help Madagascar prioritize and save the 10% of native rainforest they have left.  It’s reminiscent of Willie Smits‘ work in Borneo, though focused on preservation rather than revitalization.  But it has the same feel of getting the local people committed to managing their own ecological resources.

You can donate here (I gave them $500), but make sure to write “For the Fisher Madagascar Project” in the “Comments” field.  Otherwise, you’ll be paying for the building lights.  Go ahead and leave the “Allocation” field at the default, “Campaign for a New Academy”. Update: Forgot to mention that if you donate $2,000 they’ll name a new species after you or whomever you designate.

It’s hard to do justice to what I saw last night in a blog post, but here goes…

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Foldit

Has anyone played Foldit, the protein-folding game that is designed to advance the science?  This Wired article makes it sound like Ender’s Game meets biochemistry!  Sounds like the Poehlman kid is the protein-folding equivalent of Stephen Wiltshire.  I love the crowdsourcing, the meta-evolutionary algorithm of it (to find the savants), and the implications for science.

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Peer-Review vs. Info Prizes and Markets

I have been having a 140 character discussion with Ciarán Brewster (@macbruski) via twitter.  And while it’s kind of interesting to force complex subject matter into very few characters, it is limiting the discussion, so I will summarize it so far here and hopefully others can weigh in too.

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Game Theory and Military Planning

In “Game Theory: Can a Round of Poker Solve Afghanistan’s Problems?” Major Richard J.H. Gash creates a simple two player game to show how game theory can be used to influence military planning. Gash’s game involves two villages in Afghanistan with the choice to either support the “Coalition” or support the “Taliban.” The scoring of the game generates a payoff matrix that is similar to that of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with a non Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium. Unfortunately, Gash oversimplifies the game to just one round. In reality, Afghan villages participate in multiple rounds of decision making, with the actual number of rounds unknown, leading to differing strategies and outcomes than those proposed by Gash.

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You Can’t Pick Winners at the Seed Stage

[EDITED 05/08/2009: see here] The majority of people I’ve talked to like the idea of revolutionizing angel funding. Among the skeptical minority, there are several common objections. Perhaps the weakest is that individual angels can pick winners at the seed stage.

Now, those who make this objection usually don’t state it that bluntly. They might say that investors need technical expertise to evaluate the feasibility of a technology, or industry expertise to evaluate the likelihood of demand materializing, or business expertise to evaluate the evaluate the plausibility of the revenue model. But whatever the detailed form of the assertion, it is predicated upon angels possessing specialized knowledge that allows them to reliably predict the future success of seed-stage companies in which they invest.

It should be no surprise to readers that I find this assertion hard to defend. Given the difficulty in principle of predicting the future state of a complex system given its initial state, one should produce very strong evidence to make such a claim and I haven’t seen any from proponents of angels’ abilities. Moreover, the general evidence of human’s ability to predict these sorts of outcomes makes it unlikely for a person to have a significant degree of forecasting skill in this area.

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Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler.  I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms.  Here’s what Hubler had to say:

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Military-Industrial Complex Redux

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Good Karma?

So I just put down a (refundable) deposit on a Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid car.

What do you think of this decision?

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Must Read Article on the Financial Meltdown

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, an excellent article in Wired about how one formula, embodying one assumption, catalyzed the meltdown.  I recommend you read it and ponder it.  There are many useful lessons for modeling complex systems in general.

However, I will summarize for those of you short on time.  A fundamental problem in securitization is figuring out how different components of a security are related.  Think of it as measuring how well the components are diversified.  The more independent the components, the less risk embodied in the security.  Thus AAA rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities are supposed to be very safe because the components are supposed to be highly independent.

A Chinese mathematician named David X. Li had an insight.  You don’t have to analyze the dependencies directly, you just have to observe the correlations in the market prices of the components.  Then you can compute these really tight sounding confidence intervals on the correlations of various components because you have all this market data.  Of course, the market can’t take into account what it doesn’t understand.  So you see a bunch of 25-sigma events.  At least, your model says they are 25-sigma.  Oops!

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U.S. Government is Open for Questions

Taking the cue from social software sites like Digg, the Obama transition team is leveraging the wisdom of your crowd to find out what the most important and relevant questions are that the public wants answered.  Judging from the top page of questions as voted by several hundred thousand people, the relevance/importance quotient is very high.  Below is the email that tipped me off to this latest development in “government 2.0”.

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Going Meta on “Autonomy”

Continuation of: Focusing on “Autonomy”

I’ve been trying to reconcile Rafe’s an my views on this topic.  I actually think we agree on the broad themes related to our argument over “autonomy”.  From my perspective, it seems like the only real disagreement is on the implications for humans.

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Focusing on “Autonomy”

Continuation of: Superfoo

Rafe and I had a great chat on the phone today about Superfoos.  I think we agreed that there will be multiple instances of agents emerging in the level immediately above humans but there is always a single top-level network in local space.  I think we also agreed that the “awareness” at this level will be different from human -awareness.  It probably won’t subsume our awareness (at least without a technological singularity) but will exhibit properties such as self-preservation.

Where we got stuck was on the concept of autonomy.  Stuck isn’t really the right word.  We both greatly expanded our conceptual space around autonomy.  But we didn’t come to agreement on a definition.  However, it was a very productive conversation, so I thought I’d put my impressions down here.

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Superfoo

Response to Superorganism as Terminology.

I was actually about to post something about terminology, so I’m glad this came up. It’s just so difficult to choose words to describe concepts that have little precedent, without going to the extreme of overloading on the one end (e.g. “organism”) or the other extreme of being totally meaningless (e.g. “foo”). I have tried to use terms that are the closest in meaning to what I’m after but there’s no avoiding the misinterpretation. I can only hope by defining and redefining to an audience that is not quick to make snap judgments but rather considers the word usage in context, we can converge to at least a common understanding of what I am claiming. From there at least we have a shot at real communication of ideas and hopefully even agreement.

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Response to “Superorganism Considered Harmful”

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post.

Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular organisms. Certainly, there are many single-celled organisms that exist outside of multicelluar control today.  So where is the evidence that there will be only one and that people won’t be able to opt out in a meaningful sense?

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Superorganism Considered Harmful

Response to: Superorganism and Singularity

Rafe’s post covers a rather speculative topic. I think it’s worth stress testing so I am going to play skeptic without revealing my actual position.  But you can be assured that it’s at least somewhat nuanced.

Rafe knows more about this topic than I.  In general, I tend to trust his judgment in areas where he is expert. But I want to make sure he’s devoted enough due diligence before reaching his conclusions. Thus the stress test.

First, I’m going to try to demolish his assertions within the conceptual confines of his own analogy.  Then I’ll undermine the analogy. Finally, I’ll attack emergence itself as a concept with no predictive skill in this case.

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Rebooting America

Anyone interested in how technology and policy can work together to form us a more perfect union should read Rebooting America.  If your budget is tight right now, you can download the PDF version for free.

While you are at it, check out the Personal Democracy Forum which is the larger effort that Rebooting America is part of.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead

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Superorganism and Singularity

There is an aspect to The Singularity which is not discussed much, an orthogonal dimension that is already taking shape, and which is perhaps more significant than what is implied by the “standard definition”:

The Singularity represents an “event horizon” in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future may cease to give reliable answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence.  (Definition taken from The Singularity Summit website)

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AT&T Stepped Up to the Plate and Made Things Right

When I emailed AT&T about an outrageous international roaming charge that I wanted reversed, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a positive response.  But I got one, and I am making good on my promise to let people know about it.  If anything is a complex system, cell phone customer service certainly is, so I view this as on topic :-)

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Singularity Summit: How Will We Get There?

Now that I’ve had a week to digest what I saw at the summit, I have some thoughts on the most likely path we’ll take to the singularity. From an absolute perspective, this path isn’t very likely because there are a lot of different ways to get there (or not get there). But given what I’ve seen so far, I assign this path the highest concentration of the admittedly diffuse conditional probability mass.

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Singularity Summit: Thoughts on AGI

As most of you know, one of the commonly proposed paths to The Singularity is the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As you can read in my rundown of the Singularity Summit, speakers showcased a lot of progress in hardware substrate and software infrastructure, but no significant conceptual advances in implementing executive function in software.

Absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence, but I believe that if anyone were making headway on this problem, the chances that someone at the summit would have alluded to it are high. Therefore, I predict that the first being with substantially higher g than current humans is much more likely to be an augmented human than an AGI [Edit: more thoughts on electronically enhancing humans here].

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Quick Rundown on the Singularity Summit

I attended the Singularity Summit today. Overall, it was worth the time spent.  I did not attend the workshop on Friday because it didn’t look substantive when I reviewed the program.  Today, I spoke to several people who were there and they confirmed my prediction. I took 7 pages of notes at the summit and hope to have some insightful synthesis of the material in a few days [Edit: first thought here, more here].  In the meantime, here is a short review of the talks.

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I May Be a Credit Crunch “Denier” Too

As most of you already know, I am an anthropogenic global warming skeptic, aka “denier”.  Well, a new paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has turned me into a credit crunch skeptic too.

The maintstream narrative on why we need a bailout is that credit is “frozen”. We can’t just let the financial sector sort itself out because it provides the credit “grease” that lubricates the rest of the economy.  The graphs in this paper make it pretty clear that the wheels of Main Street have plenty of grease. So it looks to me like the bailout is corporate welfare plain and simple.  It also means that Paulson and Bernanke talking about how bad things are to justify the bailout may have actually exacerbated any real recession by magnifying the psychological salience of the crisis.

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Financial Crisis Act III: The Flailing Response

As we saw in Act I and Act II, the current financial crisis was enabled by government interference in the housing and mortgage markets, then initiated by Wall Street’s willful blindness to systematic risk in the MBS market. Now we are observing the government’s flailing response.

First they bail out Bear Stearns.  Then they let Lehman go bankrupt.  But AIG gets a lifeline. On to a $700B bailout intended to purchase toxic MBSs. And most recently forcing several probably healthy banks to absorb $250B in government investment. Along the way, there were a bunch of changes to FDIC regulations and a see-sawing stock market.

You might be asking yourself, what the heck is going on here? The reason for all the flailing is that the government is attempting to implement a command and control solution to an extremely distributed problem.

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Financial Crisis Act II: Wall Street Sharks

When the bailout passed, I first thought this post was moot.  But then I reconsidered.  There’s still plenty of time to affect the implementation and several lessons to be learned.  Also, when I’m pissed off, it’s nice to know that I have a good reason.

In Act I, we saw how government meddling overheated the housing and mortgage markets. Now we’ll see how Wall Street took advantage of this opportunity and also apportion some blame to ourselves.

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Financial Crisis Act I: Government Meddling

Let me start by saying that the financial crisis is a very complex situation.  I read several economics blogs every day and quite a few academic papers every month.  My semi-professional opinion is that no economist even comes close to fully understanding the financial system, let alone the complete macroeconomy.  Luckily, I haven’t seen any of them delusional enough to assert that they do in a professional forum. So when you hear a talking head spouting off about the crisis, take what he says with a grain of salt (this includes me, of course). At best, he only sort of knows what he’s talking about.

Because of the complexity, I think we should be very careful to take baby steps.  Going off half-cocked is much more likely to make things worse than better.  I think we need to do three things.  First, we need to understand the underlying causes of the mortgage meltdown that kicked off the cascade (not because I think fixing the cause will solve the problem, but because it will help us avoid making things worse).  Second, we need to examine how the cascade was magnified so we can hopefully install some breaks going forward. Third, we need to agree on the outcomes we most want to prevent as a society (as individuals, I’m sure we all want to keep our houses, jobs, and savings).

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Who’s Curious About the Financial Crisis?

So as not to waste my expensive schooling, I still keep up with economics as a hobby.  I don’t expect other people to generally share this interest, but it occurred to me that the current financial crisis is an excellent example of what happens when a complex adaptive system experiences a shock.  Is anybody curious to have us discuss this topic?  If so, what is specifically interesting to you?  My short answer is to read everything by Arnold Kling at EconLog.  Of course, I have a lot more thoughts if anyone wants to hear them.

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Hive Mindstein

David Basanta’s blog has an interesting thread (quite a few of them actually).  Here’s the setup but you should read the original post, including the Wired article:

Apparently, some people are seeing some potential in cloud computing not just as an aid to science but as a completely new approach to do it. An article in Wired magazine argues precisely that. With the provocative title of The end of theory, the article concludes that, with plenty of data and clever algorithms (like those developed by Google), it is possible to obtain patterns that could be used to predict outcomes…and all that without the need of scientific models.

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Band Aids and the Copenhagen Consensus

I recently alerted Rafe to the latest Copenhagen Consensus, which aims to set priorities for the most cost effective interventions to improve global welfare. Items (1) and (3) were micronutrient supplementation and fortification. Rafe expressed concern that these were a “band aid approach”. After pondering this characterization for a bit, I have some thoughts on when to apply a “band aid approach” and the conditions we should attach to such approaches.

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TED Talk: Susan Blackmore

Memes and “temes”

Apropos of Kevin’s post yesterday on the “Singularity“, we need to be taking more seriously cultural agency (which includes technological and socio-technological agency):

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Stray Thought About the Singularity

Rafe’s post on complex systems defending themselves randomly collided in my mind with this post and paper by Robin Hanson on the Singularity to spur a stray thought. What if the Singularity were catalyzed by changes in organizations rather than intelligence or manufacturing?

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Complex Systems Defend Themselves

I’ve talked on here about the importance of taking seriously the notion of agency as it applies to systems other than biological.  In reading a recent Wired retrospective on what they called wrong, I was struck by feeling that their error was the same in all three cases, and that is underestimating the degree to which complex systems will defend themselves in the face of attack as if they were living, breathing organisms.

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