Inventing Hari Seldon's psychohistory - and other science marvels

The Defense Department wants new computer tools to analyze mounds of unstructured text, blogs and tweets as part of a coordinated push to help military analysts predict the future and make decisions faster. The search is part of the Office of Naval Research's "Data to Decisions" program, a series of three-to-10-year initiatives that will address the volume of information that threatens to overwhelm planners in the digital age. The ONR is calling for computer algorithms to predict events, fuse different forms of information and offer context on unfolding events. The office expects to spend $500,000 each year in funding.

This is just one of many such endeavors currently underway, the most ambitious being a European Union plan devoting billions of Euros to developing predictive analytics that sound a lot like the "psychohistory" of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Universe and its genius prognosticator Hari Seldon.  (I know about such things: I entered Seldon's mind, in my novel set in Isaac's cosmos in my novel, FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH that tied up many loose ends in the Foundation universe.)

Alas, while better tools for appraisal and projection are desperately needed (I portray them in EXISTENCE), I also consider all these expensive European and American efforts to be premature and likely doomed.  

Instead, what would be far better is to lay the foundations by doing one simple thing -- performing a broad-spectrum survey in order to find out who - in human civilization - happens to be right a lot.

Can you believe that there has never been a systematic effort to do that one, simple thing?  Shine light on all the actuaries, horseracing touts, stock analysts, political pundits and so on who claim to have a handle on the future, with a clear and do-able aim - to appraise and score them, so that we can find out - at long last - who gets it right more often than others... perhaps anomalously often, far above chance? And in contrast, who is full of bull? Can you think of any appraisal... any at all... that could have more substantial positive effects on society and the world?  Or that would seem more terrifying to the "chattering castes"?

And so why do I push for it?  Guesses, anyone?

I discuss elsewhere the many advantages. As well as complications, e.g. that the very best prognosticators might not want scrutiny applied to their methods. Still, we'd all have a chance for a better society if the best were scored and revealed and their methods scrutinized. It would also cost 1% of the vast (and futile) modeling programs under proposal. Ah, but perhaps that is why my suggestion is never taken seriously.  See: Accountability for Everyday Prophets: A Call for a Predictions Registry. 

== How to keep growth going... ==

Is growth slowing?  Every decade since the 1940s featured some cluster of new technologies -- from jets to satellites to pharma and the internet -- that created a burst of new wealth and productivity. (Which incidentally helped Americans to pay for the tsunami of purchases that then propelled world development.) I've pointed out that most U.S. problems are rooted in one sad fact: there was no such "big new thing" in the 1st decade of the 21st Century.

That's partly the fault of troglodyte political leaders who ruled us then. But in a broader sense it provokes some to claim that the era of tech driven growth is over,  Paul Krugman replies in the NY Times that it's too soon to count technology out.  Still, even optimists should be concerned: while smart machines may make higher GDP possible, “they also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.”

So, is the "maker movement" going to rescue American manufacturing independence... and civilization in general... as some  tech-utopians not predict? (And as I depict in my graphic novel TINKERERS.)  Have a look at a very thoughtful essay in Technology Review that considers some factors that the tech-transcendentalists - in their zeal to believe - may have missed.

Fortunately, the paucity of great economy-driving inventions dows not apply to pure science. A list of scientific and technical accomplishments made in 2012 suggests that our time of wonders is not behind us, but ahead.  Giving vision to the blind, discovering rogue planets or others made of diamond ... or orbiting the nearest star. Hacking the brain.  Photographing DNA. Invisibility cloaks and more...

== Saving the World... with self-driving cars? ==

Climate change increases the risk of many types of record-breaking extreme weather events that threaten communities across the country. In 2012, there were 3,527 monthly weather records broken for heat, rain, and snow in the US, according to information from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). That's even more than the 3,251 records smashed in 2011—and some of the newly-broken records had stood for 30 years or more.  More ammo for your idiot uncle to frantically dodge and deflect.

Okay, so what do cars have to do with solving this? Recall a couple of postings ago I described my own small role in the Clean Air Car Race of 1970, which might have hastened the removal of lead from gasoline. Now comes the endeavor of another Brin... Google's self-driving car, which may offer not only convenience, but a decline in the need for personally-owned automobiles, overall.  A problem for Detroit, but a boon to urban centers, if you can share a car with a dozen others and use your phone to summon it to come get you, whenever you need a ride.  Or join a coop or a flash-rental agency to get the same thing.  Or unleash your own car at night to roam around as a taxi, earning you bread?

== Science Potpourri ==

Kaggle attempts to use crowd-sourcing and contests/prizes to help small companies solve knotty software problems quickly. Companies pay to post their competitions to Kaggle. But those fees will be waived for the five startups Kaggle selects to take part in its new experiment in crowdsourced algorithms.

The bizarre notion of "negative temperatures"  seems weird and quasi-mystical... though those claiming to have achieved it do not define temperature the way most of us do, as a property of atomic motion, but rather as a thermodynamic quality. From my understanding of what they are doing, it sounds rather like the inverted energy-state system you get inside a laser, plus some mumbo terminology... plus a trick of creating atoms that each have a "maximum energy state"... then causing the number of occupied high energy states to outnumber the low energy ones.  When all of the system's energy is crammed into those maximum energy states, the entropy of the system actually falls. That is, by strict, statistical definition.

See also this take on it. What the article doesn't explain is how the authors blocked  the system from simply adding higher states as happens in regular physics, all the way to ionized plasma. The researchers achieved this at nano-temperatures near absolute zero, which suggests taking advantage of some quantum-level barrier that can only be used in such extremely cold ranges.  Hence all the talk of "practical uses" seems, well, far fetched. In that light, "negative temperature" is a thermodynamics legalism. In fact, well, I feel frosty toward it.

Meanwhile... Australian Zircons have long been considered the oldest tracers of geology on Earth.  But this one apparently formed when the planet was just 150 million years old. In there are more surprises...tales of the new born earth.

== Bio Miscellany! ==

We are definitely entering the era of "augmented soldiers" that I forecast in The Postman. Studies are underway, how the Pentagon and others might negotiate the minefield of risks and opportunities ahead.

A "micromort" is a unit of statistical chance of increasing your likelihood of dying by one millionth (or decreasing it.)  An interesting approach to risk assessment.

A new device about the size of a business card could allow health care providers to test for insulin and other blood proteins, cholesterol, and even signs of viral or bacterial infection all at the same time — with one drop of blood.

On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish.

And while we're at sea... Japanese researchers post first video of a giant squid in its natural habitat.

Release the kraken! A collection of tales and legends, poems and fiction, from Verne to Tennyson -- about this marvelous cephalopod.

The detailed changes in the structure of a virus as it infects an E. coli bacterium have been observed for the first time. 

Instructing scar tissue to change itself into healthy tissue. By using a cocktail of three specific genes researchers have used gene therapy to reprogram the scar tissue cells on a damaged heart into functional muscle cells, while the addition of a fourth gene stimulated the growth of blood vessels to enhance the effect.

The doctor's office of the future: a kiosk at your local grocery store?

 == And Technology on parade ==

Russia sets its sights on the moon: Four robot probes due for 2015, a manned mission by 2030. The first flight, slated for 2015, will see a 1.2 ton lunar lander called Luna-Glob (Moon Globe) deposited on the moon's surface to search for water, take soil samples, and beam back its findings to Earth. I wish Phobos-Grunt had succeeded... Phobos is valuable. Not so sure about the rest of this.

A Topological Recipe Book for New Materials. Researchers showed that they can create a recipe book to build new materials using the mathematics of topology (whose properties that do not change when an object is continuously deformed.)

I've always been a junkie for bridges.  I love every variety and find them the most esthetically wonderful things we humans make, blending art and nature's laws.  Now see how smart design and super materials are enabling ever longer cable-stay bridges.

Researchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that’s considered one of the body’s most powerful painkillers.

Construction is complete on behemoth airship; first flight planned. Worldwide Aeros, a company of about 100 employees, built the prototype under a contract of about $35 million from the Pentagon and NASA. The Aeroscraft is a zeppelin with a 230-foot rigid skeleton made of aluminum and carbon fiber. It's a new type of hybrid aircraft that combines airplane and airship technologies.

North Dakota is now brighter than Pennsylvania, as seen from space. Why? The fracking boom has so many oil rigs at work, flaring off excess natural gas under super-lax state rules, that ND glows like New York. Ah, yummy greenhouse. This needs adjustment. And soon.

UCSD has introduced Diego-san, a new humanoid robot who mimics the expressions of a one-year-old child. Diego-san’s hardware was developed by two leading robot manufacturers: the head by Hanson Robotics and the body by Japan’s Kokoro Co. The project is led by University of California, San Diego research scientist Javier Movellan, who directs the Institute for Neural Computation’s Machine Perception Laboratory. Well into the Uncanny Valley...

Read an update on the Google Glass Project, which promises to deliver heads-up, augmented reality (AR) to smart glasses you'll wear on the street... supposedly in 2014.  And to see where all this will lead?  Have a look at your future in Vinge's  RAINBOW'S END or (even more accurately) my EXISTENCE.

Challenging literature is good for the brain? Better than self-help books. Maybe even try some challenging Science Fiction titles....

Nanowire Arrays for Better Piezoelectric Energy Generators. Researchers developed a nanogenerator consisting of an array of vertically aligned nanowires that, when deformed by an impact or twist induces a piezoelectric production of electrons. The proof-of-concept work included producing enough energy to turn on an LED light..

And finally...  Ever had one of those chilling "coincidence" moments when Some set of flukes coincide?  "What're the odds of THAT happening?"  Are you familiar with The Odds Must Be Crazy website?  They collect these kinds of coincidences and attempt to de-mystify them with science and statistics.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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The "Tytler" Calumny -- Is Democracy Hopeless?

Well... it's back.  One of the best examples of a mass-hypnotic pseudo-wisdom that helps to lobotomize politics in American life.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship." 

This widely-circulated nostrum is called the "Tytler Calumny" and it is the great example of what has gone wrong with the mental processes of our friends on the right, who used to be represented in sage debate by great minds like Barry Goldwater and Friedrich Hayek and William F. Buckley...  but who are now reduced to slinging around aphorisms and fact-free fox-assertions.

(In fairness, after watching Bill O'Reilly hold his own with Jon Stewart in the great 2012 Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium, I have to admit, there are still islands of sort-of almost Goldwater-style adult-honesty on that side, though lamentably rare, as this missive will show you. (LATER addendum: despite my optimism, it later became clear that Bill O'Reilly was no better than his cult-peers.))

First off, although named for a 19th Century Englishman Alexander Tytler, there is no actual evidence that Tytler actually said it! This aphorism is also often attributed falsely to historian Arnold Toynbee or Lord Thomas Macauley, or even Alexis de Tocqueville, although recent scholarship appears to follow a trail leading to a 1943 speech by one Henning Webb Prentis, Jr., President of the Armstrong Cork Company.

It is often accompanied by another feat of cynicism called the Fatal Sequence.

"Great nations rise and fall in a 200 year cycle. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

Now, as one who had the chance to "channel" the great science-fiction psychohistorian Hari Seldon, I admit to sharing the soft spot that many SF fans feel toward the central notion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series -- that the arc of history can be somehow easily be tracked, patterns-perceived, predictions made. And indeed, there certainly are some patterns!  Such as the dominance, in 99% of human societies, of small cabals of owner oligarchs, who passed on their property-based power to sons who never did a thing to earn it. The persistent-feudal pattern that Adam Smith and the American Founders strove so hard to break. Yes, I see the pattern-seeking allure.

But I've learned to be wary of glib nostrums that seem just too convenient to be true.

== Stroking the ego, starving the intellect ==

Consider how the Tytler Calumny appeals to the vanity of the one repeating it.  The sad cynicism of someone who considers himself above the hoi polloi of the mere "people."  It is a blithe dismissal of even the possibility that a democracy can maintain itself. This despite the fact that -- if you include the vigorous colonial legislatures -- we in the U.S. have three centuries of ever-ripening success, on this continent alone, becoming steadily mightier at the same pace that we've grown more inclusive.

The calumny draws believers, despite the fact that our democracy has accomplished more prodigious feats, more wonders and more improvements to human happiness and knowledge than all of humanity's other nations and cultures combined.  By far.  By orders of magnitude.

The Tytler nostrum (appraised here on Snopes) sounds "logical" in its smug contempt for the masses... except that it runs contrary to actual fact.  For example, when the citizens of Athens voted against distributing the windfall from new silver mines to every citizen, and instead asked Themistocles to invest it in their future.  Would most kings have done that?

All through the 1990s, Bill Clinton allied himself with fiscal moderates of both parties to stave off efforts by the supply-siders to raid the budget surplus and give it all -- not to the People -- but to the rich.  Clinton and Senators Tsongas (D) and Rudman (R) and others in the moderate middle were able to accomplish that because they were backed up by the public! By opinion polls showing that the middle class overwhelmingly wanted the budget surplus spent on paying down debt. And not on tax cuts for themselves. 

Should we be surprised? Indeed, who is more likely to have the habit of weighing the consequences of debt? Middle class citizens who must wrestle with tradeoffs, stanching their impulses and appetites every day, in favor of budgeting tightly for the future?  Or aristocrats who are accustomed to indulging whims out of copious coffers, knowing that there are always more coppers, pennies, pfennigs etc to be squeezed from those below them on the pyramid?

Both before and after 2001, those who were demanding that all the surplus be "given back to us, right now" were aristocrats. The same caste that bankrupted most past societies. 

Are the builders of Versailles, the Schönbrunn, the Taj Mahal and Forbidden City - palatial fripperies that impoverished their nations - in any position to lecture us about deferred gratification? Should middle class Americans, who invested in universities, vast R&D efforts and endeavors to access tens of trillions of dollars in resources awaiting us in space, listen to wastrel scions chiding us from 50-room yachts, demanding that we give them more?

== The Fiscal Cliff Is Born ==

When Clinton left office, there was no one left to block the raiders -- who swarmed in to vote themselves "largesse" from the public treasury.  Largesse in the form of giga-tax cuts for the uber-oligarchy, declaring that the red ink would be paid back within a year, by supply-side miracles!  Yes, that was promised. Explicitly vowed as the direct result.

Ah. Pity that not one prediction ever made by Supply Siders ever came even remotely close to coming true. And that is ever. At any level, from the federal budget to states like Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. Exactly as described by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, most oligarchs did not spend their tax-cut largesse on productive enterprises or risky capital formation.  They spent it on dividend-rent-seeking securities and hedge speculations that withdrew cash from circulation but boosted asset bubbles, leading to staggering deficits and the Second Great Depression.

Dig this well, so that the Tytler Calumny can die its deserved death.  

The middle class demanded debt pay-down.  The aristocracy demanded short-sighted greed.  Exactly as they did in 1789 France, when the First Estate refused to help pay for the nation that benefited them... and thus signed their own fates.

The 1789 lords' rationalization - that they needed all the money to invest in their own duchies and estates and in jobs for their tenants - was precisely the same as the supply siders and "job-creators" use today. Flat out lies for which they later paid their lives.

== Conservatives Who Can See ==

Now, not everyone on today's American right has been lobotomized by Fox. Some of the heirs of Barry Goldwater have taken notice. For example, Mike Lofgren, in The American Conservative  (one of the few journals of the right that today would be considered sane by Goldwater and Buckley) has penned a scathing denunciation of how a worldwide caste of uber-wealthy appears to be seceding from the nations and peoples they increasingly control. In "Revolt of the Rich," Lofgren shows how this process - bringing us toward wealth disparities like those of 1789 France - threaten the very fabric of our western/american social contract.

"It is no coincidence that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been falling at the fastest rate in decades. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s report of June 2012, the median net worth of families plummeted almost 40 percent between 2007 and 2010."

Here is another snippet:

"If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the super wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

Look across the last 6000 years, the spendthrift aristocracy that ran nearly every kingdom, empire or feudal region typified Tytler's quotation, far more than the primly puritan democrats of Athens, Florence, Venice, the medieval guilds, or Britain or America. Committing horrors of statecraft, blundering and crushing freedom and repressing markets, the lords were the enemies of liberty in 99% of human cultures... the enemies of market capitalism who were most denounced by Adam Smith.

In sharp contrast -- and reiterating because it bears repeating -- middle class folk understand debt, better than anybody.  They walk its minefields every single day. Unlike the poor, they have skills and have options and practice dealing with those choices. They mostly manage to use debt as a tool... one not to be indulged excessively.  Unlike the rich, they have no illusions that you can manipulate your way out of any jam, privatizing profits and socializing costs.  Railing against government, then suckling at its teat.  The middle class -- the citizens who make democracy work -- don't have that luxury.  That delusion.

== The Paradox of "Deciders and Allocators" ==

Hypocrites who adore rule-by-oligarchy violate the fundamental principles of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and the entire conservative wing of mainstream economics, who all maintain that economic decisions are best made when we maximize the number of participants who get to know and participate in a basically flat and fair and open market.  (And the same competitive-accountability principle applies in democracy and science.)

Does it surprise you to learn that I think Hayek and Smith were absolutely right about this?  All humans are delusional, but the greater the number in-the-know and applying reciprocal accountability, the more likely each delusion is to be caught by somebody.

Oh, have you listened to those who decry that top-down decisions should not be made by the "limited number" of say 100,000 accountable and skilled and unbiased civil servants?  Sure, they have a point.

Only these loud critics then - without an eyeblink of irony - swerve and excuse secret, self-interested and conniving "picking winners and losers" when it is done by less than 3,000 elite-oligarch golf buddies in the CEO/billionaire caste. Praising that closed cabal as smart and accountable-enough, they dare to call that "capitalism."

It is not capitalism! It is the age-old enemy of capitalism. Ask Adam Smith.

See: Allocation vs. Markets: An Ancient Struggle with strange modern implications.

== What is the crux?  ==

What do I aim to accomplish here? I want you all to recognize and be able to name the Tytler Calumny, the next time your favorite ostrich or grouchy uncle starts reciting this poisonously treasonable and noxiously lying nostrum, bemoaning the impossibility that democracy can possibly survive the inherent contradictions of human nature.

In fact, I agree that Human Nature contains the seeds of downfall for our Enlightenment Experiment.  But the pattern we must fight is not some mystical 200 year "cycle" of decadence that has no known examples from history to back it up!

Rather, the truly ubiquitous pattern that has proved ruinous to human civilization is the very one that spoilt 99% of other societies, leading small clades of delusional lords to evade criticism and to rule by owner-right, making endless errors of statecraft that we now call "history." (And no, I don't prefer idiotic socialism! What I'll fight for is our pragmatic, wide-open renaissance.)

Those who keep repeating the Tytler Calumny seem eager to deride our Great Experiment, chopping away at its ankles, at its morale, implying that democracy is inherently doomed, and that we must return to the pattern that ruled other human cultures.  A pattern with a far worse, mostly vapid and stupid track record of misgovernment.

Whose tune are they parroting, when these fools demean democracy and extoll aristocracy? The lyrics come from Fox News, co-owned by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a couple of coal baron pals and by the Sa'udi Royal House.

Huh.  Some coincidence. Lords preaching the inevitability of a return to lordship. The biggest reason not to heed them is that they clearly are too dumb to suss out where this leads.

Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé...

======

FOLOWUP:  In a November 2012 report we learn that that Senate Republicans applied pressure on the neutral nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) in September to withdraw a report finding that lowering marginal tax rates for the wealthiest Americans had no effect on economic growth or job creation.

"The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical," the Times reported. Democrats in Congress resurfaced the report. Republicans objected that it underminde the governing fiscal philosophy of the party, that tax cuts for the wealthy will spur growth and benefit everybody."

Changes over 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains rate do not correlate with economic growth. Reduction in top rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. However, top rate reductions do associate with increasing divergence of national income going to the top 0.1%

This is important... and was always obvious.  Even in 1776 Adam Smith described what the rich actually do with sudden cash infusions. They put it to work in "passive rent seeking" and only rarely into capital equipment or risky new products and services. (Risk taking can be rewarded in other ways.) And that cash flow to the rich reduces the velocity of money. If there were ever a time not to do that, it is during a recession, when we want high money velocity, put cash in middle class pockets! (In fairness, during runaway inflation, largesse to the rich - reducing money velocity - actually makes some sense.) 

George H.W. Bush called Supply Side "voodoo economics. It was and is.  And it is the "people" - the middle classes - who are the ones best able to resist the temptation to vote themselves "largesse" and defer gratification for the sake of their kids.