Quote of the Day

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.

- Scott Adams

The Friendship That Made Google Huge

In graduate school, at M.I.T., Sanjay found a tight-knit group of friends. Still, he never dated, and does so only “very, very infrequently” now. He says that he didn’t decide not to have a family—it just unfolded that way. His close friends have learned not to bother him about it, and his parents long ago accepted that their son would be a bachelor. Perhaps because he’s so private, an air of mystery surrounds him at Google. He is known for being quiet but profound—someone who thinks deeply and with unusual clarity. On his desk, he keeps a stack of Mead composition notebooks going back nearly twenty years, filled with tidy lists and diagrams. He writes in pen and in cursive. He rarely references an old notebook, but writes in order to think. At M.I.T., his graduate adviser was Barbara Liskov, an influential computer scientist who studied, among other things, the management of complex code bases. In her view, the best code is like a good piece of writing. It needs a carefully realized structure; every word should do work. Programming this way requires empathy with readers. It also means seeing code not just as a means to an end but as an artifact in itself. “The thing I think he is best at is designing systems,” Craig Silverstein said. “If you’re just looking at a file of code Sanjay wrote, it’s beautiful in the way that a well-proportioned sculpture is beautiful.”

[---]

At Google, Jeff is far better known. There are Jeff Dean memes, modelled on the ones about Chuck Norris. (“Chuck Norris counted to infinity . . . twice”; “Jeff Dean’s résumé lists the things he hasn’t done—it’s shorter that way.”) But, for those who know them both, Sanjay is an equal talent. “Jeff is great at coming up with wild new ideas and prototyping things,” Wilson Hsieh, their longtime colleague, said. “Sanjay was the one who built things to last.” In life, Jeff is more outgoing, Sanjay more introverted. In code, it’s the reverse. Jeff’s programming is dazzling—he can quickly outline startling ideas—but, because it’s done quickly, in a spirit of discovery, it can leave readers behind. Sanjay’s code is social.

“Some people,” Silverstein said, “their code’s too loose. One screen of code has very little information on it. You’re always scrolling back and forth to figure out what’s going on.” Others write code that’s too dense: “You look at it, you’re, like, ‘Ugh. I’m not looking forward to reading this.’ Sanjay has somehow split the middle. You look at his code and you’re, like, ‘O.K., I can figure this out,’ and, still, you get a lot on a single page.” Silverstein continued, “Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay’s code, it seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I understand the greatness. I don’t understand how it’s done.”

[---]

“Hey,” Jeff said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the screen. Although in conversation he is given to dad jokes and puns, he can become opinionated, brusque, and disapproving when he sits at a computer with Sanjay. Sanjay takes this in stride. When he thinks Jeff is moving too fast, he’ll lift his hands off the keyboard and spread his fingers, as if to say, “Stop.” (In general, Jeff is the accelerator, Sanjay the brake.) This is as close as they get to an argument: in twenty years together, they can’t remember raising their voices.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

- John F. Kennedy

Wisdom Of The Week

The Hungarian immigrant directs the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and has an appointment at Harvard Medical School. Demonstrating his mastery of networking, he landed rave blurbs for the book from Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb and top scholars at Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere.

He concedes that it might seem brash to declare “universal laws of success” and not just, say, “guidelines” or “hints.” But he says that the five laws were the inescapable findings from analysis of massive data sets related to sports, business, the arts, academia, and innovation. “Outright resisting them is about as futile as trying to fly by flapping our arms up and down,” he writes.

Enough preamble, then. What are Barabasi’s five laws?

• Performance drives success, but when performance is immeasurable, networks determine success.
• Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.
• Fitness x Previous Success = Future Success.
• While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.
• Success can come at any time as long as we are persistent.

- Review of the book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Quote of the Day

What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

- Atul Gawande

Quote of the Day

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. . . . The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

- Second Thoughts on James Burnham by George Orwell

Quote of the Day

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Quote of the Day

Although this information was not new to me, I had not yet acted on it. What made this trip different? Again, it was in part the experience of simply seeing and touching the lucky few animals who had been saved from such fates. (There was a male dairy cow named Snickers who was a huge, impressive creature. It turns out that the reason he seemed so large in my eyes was that most of us have never seen an adult male dairy cow. They are all killed before adulthood.) What I found most interesting was that a simple slogan had a transformative impact on me: "In every glass of milk, there's a little bit of veal." This powerful statement not only captures a powerful truth, but it is devastating in its simplicity. Once the tour guide said it, I could never think about milk or cheese the same way again.

One lesson that I drew from this experience, therefore, is a renewed appreciation for the concept of framing and the psychology of learning. Even an academic who values arguments and facts can compartmentalize things if they are not presented powerfully enough. As regular readers of this blog know, I am especially fascinated by the power of rhetoric; but even I was surprised by the impact of something so simple as that bumper-sticker statement. Content matters profoundly, of course, but I will never again even consider doubting the power of form.

The other major lesson that I have drawn in the few days since I chose to become a vegan is, to put it simply, that the U.S. economy makes it difficult -- but by no means prohibitive -- to be a vegan. Again, I claim no great new insight here; but experiencing is different from knowing. The most surprising thing about becoming a vegan is that it requires so much thinking! As Professor Colb noted to me, it was a huge relief to be able to go to the snack bar at the Sanctuary and simply buy something that looked like it would taste good. (I assure the skeptics that there were plenty of items that were very appealing.) In a regular grocery store or restaurant, everything has to be filtered through the question of whether the items in question are vegan-friendly. Everything requires at least a little bit of research and a lot of skepticism. In restaurants, questions about these matters are met with blank stares, obvious misinformation, and outright hostility.

- Meat, Dairy, Psychology, Law, Economics

Max Holiday Card 2018

Wish You All Happy Holidays !

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity.

- Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

Quote of the Day

It is true, as we are often reminded, that kindness to animals is among the humbler duties of human charity--though for just that reason among the more easily neglected. And it is true that there will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love. Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others.

- Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

Wisdom Of The Week

The Maginot Line was, in its time, believed to be a significant innovation in national defense; foreign leaders came from all over to tour it. It was a series of fortresses and railroads, resistant to all known forms of artillery, built using the latest technology. The purpose was both to halt an invasion force — keeping civilians safer — and to deliver early warning of an attack. The line was built by France along the entirety of its border with Germany. It extended into the border with Belgium, but stopped at the Forest of Ardennes because of the prevailing belief among experts that Ardennes was impenetrable.

Ardennes, it turned out, was not impenetrable. Moving through the forest would perhaps have been a futile effort for an army using the attrition warfare strategies prevalent in World War I, but it was vulnerable to new modes of warfare. As the French focused on building the Maginot Line, the Germans developed exactly such a new model of warfare — Blitzkrieg —and sent a million men and 1500 tanks through Ardennes (while deploying a small force to the Maginot Line as a decoy).

The Line, designed to very effectively fight the last war, had delivered a false sense of security.

[---]

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

If the warm war is allowed to continue as it has, there is a very real threat of descent into illegitimate leadership and fractured, paralyzed societies. If algorithmic amplification continues to privilege the propagandists most effective at gaming the system, if combatant persona accounts continue to harass civilian voices off of platforms, and if hostile state intelligence services remain able to recruit millions of Americans into fake “communities”, the norms that have traditionally protected democratic societies will fail.

We don’t have time to waste on digital security theater. In the two years since Election 2016, we’ve all come to agree that something is wrong on the internet. There is momentum and energy to do something, but the complexity of the problem and the fact that it intersects with other thorny issues of internet governance (privacy, monopoly, expression, among others) means that we’re stuck in a state of paralysis, unable to address disinformation in a meaningful way. Instead, both regulators and the platforms throw up low-level roadblocks. This is what a digital Maginot line looks like.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets. When it’s all done and over with, we’ll look back on this era as being as consequential in reshaping the future of the United States and the world as World War II.

- More Here

Why Good Forecasters Become Better People

It is only a modest oversimplification to summarise Prof Tetlock’s results using the late William Goldman’s aphorism: nobody knows anything.

Yet Profs Mellers, Tetlock and Don Moore then ran a larger forecasting tournament and discovered that a small number of people seem to be able to forecast better than the rest of us. These so-called superforecasters are not necessarily subject-matter experts, but they tend to be proactively open-minded, always looking for contrary evidence or opinions.

There are certain mental virtues, then, that make people better forecasters. The new research turns the question around: might trying to become a better forecaster strengthen such mental virtues? In particular, might it make us less polarised in our political views?

- More Here

The Alternative to Ideology

There is nothing wrong with policy advocacy that is informed by a commitment to principles. In fact, it is almost impossible for us to do otherwise given that principles are the projection of personal values into the political realm. Thinking about politics without principled considerations is to think about politics as the exercise of power without moral limit.

But there is no obvious reason why we should hold one principle to be more important than any other in nearly every single policy context. All of the worthy principles marshaled in American politics are important, but some will be more important than others depending upon the circumstance. They cannot all be fully realized at the same time with any given policy proposal. Ethically difficult trade-offs are necessary, and those trade-offs must be transparently considered on a case-by-case basis. There is little room for ideology in this undertaking.

There is a word for the monomaniacal pursuit of a single idea. And that word is fanaticism.

[---]

What is the alternative to ideology? There is no easy answer. Without some means of sorting through the reams of information coming at us every day, we would be overwhelmed and incapable of considered thought or action. Without any underlying principles or beliefs whatsoever, we are dangerously susceptible to believing anything, no matter how ludicrous, and to act cruelly without moral constraint. Yet any set of beliefs, if they are coherent, are the wet clay of ideology. Hence, the best we can do is to police our inner ideologue with a studied, skeptical outlook, a mindful appreciation of our own fallibility, and an open, inquisitive mind.

Politics and policymaking without an ideological bible is incredibly demanding. It requires far more technocratic expertise and engagement than is required by ideologues, who already (they think) know the answers. It also requires difficult judgments, on a case-by-case basis, about which ethical considerations are of paramount concern for any given issue at hand, and what trade-offs regarding those considerations are most warranted.

To embrace nonideological politics, then, is to embrace moderation, which requires humility, prudence, pragmatism, and a conservative temperament. No matter what principles we bring to the political table, remaking society in some ideologically-driven image is off the table given the need to respect pluralism. A sober appreciation of the limitations of knowledge (and the irresolvable problem of unintended consequences) further cautions against over-ambitious policy agendas.

[---]

At this (rather late) point in my intellectual journey, I am of the same mind as the Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio:

There were only a few of us who preserved a small bag in which, before throwing ourselves into the sea, we deposited for safekeeping the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgment, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things. Many, too many, deprived themselves of this baggage: they either abandoned it, considering it a useless weight; or they never possessed it, throwing themselves into the waters before having the time to acquire it. I do not reproach them; but I prefer the company of the others. Indeed, I suspect that this company is destined to grow, as the years bring wisdom and events shed new light on things.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

A Plant-based Diet Changed My Life

Quote of the Day

When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the Day

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.

- Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Quote of the Day

What I've Been Reading

Ironically, the need for a theory of causation began to surface at the same time that statistics came into being. In fact, modern statistics hatched from the causal questions that Galton and Pearson asked about heredity and their ingenious attempts to answer them using cross-generational data. Unfortunately, they failed in this endeavor, and rather than pause to ask why, they declared those questions off limits and turned to developing a thriving, causality-free enterprise called statistics.

[---]

My emphasis on language also comes from a deep conviction that language shapes our thoughts. You cannot answer question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for. 

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl.

Wow ! one of the best books of the year. Easy ready even for a non-technical person.

1. My research on machine learning has taught me that a causal learner must master at least three distinct levels of cognitive ability: seeing, doing and imagining.
2. Bayes's rule informs our reasoning in cases where ordinary intuition fails us or where emotion might lead us astray.
3. Monty Hall Problem is a paradox because "They are accustomed to the reduction of data and ignoring the data-generating process (R.A Fisher, 1922).
4. To turn a noncausal Bayesian network into a causal model - or, more precisely, to make it capable of answering counterfactual queries - we need a dose-response relationship at each node.

Quote of the Day

Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us.  The sun shines not on us, but in us.  The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.

- John Muir

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

Now, what that tells you is that there is a problem – which I recognise myself, being an atheist – about where you get your values from. I think ultimately one peels back to something like Wittgenstein’s “form of life” and that’s what we all, in the end, endorse. Of course, many people would include some element of Christian theism, even if they were brought up in a secular family, but the idea that you can move seamlessly from atheism to a liberal morality is, I think, a complete illusion.

[---]

It’s the power. CS Lewis wrote in a wartime lecture – which was turned into a little book, The Abolition of Man – that when people talk about the power of humanity over nature, what they really mean is the power of some human beings over other human beings. And as an atheist, my objection to this kind of eugenics is that it reposes far too much trust in the people who either regard themselves or are regarded by others as the cleverest people around at the time: far too much trust. And I don’t share the ambition that they have to reproduce themselves.

So the idea that there could be a technological solution to death seems to me to really be an absurdity. And it’s a way of avoiding or even denying one of the routes towards a need or reason that theism satisfies – to the extent that it can – which is to reconcile human beings not only to their own mortality, but even more, to the mortality of whatever it is that they love.

- Matters of life and death: Rowan Williams and John Gray in conversation

Quote of the Day

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

- Rachel Carson

Quote of the Day

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

- William James

Quote of the Day

We knew that there is a vindictive and volatile child in the White House, but I was still both richly entertained and highly alarmed by a trio of accounts about life inside the Trump playpen. Bob Woodward’s Fear (Simon & Schuster) is the most sober; Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown) is the most lurid. The Fifth Risk (Allen Lane) by Michael Lewis is best on why Trump’s manic, anarchic and paranoid style is dangerous. It is somehow appropriate that all these Trump books have titles containing F-words.

- Best books of 2018

Quote of the Day

The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

Quote of the Day

Take It from Someone Who Has Suffered Real Physical Abuse: Words Aren’t Violence

Language is mutable, and definitions change over time. But what we’ve witnessed in recent years—especially on campuses—is a profound form of concept creep that goes beyond mere language and labels. The ordinary challenges of life now are being reinvented as trauma, and words are conflated with violence. It is all part of our ongoing cultural embrace of the “untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker,” as illuminated by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind. Debates, lectures and even ordinary conversations now can be brought to an end when one party declares checkmate by asserting that this or that argument serves to “deny their humanity” or makes them feel “unsafe.”

As someone who has experienced nine of the 10 most studied Adverse Childhood Experiences, who lives with chronic physical pain from violence-inflicted injuries, who spends three hours a week with a therapist specializing in trauma, I can attest that such claims strike me as dangerous gibberish. Can words do damage? Of course. But the difference between words and violence is that mentally competent adults nearly always have a choice about how much damage words can inflict, whereas the damage caused by my father’s belt—like all physical abuse—didn’t rise or fall depending on my psychological state at the moment of impact.

[---]

The sight of a man’s belt used to trigger me. I would avoid the men’s department in clothing stores for this reason. Standing in a line with a man both in front of and behind me would give me physical anxiety symptoms for hours afterward. To resolve this trigger, my therapist told me to buy a man’s belt. I cried in the car and used up a lot of Kleenex in my next therapy session. Then I brought the thing home and hung it on the doorknob of my bedroom door. It hung there like a poisonous viper, giving me nightmares.

Then something beautiful happened. Its power started to fade. After a few weeks, it went from a dark artifact with the power to bring back my traumatic past, to a hunk of leather fashioned to hold up some guy’s pants. The experience made me grateful that my therapist didn’t take his cue from the culture around him. Teaching people to react to words as if they were weapons is teaching them to fetishize their damage—or even to create new damage. How will a generation trained to brew up their own cortisol on any pretext experience life if every off-colour joke knocks the legs out from under them?

When I enrolled at my university as a mature student trying to piece her life back together, I knew there was a chance that I might need some kind of special accommodations. But the university’s disability officer offered me so many accommodations that it was embarrassing. If I wanted to, I could have remained deeply mired in my mental debilitation without even the slightest spur toward recovery.

Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom.  We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas will result in the triumph of truth.

- John Gray

Wisdom Of The Week

For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well. “If you are alive,” he sets out to answer, “what sorts of behaviors must you show?”

First the bad news: The free energy principle is maddeningly difficult to understand. So difficult, in fact, that entire rooms of very, very smart people have tried and failed to grasp it. A Twitter account2 with 3,000 followers exists simply to mock its opacity, and nearly every person I spoke with about it, including researchers whose work depends on it, told me they didn’t fully comprehend it.

But often those same people hastened to add that the free energy principle, at its heart, tells a simple story and solves a basic puzzle. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends toward entropy, toward dissolution; but living things fiercely resist it. We wake up every morning nearly the same person we were the day before, with clear separations between our cells and organs, and between us and the world without. How? Friston’s free energy principle says that all life, at every scale of organization—from single cells to the human brain, with its billions of neurons—is driven by the same universal imperative, which can be reduced to a mathematical function. To be alive, he says, is to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy.

To get a sense of the potential implications of this theory, all you have to do is look at the array of people who darken the FIL’s doorstep on Monday mornings. Some are here because they want to use the free energy principle to unify theories of the mind, provide a new foundation for biology, and explain life as we know it. Others hope the free energy principle will finally ground psychiatry in a functional understanding of the brain. And still others come because they want to use Friston’s ideas to break through the roadblocks in artificial intelligence research. But they all have one reason in common for being here, which is that the only person who truly understands Karl Friston’s free energy principle may be Karl Friston himself.

[---]

EVEN FRISTON HAS a hard time deciding where to start when he describes the free energy principle. He often sends people to its Wikipedia page. But for my part, it seems apt to begin with the blanket draped over the futon in Friston’s office.

It’s a white fleece throw, custom-printed with a black-and-white portrait of a stern, bearded Russian mathematician named Andrei Andreyevich Markov, who died in 1922. The blanket is a gag gift from Friston’s son, a plush, polyester inside joke about an idea that has become central to the free energy principle. Markov is the eponym of a concept called a Markov blanket, which in machine learning is essentially a shield that separates one set of variables from others in a layered, hierarchical system. The psychologist Christopher Frith—who has an h-index on par with Friston’s—once described a Markov blanket as “a cognitive version of a cell membrane, shielding states inside the blanket from states outside.”

In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.

“That’s the Markov blanket you’ve read about. This is it. You can touch it,” Friston said dryly when I first saw the throw in his office. I couldn’t help myself; I did briefly reach out to feel it under my fingers. Ever since I first read about Markov blankets, I’d seen them everywhere. Markov blankets around a leaf and a tree and a mosquito. In London, I saw them around the postdocs at the FIL, around the black-clad protesters at an antifascist rally, and around the people living in boats in the canals. Invisible cloaks around everyone, and underneath each one a different living system that minimizes its own free energy.

[---]

The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-­changing effect. But if you translate the concept from math into English, here’s roughly what you get: Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.

[---]

A single-celled organism has the same imperative to reduce surprise that a brain does.

The only difference is that, as self-organizing biological systems go, the human brain is inordinately complex: It soaks in information from billions of sense receptors, and it needs to organize that information efficiently into an accurate model of the world. “It’s literally a fantastic organ in the sense that it generates hypotheses or fantasies that are appropriate for trying to explain these myriad patterns, this flux of sensory information that it is in receipt of,” Friston says. In seeking to predict what the next wave of sensations is going to tell it—and the next, and the next—the brain is constantly making inferences and updating its beliefs based on what the senses relay back, and trying to minimize prediction-error signals.

So far, as you might have noticed, this sounds a lot like the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine” that Hinton told Friston about in the 1990s. And indeed, Friston regards the Bayesian model as a foundation of the free energy principle (“free energy” is even a rough synonym for “prediction error”). But the limitation of the Bayesian model, for Friston, is that it only accounts for the interaction between beliefs and perceptions; it has nothing to say about the body or action. It can’t get you out of your chair.

This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.

And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis—my fantasy—through action.

[---]

So: The free energy principle offers a unifying explanation for how the mind works and a unifying explanation for how the mind malfunctions. It stands to reason, then, that it might also put us on a path toward building a mind from scratch.

- Free Energy Principle

What I've Been Reading

I think the term is very loaded, and when many people invoke it they often do so as a catch-all for talking about working with a certain a set of tools:R, map-reduce, data visualization etc. I think, this actually hurts the discipline a great deal, because if it is meant to actually a science, the majority of our focus be on questions, not tools.

- Drew Conway

The Disruptors: Data Science Leaders: Collective Biographies of Influential Leaders by Kate Strachnyi.

Kate has done a much needed work to bring to light what this field is all about; thank you Kate for giving me good talking points on explaining what I do.

Humans are born data scientists; we are born curious, we ask lot of questions, and we are good at detecting patterns. When children play, they sort their toys by color, shape, function. They know they can build a castle with blocks but not balls and they know you can play soccer with a ball but not blocks. These are things data scientists do, classification, sorting, indexing etc. 

- Kirk Borne 

People want artificial intelligence, but they also want control. Having both is difficult. 

- Mico Yuk

Quote of the Day

Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not ‘This is misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’

- Marcus Aurelius

Cats, Birds & Humans

John Gray considers why the human animal needs contact with something other than itself.  He tells the story of an eminent philosopher who once told him that he'd persuaded his cat to become a vegan! An effort, it seems, to get the cat to share his values. 

But Gray argues that there's no evolutionary hierarchy with humans at the top.  "What birds and animals offer us", he says, "is not confirmation of our sense of having an exalted place in some sort of cosmic hierarchy. It's admission into a larger scheme of things, where our minds are no longer turned in on themselves".  He concludes that "by giving us the freedom to see the world afresh, birds and animals renew our humanity".

- Listen to John Gray Here

Quote of the Day

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

- Marcus Aurelius

Complex Adaptive Systems - Dave Snowden

Quote of the Day

The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses.

Proof of Dr. Farnes's theory will come from tests performed with a cutting-edge radio telescope known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international endeavour to build the world's largest telescope in which the University of Oxford is collaborating.

Dr. Farnes adds: "There are still many theoretical issues and computational simulations to work through, and LambdaCDM has a nearly 30 year head start, but I'm looking forward to seeing whether this new extended version of LambdaCDM can accurately match other observational evidence of our cosmology. If real, it would suggest that the missing 95% of the cosmos had an aesthetic solution: we had forgotten to include a simple minus sign."

- Negative Mass

I Have Been At Every Powerful Table You Can Think Of... They Are Not Smart

Michelle Obama offered a "secret" to young women everywhere: "I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of, I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the U.N.: They are not that smart."

In addition to revealing her tonic for self-doubt, Obama also talked about the experience of black women being caricatured, asserting that "the size of our hips, our style, our swag, it becomes co-opted, but then we are demonized."

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Patience is not just about waiting for something. It’s about how you wait, or your attitude while waiting.

- Joyce Meyer

Quote of the Day

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

- Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Is Machine Learning Overhyped?

Despite all this promise—or perceived promise—one thing that machine learning isn’t is magic. “Let’s be realistic,” says George Dahl, a computer scientist at Google. “Machine learning is nonlinear regression,” a simple type of statistical analysis in which collected data are “fit” with model parameters. Dahl won a Merck & Co. machine-learning competition while a graduate student in Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto.

Making machine learning sound like something it’s not yet could be bad for the technique itself. If it can’t live up to the bar that’s been set, funders and scientists may decide machine learning isn’t worth their time. “We need the most brilliant minds to feel enticed” to study it and explore its benefits for it to be successful, says Nuno Maulide, an organic synthetic chemist at the University of Vienna.

To explore the space between what some have promised and what machine learning might actually deliver—and to discern among chemists a consensus about the much-ballyhooed tool—C&EN has examined some of the fields where it’s generating the most enthusiasm and skepticism.

[---]

Whether that’s overhyping it depends on your perspective. For those chemists who work most closely with machine learning, the excitement they see in press releases and casual conversation can get tiresome. These experts have great faith that machine learning will have a real and lasting impact on chemistry, especially if more people are trained to use it. At the same time, some worry that this tool can’t possibly live up to the highest expectations and that disappointment might hurt progress.

Cronin puts it this way: “Although I say machine learning is overhyped and annoying, I think it’s underused by chemists.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

- Steve Jobs

As We May Think

Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile. Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood. Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundreds of thousands of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets—and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

[---]

Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own card, and the card taken from the article sold—all punched cards. When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the customer.

But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however. Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.

The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them. Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card into use—a second should suffice for the entire operation. The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using photography, however one can arrange to project the record in enlarged form and at a distance by using the process common in television equipment.

- Vannevar Bush’s Classic 1945 Article

What I've Been Reading

In addition, discarding things force you to take responsibility. You will make your own decisions and stand by them. Since you are the person who threw away your things, you cannot blame others. People who tidy their own living spaces tend to have more confidence in making important decisions. 

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

I never knew storing clothes vertical not only saves space but also helps clothes last longer (plus I found out, its easier to pick as well). Only thing, I don't agree in the book is throwing away unread books; Antilibrary is a constant remainder of what I don't know.

Your belonging play an important role in your life. They help you 24/7. Thus you should appreciate them for all the good things they are doing for you. It is a simple task. You have to talk to your belongings as if they are human beings.

This technique will enhance your appreciation for your possessions. If you will do this regularly, your relationship with your items and your living space will be more intimate.

This technique will enhance the lifespan of almost all items. This is easy to understood. If you will explicitly show your appreciation for an object, you will take good care of it. Thus, it will exceed its natural lifespan. 

The Human Origin Story Has Changed Again

The discovery of 2.4-million-year-old stone tools and butchered bones at a site in Algeria suggests our distant hominin relatives spread into the northern regions of Africa far earlier than archaeologists assumed. The find adds credence to the newly emerging suggestion that ancient hominins lived—and evolved—outside a supposed Garden of Eden in East Africa.

[--]

To put these dates into perspective, our species, Homo sapiens, emerged 300,000 years ago. So the unknown hominins who built these tools were romping around eastern and northern Africa some 2.3 million years before modern humans hit the scene. The new discoveries at Ain Boucherit, the details of which were published today in Science, suggest North Africa wasn’t just a place where human ancestors lived and developed tools—it was a place where they evolved.

Indeed, this new research is feeding into an emerging narrative, whereby humans evolved across the African continent as a whole, and not merely in East Africa as per conventional thinking. What’s more, it should spur increased archaeological interest in northern Africa.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Here’s why I’m a fan of thanking our lucky stars every day: it helps with forgiving yourself your failures; it cuts down on celebrity worship and boosts humility; and, perhaps most important, it makes us more compassionate.

- A.J. Jacobs, Thanks A Thousand: A Gratitude Journey

The New Evolution Deniers

Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were repeated attempts by evangelicals to ban evolution in public schools or teach the so-called “controversy” by including Intelligent Design—the belief that life is too complex to have evolved without the aid of some “Intelligent Designer” (i.e. God)—in the biology curriculum alongside evolution. But these attempts failed when scientists demonstrated in court that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Biblical Creationism gussied up in scientific-sounding prose. Since then, however, Creationism and Intelligent Design have lost a tremendous amount of momentum and influence. But while these right-wing anti-evolution movements withered to irrelevancy, a much more cryptic form of left-wing evolution denialism has been slowly growing.

[---]

Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

Let me start not logically, but psychologically. I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things.

You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?'' Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar. Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that's the necessary but not sufficient condition. All of these items I will talk about are both luck and not luck.

How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains. Brains are measured in various ways. In mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, typically brains correlates to a great extent with the ability to manipulate symbols. And so the typical IQ test is apt to score them fairly high. On the other hand, in other fields it is something different. For example, Bill Pfann, the fellow who did zone melting, came into my office one day. He had this idea dimly in his mind about what he wanted and he had some equations. It was pretty clear to me that this man didn't know much mathematics and he wasn't really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it home and did a little work. I finally showed him how to run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate.

[---]

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven't got enough manpower to move into a direction when that's exactly what you need to do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

- You and Your Research, Richard Hamming

Quote of the Day

It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights.

- Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

Quote of the Day

It does not make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do.

- Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.

- F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

Quote of the Day

Three-quarters of today’s youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another.

- Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

The 1-Hour Workday

First thing in the morning is when I'm at my mental best, and when I'm still most in control of my time, so I now use the first hour of my day to write. For me, it's best done from home. I've developed something of a ritual: I wake up early, make an espresso, and write until I'm spent—or until distractions like email or the day's deadlines and meetings start to intrude. This is usually about an hour, some days a little less and some days more. I've found that, like hitting a ball in golf, regular writing is easier if I tee it up. I plan my early morning writing the night before. It is in my calendar and on my to-do list, with details about which paper and section I will be working on.

This routine has transformed my work life. Instead of the frustration that frequently plagued me early in my career, now—no matter how work proceeds after I've completed my writing time—I go home at the end of the day with the satisfaction of having accomplished something.

I have in no way mastered the writing game, but my 1-hour workday has certainly increased my academic output. And by keeping me focused and in practice, it has improved the quality of my writing and made the process much more enjoyable. It also offers an opportunity for deep thinking. I remember rarely having any such thinking time when I started out as a professor, but now I find that my daily keystrokes can lead to new ideas. When I string together days of successful writing, ideas flow and new connections present themselves even when I'm away from my keyboard, particularly on my bike ride to work or when I'm reading for pleasure.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

What I’ve Been Reading

The art of rethinking and rediscovery, lies in questioning our ideas of authority, knowledge, judgement, right and wrong, and the process of rethinking itself. Ideas cannot be pinned down like butterflies: they come from people living and thinking though time, and are passed among us down the centuries. The same idea can be bad at one time and good at another. An idea can be bad in the sense of incorrect, but nonetheless good because it is the necessary stepping-stone to something better. More, generally, rethinking suggests than an idea can be good in the sense of useful, even if it is bad in the sense of wrong. It can be a placebo idea. Outrageously, it sometimes might not matter whether an idea is true or false. 

Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole. Message of the book is don’t ignore old ideas; lots of new ideas are refurbished from old discarded ideas.

Wow ! I learned so many “old-new” things from this small book. A must read for everyone; I promise you it will make you humble.  I mean, the book covers Presentism, Truthifiable, Falsifiablity, Panpsychism, Teleological, Free Will vs. Free Won’t etc.,  do you need more?

Great quote by Enno Schmidt:

I’m proud of this because to do something good, you have to a bit stupid in that moment. Being a bit stupid allows you to see more. Don’t be too intelligent - because then you can think of every possible objection. This might be summed up as “Don’t overthink,; rethink”. 

Why is it a taboo to talk about population? Is it because most people want kids? its ridiculous ! 

In response to a 2015 article about global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, for example, one reader wrote, “The world’s most difficult problems would be greatly ameliorated if we are able to reduce population, and this notion should be discussed.” By what means he thought that population ought to be “reduced” was, tellingly, left unsaid. Yet what Malthus actually wrote is far from the pessimistic misanthropy that is even today, usually unthinkingly, ascribed to him. 

Summary: 

Take an idea and see if it might be a black box (Lamarckism). Forget about whether an idea is true or false and consider its possible placebo effect (William James’s theory of emotion), or weather it is a necessary stepping-stone even if it might be wrong (dark energy). Ask whether an idea has been rejected not because it is stupid but because it would be a power-up (multilingual computer programming). Pay serious attention to the lease ridiculous option(panpsychism). Identify what we know we don’t know, to stimulate curiosity. Abandon common sense and bet against the market. Take another look at what seems too simple to work. Adopt the view from Tomorrow for an enlightening perspective on current thinking. The suspension of belief is a powerful engine of discovery, and of rediscovery. 

Quote of the Day

The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

- William Gibson

What I’ve Been Reading

As we get older, however, we have to present to the world a consistent identity. We have to play certain roles and live up to certain expectations. We have to trim and lop off natural qualities. Boys lose their rich range of emotions and in the struggle to get ahead, repress their natural empathy. Girls have to sacrifice their assertive sides. They are supposed to be nice, smiling, deferential, always considering other people’s feelings before their own. A woman can be a boss, but she must be tender and pliant, never too aggressive.

In this process, we become less and less dimensional; we conform to the expected roles of our culture and time period. We lose valuable and rich parts to our character. 

Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene.

I was expecting lots of repetition from his older books but I was wrong. This is treasure trove to be savored life long. I cannot even being to quote from this brilliant work.

Thank you Mr. Greene; only you can research extensively and write chapters like “Know Your Limits” and “Reconnect to the Masculine or Feminine Within You”.

Confront Your Dark Side:
We can never alter human nature through enforced niceness. The pitchfork doesn’t work. Nor is the solution to seek release for our Shadow in the group, which is volatile and dangerous. Instead the answer is to see our Shadow in action and become more self-aware. It is hard to project onto others our own secret impulses or over idealize some cause, once we are made aware of the mechanism operating within us. Through such self-knowledge we can find a way to integrate the dark side into our consciousness productively and creatively. In doing so we become more authentic and complete, exploiting to the maximum the energies we naturally process. 

See Through People’s Masks:
You must understand and accept the theatrical quality of life. You do not moralize and rail against the role-playing and the wearing masks so essential to smooth social functioning. In fact, your goal is to play your part on the stage of life with consummate skill attracting attention, dominating the limelight and making yourself into a sympathetic hero or heroine. Second, you must not be naive and mistake people’s appearances for reality. You are not blinded by people’s acting skills. You transform yourself into a master decoder for their true feelings, working on your observation skills and practicing them as much as you can in daily life. 

Know Your Limits: 
The greatest protection you have against grandiosity is to maintain a realistic attitude. You know what subjects and activities you are naturally attracted to. You cannot be skilled at everything. You need to play to your strengths and not imagine you can be great at whatever you put your mind to. You must have a solid grasp of your social position - your allies, the people with whom you have the greatest rapport, the natural audience for your work. You cannot please everyone. 

Beware The Fragile Ego:
Finally, it is worth cultivating moments in life in which we feel immense satisfaction and happiness divorced from our success or achievements. This happens commonly when we find ourselves in a beautiful landscape - the mountains, the sea, a forest. We do not feel the prying, comparing eyes to others, the need to have move attention or to assert ourselves. We simply in awe of what we see, and it is intensely therapeutic. This can also occur when we contemplate the immensity of the universe, the uncanny set of circumstances that had come together for us to be born, the vast reaches of time before us and after us. These are sublime moments, and as far removed from the pettiness and poisons of envy as possible

The Truth About Algorithms - Cathy O’Neil

The Truth About Algorithms | Cathy O’Neil from Nice Shit Studio on Vimeo.

Quote of the Day

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence.

[…]

There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen.

- The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

Fourth National Climate Assessment (Detail and Summary)

Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Extreme weather and climate-related impacts on one system can result in increased
risks or failures in other critical systems, including water resources, food production and distribution, energy and transportation, public health, international trade, and national security. The full extent of climate change risks to interconnected systems, many of which span regional and national boundaries, is often greater than the sum of risks to individual sectors. Failure to anticipate interconnected impacts can lead to missed opportunities for effectively managing the risks of climate change and can also lead to management responses that increase risks to other sectors and regions. Joint planning with stakeholders across sectors, regions, and jurisdictions can help identify critical risks arising from interaction among systems ahead of time.

- Read the full report here or the summary here

Wisdom Of The Week

The defining characteristic of economics in the 1950s is that the country got rich by making the poor less poor.

Average wages doubled from 1940 to 1948, then doubled again by 1963.

And those gains focused on those who had been left behind for decades before. The gap between rich and poor narrowed by an extraordinary amount.

[---]

The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely. The differences between his automobile and the poor man’s are minor. Essentially they have similar engines, similar fittings. In the early years of the century there was a hierarchy of automobiles.

Paul Graham wrote in 2016 about what something as simple as there only being three TV stations did to equalize culture:

It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.

This was important. People measure their well being against their peers. And for most of the 1945-1980 period, people had a lot of what looked like peers to compare themselves to. Many people – most people – lived lives that were either equal or at least fathomable to those around them. The idea that people’s lives equalized as much as their incomes is an important point of this story we’ll come back to.

- How This All Happened

Quote of the Day

What I’ve Been Reading

The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. 

[---] 

“It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than... to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.”

- Donald Hebb 

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky.

No kidding ! This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read in decades.

• It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. 
• Many of our best moments or morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization. 
• Individual no more exceptional than rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans. 

It’s impossible to summarize this book so here is simple yet profound last two thoughts from Sapolsky:

• If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “it’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates into something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but we realize that ...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent concludes the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably have also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasite disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, wardlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.   

• Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. 

Quote of the Day

Education can help us only if it produces "whole men." The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the "whole man," in fact, may have very little detailed knowledge of facts & theories...but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity.

- E.F. Schumacher

A Thanksgiving Story About The Limits Of Human Empathy: Tossing a Bird That Does Not Fly Out of a Plane

The town of Yellville in Arkansas has come to feel a touch bashful about its annual “Turkey Trot” weekend, when a dozen or so turkeys, which do not fly, are thrown from planes, which do, to the delight of many Yellville residents. “When you drop a turkey from hundreds of feet in the air, the panicked animals try to right themselves. Some catch a gust. Others do not. Some die when they hit the ground. Others survive with broken bones. Yet others are grievously injured when they are fought over by local kids. Some perish of apparent shock. A few, it is fair to note, are rattled, but physically unharmed.

- More Here

What I’ve Been Reading

We should be more concerned with the fragility of our civilization. 

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals  by Tyler Cowen.

The message - Economic growth is good but conscience is more important than that. Unlike his other books where he was very blunt; Tyler changed his tone to be more mellow. A thousand books have been written on this topic and not much changed. A change at a conscience level has to come at a fundamental level. This book doesn’t answer that and to be fair there is no straight forward answer either.

Economic growth does helps us focus on reducing suffering but history and current events has taught us human nature has much more deeper roots with infinitesimal and insatiable needs. But economic growth has been only path so far which has improved human and animal welfare albeit extremely slowly.

Tyler in his own style comes up with timeless one-liners:

• When it comes to most “small” policies affecting the present and the near-present only, we should be agnostic. 
• Policy should more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future. 

Tyler explains (in the appendix) why the ideas in the book cannot resolve animal welfare issues.

Quote of the Day

Prevalent in our society are some deep misconceptions about turkeys: that they lack intelligence, that they don’t have personalities, that there can be no kinship between humans and these animals who appear so very different from us. For eight years, Hildy walked up to people bearing such assumptions and completely disarmed them. No one who met this bright, charismatic bird could doubt that turkeys are individuals with minds, feelings, and unique characters – individuals with whom we can have connections, individuals with whom we can share friendship.

Hildy loved people. Partial to having her feathers stroked, she would sit with visitors for hours soaking up attention…Her best friends were fellow turkeys Kima, Rhonda, and Feather. They all adored spending time together and, when they weren’t at each other’s sides, would call out to one another to stay in touch. The companions loved to wander beneath the willow tree in the yard by their barn.

- 12 Reasons You May Never Want To Eat Turkey Again

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.

- Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

Quote of the Day

Humans Are So Immersed In Immorality That We Can Be Entirely Unaware Of It

Most of us are not like McMahan. We do not follow moral arguments if they lead to uncomfortable conclusions. We prefer to make ethical decisions based on instinct, popular wisdom, and whatever feels like the right response to a particular situation. It’s a mushy process—one that moral philosophers attempt to de-mush by laying out the myriad assumption and implications that are weaved into almost every human action, from how we spend our money to our relationships with family.

Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it.

Part of a moral philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical blind spots. “I do think we make moral progress in part by challenging our intuitions,” McMahan said.

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Though McMahan’s philosophical studies focus on clear-cut arguments, it’s impossible to shed personal preferences. Lurking behind this formal discussion of killing humanely-reared animals lies McMahan’s decision to go from being a hunter in South Carolina to a committed vegetarian. He made the choice as a teenager, after he saw a man wound a bird on a dove shoot.

“I remember this man walking in such a leisurely way towards this bird that was flapping across the ground trying to evade him,” he recalled. And so McMahan sold his gun and stopped hunting. A little later, his “first philosophical thought” turned him vegetarian: “I thought that if I wasn’t willing to kill these animals in order to eat them, I shouldn’t pay other people to kill them for me,” he added.

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Our instincts can lead us astray. But nothing would truly matter were it not for our deeply-felt, potentially irrational, emotional responses. The problem that McMahan and moral philosophy must face is how to integrate such intuitions into a solid theory. And for those of us facing ethical decisions in everyday life, we must tackle the same potentially unanswerable questions as McMahan, testing both our intuitions and our logic.

No great ethical conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers—or all people—easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic, and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the decisions we reach won’t be shallow.

It’s difficult work, and slow. McMahan plans to spend several days working solidly for 12 hours at a time on the question of meat-eating, reading others’ work and writing constantly. That’s just the beginning. “And then,” he said, “you just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can.”

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