Social Mode

The news is a maniacal scramble to make sense of the current financial situation around the world.

Predictions, ____ expert from _____ investment research firm, advice, soothsaying, modeling, bear vs. bull, Fed should do this, Fed shouldn’t do this…. and so on.

A truth I got comfortable with a long time ago but had reinforced over the last three weeks in my life.

Your model can only be as predictive as the thing you are modeling.

– Jason Cawley, Wolfram Research (and probably others…)

That’s a stupid statement, right? Duh. I know that.

Really think about it though. and then consider these things and your interpretation of them
- weather forecasts
- endless dow jones index reports
- Political polls
- compatibility tests in online dating
- SAT scores
- TSA profiling at airports
- Annual budgeting for businesses
- Or go through the latest in the news
All of these “indicators” attempt to predict complex systems/situations. Those systems have to show some stability, some simplicity to ever give way to useful prediction (useful = do you get info you can use elsewhere and with enough time/energy to use it).

There is potential to get some local or short term prediction due to local or short term stability. However, to effectively use that over time you need to be able to predict when that stability yields to a new pattern. That is where it gets difficult.

Yes, you can aggregate a lot of these indicators to produce some sort of statistical sample. Usually though, you’re simply hiding the intesting stuff in the errors in your statistical model. Washing out the outliers as “noise”. The problem is, especially in the indicators above, it’s the outliers that matter! But I digress…

Point for financial pundits: national and global economics itself is complex. no simple model, simple statement, simple index can accurately model it. not even poorly.

Agree or Disagree? Let’s have a discussion.
Predictability in Finance

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Jul 16
This is one fun little theorem.

Basically… if symbolic systems terminate (program halts/gives output), the terminating expression is independent of how the rules were applied.

You get “confluence” out of this.

You probably are thinking, “and so what does this have to do with my life?”

a) maybe nothing if arithmetic never enters your life (unlikely)

b) it’s extremely good to know when you use functional programming that you can get to the same answer with many different ways of writing something. For good overview of functional programming, go here.

Church Rosser Theorem

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Jul 16
Rather than expend energy writing my own general overview of what the heck just happened at summer school I’ll just link to this wrap up from the Wolfram team.

Sure, I’ll have far more details in upcoming posts, though most of those details will involve actual math, code, projects and implications and less about the school experience.

~Russ

NKS Summer School – The Follow Up Post 1

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Jul 15
Recently, for a variety of interesting and uninteresting reasons the logic driving the selection of my projects and company affliations warrants explanation. Why?

Well, you, the reader/partner/associate, can decide if my explanations pertain to you, matter to you or make any sense at all. Most likely this exposition concerns me alone – a letter to myself. I figured that we’re all not so different though – so perhaps you, too, struggle in finding or creating projects that matter to you and this essay might help you in your processes.

I value projects and experiences with non-trivial consequences.

I think of consequences as both direct outcomes as well as side effects, learnings, connections and follow on projects.

Non-trivial is the crucial concept here. Non-trivial is somewhat hard to define as you almost have to assign that status to a consequence retrospectively. Let me leave that concept alone for a moment and instead focus on the trivial.

Trivial consequences in projects and business include:
- Money alone – getting rich to get rich, getting rich as the only outcome
- Fame alone – fame for fame’s sake
- Career Move – an outcome that only moves a career forward regardless of the other consequences
- Isolated Impact – it impacts you and you alone
- 1000 Monkeys – an outcome so trivial that a 1000 monkeys in a short amount of time could produce the same result
- 1 Monkey – worse than a 1000 monkeys is 1 monkey “in the right place and the right time regardless of experience or skill” could produce the outcome
- Been Done Before – an old project with a new audience does not add value (usually)
- Time and Space Dependence – a non repeatable “stuck in time” outcome. i.e. pet rocks in the 80s.
- Can’t Explain To Mom – a project that doesn’t impact mom or is too embarassing to tell mom usually is trivial
- and combinations of any or all of the above.
Generally projects and companies with trivial consequences are easy to spot. Thought experiments following the format “suppose this all worked out perfectly” generally reveal whether the basic consequences would be trivial.

I certainly have knowingly worked on projects and companies with trivial consequences. Generally I work in such situations if the methods (work) is appropriately trivial (cost effective). In fact, I cannot avoid, nor do I think anyone can avoid, a certain amount of trivial work – its often the trivial work that pays the bills in the short term. Also, trivial work serves as practice or warm up or learning steps to non-trivial work.

The challenge involves avoiding trivial consequences requiring non-trivial methods. Many projects require elaborate set ups and execution (and generally a lot of people). Finding simple ways to do things is very difficult (it requires thought! and practice!). However, more damaging to the pursuit of non-trivial consequences is our (my!) confusion between methods (the pursuit, the work) and the consequences (the outcome, the goals). I often fall into the trap of “if the work is hard, the outcome must matter!” Wrong! … usually.

In short, I do trivial work if and only if the methods are or can be made trivial (usually through the use of a computer or sub contracting).

And now the hard stuff! Non-trivial outcomes can be hard to predict. The metrics for non-trivialness are not obvious nor standardized. The outcomes typically maintain challenging contingencies and/or are the result of hard to spot initial conditions.

This much I’ve identifed about non-trivialness in projects:
- There is a barrier to entry/getting started – usually not monetary barrier – it is a skill, experience, concept barrier
- The number of people potentially impacted is not small, that is, there is a generalization possible
- Cut and Paste Is Not Enough – it is not a simple repackaging or reordering – synthesis or genesis must be involved
- Unknown personal impact – you cannot predict its rebounding impact on you (your methods, your personal network, your experience)
- Discomfort – it involves a level of discomfort, a struggle, a slight doubt about whether you can pull it off
- Beauty – there is something beautiful in the methods and the result. Perhaps a cleanliness or cleverness or visual beauty or structure – hard to define in words but easy to spot, hear, taste, feel.
Amazingly, non-trivial results often do not require non-trivial executions. I can think of our best modern example – Google PageRank. Hugely impactful and can be explained in laymans terms in one page. I have many other examples for interested people (and, no, most of them are not computer or internet related!)

I suppose we can evaluate whether the original question or problem statement generating a project or company is trivial or non-trivial. Usually though I do not see much correlation between the original question and the eventual execution. I prefer to look at the current state of affairs to judge trivialness. Again, we have many examples where the original question is quite trivial but the results are not or the eventual executed project is not (see James Burke’s “Connections” series for a fun exposition of such phenomenon)

I want to attack the idea of “homeruns” in business head on. Many people seek the big idea in business, the big success, the huge windfall. I conjecture most pursuits of the business homerun fail because the Get Rich outcome is trivial. It is trivial to Get Rich in method and outcome. Where does fortune alone lead? If I had a big bag of money, what would I do with it? Methods of just getting rich are tried and true – sell sex, invest in stocks, drugs, organized crime, arbitrage (fuel, clicks, tickets), corporate ladder hopping and variations on those themes. Many people engage in these things – usually without knowing how trivial it is (so they do a lot of work!). This is not for me.

Homeruns in business, the kind I like, are not predifined. I don’t think “homerun” has a generally applicable definition. I don’t know the distance to the fence. I don’t even know if I’m playing baseball. (metaphors suck so lets drop them.) Point is… I don’t look for what is an obvious business success because if it were obvious (a) everyone is already doing it (b) it’s probably not as successful as it appears.

The key effort for business sucess seems to be in creation of value through conversion of resources. Can I take my raw materials (experience, insight, networks, handiwork) and produce something people will buy or rent? That is, can you take something without a price (that isn’t already in monetary/market form) and get the market to price it (value it)? Yes, there’s a way to make money by reducing the cost of something that already has a price and so forth. Again, that is trivial in most cases (though there are cases where reduction of cost is not a trivial task and the reduction in price resulting takes something with small impact to a very wide audience). Again, for some margin management works for them. For me it does not.

Defining and refining the project selection strategy is non-trivial and this is not my final effort. The methods are trivial – write it down, test it, edit, test, repeat. (oh, and don’t go broke while testing project selection / creation strategies!)
Projects and Companies with Non-Trivial Consequences

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Jul 8
Chris Anderson is at it again… stirring the pot with big claims that are hard to falsify but seem to generate a huge amount of discussion with smart people. Check out some of the discussion. Or maybe read the article first.

Here’s an excerpt:

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about “dominant” and “recessive” genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton’s laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility. In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

And where does Anderson suppose all these statistical algorithms come from? Think about it. The statistical algorithms have come from “old science”. We came up with statistics as a way model things – to compress our data. If we simply use these algos without ever obtaining understanding and testing models how can you validate that your statistical models/algos are good at finding correlations? You can’t! This point alone is enough to dismiss Anderson’s “non theory” (or is it a theory?). Read on if you want more commentary.

Certainly there are some tidbits of useful insight, however, his call for the end of science as we know it hardly withstands much thought.

a) Google doesn’t know as much as everyone claims

b) Correlation is not enough for understanding. If all we are going to do after the end of theory is act on correlations of intervening variables (i.e. variables/metaphoros that aren’t at the root of a phenomenon but are associated), we will get further and futher from understanding “the thing”. That’s ok in business and some technical situations where you want to cut corners (understanding isn’t important) but would be horribly catastrophic in medical procedures, genetic work, rocketry, etc. etc.

c) Models are useful. In fact, Anderson employs Google as a model to communicate his ideas. Models aren’t the thing, and most serious thinkers never claim they are. Models help to organize thinking and direct research, but they do not substitute for the phenomenon. Yes, in new investigations our models are somewhat off, but it an uncountable set of situations our models are highly accurate, useful and consistently employed. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the many models of the world we all use every day to great effect.

d) No doubt the computational ability we have at our finger tips will help to uncover things we never saw before. That’s always been the case with new technology. The better the technology the further we can see, the smaller we can disect, the more we can crunch… how is the advance of the computer any different? It’s not! Think about it.

e) Exhaustive search efforts (massive data mining) like the ones he sites from Venter and others has been going on for decades. There’s no big shift in the future. The more we can computer the bigger datasets we’ll work on and we’ll still see things just out of our computational reach. This is a proven fact. The universe has been computing and generating data for a very long time and we are not going to catch it seeing as how we’re PART OF IT.

f) I suspect Anderson woke up one morning to his own realizations about the usefulness of datamining. Meanwhile the rest of us have been taken advantage of new technologies and ever increasing data storage for a very long time (in fact, pretty much since the inception of science…)

Anderson is a good writer and a bad scientist. Oh well, life and science and journalism carry on….

The End of Theory?

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Jul 4
Make no mistake.

These things were not said in this fashion and were not said in this manner in an interview between Mind Matters editor, Jonah Lehrer and neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni in American Scientist magazine.

What you have here is a reinterpretation of the article as it appeared in American Scientist magazine – with my edits and additions. Deletions do not show up because they don’t make for a cogent flow of the main idea that I noted in 2006 when this research broke…

…MIRROR NEURONS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY IN SCIENCE SINCE THE PERIODIC TABLE…

[or…] = Square parentheses are all JHB’s

So, here goes…

~~~~~~~~

Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni discusses mirror neurons, autism and the potentially damaging effects of violent movies.

Mind Matters – July 1, 2008

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism. His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research.

LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?

IACOBONI:

I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life.

LEHRER: Take us inside a social interaction. How might mirror neurons help us understand what someone else is thinking or feeling?

IACOBONI: What do we do when we interact? We use our body to communicate our intentions and our feelings. The gestures, facial expressions, body postures we make are social signals, ways of communicating with one another. Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions. They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. [One can speculate that…]

the way mirror neurons likely [operate] related to others is by providing some kind of [bridging of the relationships between some specific cues – unspecified – and sensorimotor activation where the sensory information is visual rather than muscular. By attending to those cues] of the actions of other [organisms allows for the test organism to] “simulate” the [actions of the trainer organism. It is presumed that with that neuromuscular activity there is a parallel emotional component or as Iacoboni refers to it] “intentions and emotions associated with those actions.” When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling [presumed to exist] fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes [whatever feelings have been conditioned to the smiling of a stranger interviewing me about an idea that not everyone could possible comprehend the way I do – smile or…] the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly [experience my form of smile that’s related to my neurons through conditioning or through parallel imitation of a different set of mirror neurons] (in a milder form, of course) [that is presumed to be like] what you are experiencing.

LEHRER: In 2006 your lab published a paper in Nature Neuroscience

linking a mirror neuron dysfunction to autism. How might reduced mirror neuron activity explain the symptoms of autism? And has there been any progress on this front since 2006?

IACOBONI: Patients with autism have hard time understanding the mental states of other people; [they also have a hard time with language and eye gaze and eye-hand coordination to mention a few other deficits;] this is why [one reason at least] social interactions are not easy for these patients. Reduced mirror neuron activity obviously weakens [lowers, reduces, impairs, inhibits, gates, blocks, etc. ] the ability of these patients to experience immediately and effortlessly what other people are experiencing, [these connections between the things going on in the environment and their uptake of what’s going on in the environment] thus making social interactions particularly difficult for these patients.

[Alternatively, the lack of the mirror neurons reduces the initial conditions or blocks the secondary conditioning that some imply exists in the actions of motor behavior and internal emotions related to that motor behavior. These two or twenty things don’t get paired mysteriously in autistic people. They get paired and strengthened by many pairings over time in non-autistic people. Those pairings fit a learning paradigm of conditioning and, lacking that conditioning over time, may be the deficit that we observe in the autistic people.] Patients with autism have also often motor problems and language problems. It turns out that a deficit in mirror neurons can in principle explain also these other major symptoms [as outlined above as learning paradigms]. The motor deficits in autism [are involved] because mirror neurons are special types of premotor neurons, brain cells essential for planning and selecting actions. It has been also hypothesized that mirror neurons may be important in language evolution and language acquisition. [While people that have hearing loss at very early age show some similar speech deficits as found in some autistic people, it can be corrected by speech therapy at a later date if the loss is corrected. It will be interesting to see if, with the ignition of related speech mirror neurons, the speech deficits of autistic people can be repaired or if there is some ‘critical period’ in development that is needed for speech development to proceed optimally.] Indeed, a human brain area that likely contains mirror neurons overlaps with a major language area, the so-called Broca’s area. Thus, a deficit in mirror neurons can in principle account for [involvement in]

three major symptoms of autism; the social, motor and language problems.

LEHRER: If we’re wired to automatically internalize the movements and mental states of others [wooo Nelly… that is a hypothetical construct that gets headlines but has not been demonstrated since ‘mental’ states are impossible to define across indiviuals and empirically… Ok, point taken, but given it is just one-for-one as empirically demonstrated,.. ]

then what does this suggest about violent movies, television programs, video games, etcetera? Should we be more careful about what we watch?

IACOBONI: I believe we should be more careful about what we watch. This is a tricky argument; of course, because it forces us to reconsider our long cherished ideas about free will and may potentially have repercussions on free speech. There is convincing behavioral evidence linking media violence with imitative violence. Mirror neurons provide a plausible neurobiological mechanism that explains why being exposed to media violence leads to imitative violence. What should we do about it? Although it is obviously hard to have a clear and definitive answer, it is important to openly discuss this issue and hopefully reach some kind of “societal agreement” on how to limit media violence without limiting (too much) free speech. [Otherwise, we’ll have to deal with the consequences that exist and humans have excelled at doing for millions of years.]

LEHRER: Are you worried about mirror neurons getting over-sold or over-hyped?

IACOBONI: I am a bit concerned about that. The good news is, the excitement about mirror neurons reveals that people have an intuitive understanding of how neural mechanism for mirroring work. [Yes, it also reveals that we are in new areas here and that perhaps a new form of conditioning has been uncovered that makes sense biologically, environmentally and genetically. Will it evolve and will it shed light on other things we don’t like to deal with like free will, conditioning, determinism, causality, and responsibility? Yes, it may but that is not the primary concern of science for many scientists. The primary concern is to find out “how things work out there.”] When told about this research, they can finally articulate what they already “knew” at some sort of pre-reflective level. However, the hype can backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity. I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition. The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

The original interview can be found @:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-mirror-neuron-revolut

Mirror Neurons – a fictionalized interview…

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Jul 2
If the universe (our experience, our lives, our physical reality) weren’t complex (unpredictable, undecidable) what would it be?

This is not rhetorical question.

It is not easy either.

Can you imagine an alternative?

It would be useful if we could so we can go look for evidence of the thing you imagine. Why would we do this? The growing research in “complexity” and “complex systems” make some assumptions based on irreducibility, computation equivalence and so forth that suggest less complex things are not capable of universal computation, and in some sense, the ability to evolve ever more interesting/complex things, like our universe.

My Only MetaPhysical Question I Ask Legitimately

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Jul 2
Have you ever had a period where the events and your surroundings conspired to mash together perfectly to take you away from your ordinary, usual, rarified and all too cool reality you live – transporting you to a level that is literally “whelming”? …You ever had that? I have. I am doing it again; perhaps because I was lucky enough to be nursed on my wits edge, perhaps because of a teraflop of things. Now, the point is, this is all primal to me. Yet, it always seems to hit me by surprise because it is primal.

Tonight was no exception. It goes something like this – in an out-of-body kinda way…

Weeks of anticipation funnel to an inevitable point.    Then, in a “pop” like clearing your ears from a redeye flight, it‘s here. You walk in, bold front and quivering ass not aware that you’re not breathing. At that exact moment, or the one before it, or the one before that one, you know this is the time and this is the place… you just aren’t sure for ‘what’.

A couple times before when your comfort zone was this small you didn’t know whether to wither, laugh, cry or throw up? ‘This is good’ you muse. You’ve taken steps to put yourself here physically that escalated from some intellectually ripe overture where you assessment that this could be an “interesting” gig.   Now, you’re off the access road and you’re finally here and they‘re waiting. You are generating some pretty raw emotions being ‘in the moment’; experiences that are frightening and exhilarating but devoid of references. There is nothing around you you can hold on to that will anchor some familiarity with this unfamiliarity. Yah, you’ve been center stage before, done your lines with confidence and rocked ‘em.   No script for this one though…

You’d done all the preparation, the really hard stuff, the stuff that seemed hard until you were standing there with rock star level names cooking this new visual brew without a recipe. “How’d they do that?” Mouths moved but sound came and went like a dolphin fin in the surf.

Then, while you weren’t looking, it happened. Suddenly, a conversation where the language had only three or six foreign words in it slaps you. They are talking to you. Even though it makes no sense how it made sense, you go with it. This epic was morphing before you and blurring the shadowed hallways behind you.   Now, it was natural to be there…

Stuff like that ever happen to you? I hope you know ‘about’ what I’m trying to explain.   If not, I hope you will. I think you know that when it happens to you, you’ll be different. And that’s always hard to explain. You’ll try; maybe more than once. You’ll be silent for a long time sifting and shifting through meta context that your head blows over your tongue only to be unrecognizable coming out of your mouth. No, the cliché doesn’t work… “…you’d have to be there!” No, because that would change it; your personal epic spike. Your soul mate, your mom and your hero’s can’t be there.   You’re not sure you’ll ever be able to explain what they missed. Another kind of loneliness.

Damn, this Red Bull can is cold…

Dry mouth personal epic spike – queue the music…

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Jun 27
An Interesting Cellular Automata

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Jun 24
I found this story on Slashdot. The dude has a good approach. It’s a messy world with more questions than answers.

“I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It’s called “corporate anthropology”, but personally I’m more comfortable with “design research“, because I’m not an anthropologist by training. We’re interested in design and in how what we design affects people’s lives. The tough part of the job is using the data we collect to inform and inspire how my colleagues think, and in turning this research into new ideas.”

What great insights for Nokia and designers!

The more our products live along side us/merge with us the more important this field research and understanding of real use becomes.

This is not focus grouping – which are usually unrealistic lab set ups where people are not in the same occasion/setting for their regular behaviors. Experiencing how people use technology in their regular environments is very different than your typical focus group survey or focus group lab. (man, we could write whole publications on the value (or lack thereof) of focus groups)

Why I really like this story and Nokia’s approach… that’s what I do. That’s what this blog (and the research, thinking, and posts you don’t see) are all about. Commercial anthropology. Observing the world, recording behavior and figuring out better questions to ask and putting insights to work in media, software development, and corporate strategy.

Corporate Anthropology

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Jun 20