Arrested progress

As the world’s largest democracy breaks tradition from last name based idiocy, it has significant obstacles in front of it. Often high on pride but less to show for it, the country has been put on a back burner by its compassionate leaders who followed failed systems of the East, driving a population of over a billion to near desperation for long. Socialism coupled with corruption, is a potent cocktail that poisoned an entire society while a few erected 50 story homes at the heart of pain and tribulation. What could be more ironic than a country driven to the highest segregation of wealth by its “socialistic” leaders.

Now, it apparently breaks away from its secular roots, a step backward in time, but consistent with its tradition of paranoia bred from constant inundation of foreign invasion for centuries. A society that is arranged by class, neatly dimensioned in every conceivable direction – religion, caste, color, language and physical proportion – has elevated some who have preferences for religion, a concept that even modern societies find difficult to pull away from. With Gods aplenty in every slice of society even if nearly a third go to bed hungry, it has remained an enigma for anybody who is interested in societies.

Will the next leader rise to the present and pull the country out of its torturous past? It is a long shot.

Quantum consciousness

A recent paper from the University of Auckland claims, “a potential mechanism for the conscious brain to anticipate impending opportunities and threats to survival through massively parallel weak quantum measurement (MPWQM) induced by the combined effects of edge of chaos sensitivity and phase coherence sampling of brain states. It concludes that the underpinnings of this process emerged in single-celled eucaryotes in association with (a) excitability-induced sensitivity to electro-chemical perturbations in the milieu as an anticipatory sense organ and (b) cell-to-cell signaling necessary for critical phases in the life cycle.”

Although the paper is weak on evidence, it does open an interesting avenue for research. The coordinated hypothesis of evolutionary, biological and physical basis of consciousness may remain untestable but it is a satisfying thought experiment, at the very least. Those who live, may be assigning too much value to life and to consciousness but consciousness, one has to admit, has very nice properties to it. And, if it does merge into anticipation with such forecasts emanating from electro-chemical perturbations and cell-to-cell signaling at the fundamental level, it does make it more interesting to think about. More importantly, it may open new avenues to study societal consciousness, in higher order species. The complexity of the organism appears to be inversely correlated to societal consciousness with single cell organisms exhibiting highest competence. Massively parallel systems seem to require consistency at the elemental level to induce and sustain societal consciousness and this may be a subtle sign that if quantum effects are at play, they are unlikely to transfer to complex, non-uniform and non-modular systems.

Extrapolating from stable and uniform networked systems to complex organisms may be a mistake. However, it is, indeed, a good thought experiment.

Cosmic blunder

Recent findings from Stanford University and the University of Chicago seem to confirm the “inflation theory.” Conformists are not deterred by the fact that the “signal” is much stronger than what would be forecasted by the theorists. Yet again, we have the classic case of “believe and prove,” and if the proof is a bit stronger, that is for the best. Institutions of higher learning should have higher standards - papers and the ever anticipated Nobel prizes cannot be the reason.

Cosmic inflation has fascinated many – academic and otherwise. Most students know that their education will be less valuable if they are allowed to “plug” something into an equation, just to make it work. But not for the best physicists of the day – if the data show that one drove from Chicago to Dallas in 6 hours, the “only explanation” has to be that she “inflated” through Southern Illinois, for the concept of time, space and the speed of the car are absolute. How is this any different from religious beliefs who academics tend to scorn. Why is it so difficult to believe that Christ simply rose from the cave and would return in the future. Is that belief any different from “cosmic inflation,” that is now proven albeit the effect is a bit “stronger than predicted.”

Physics is declining to a level comparable to religion. A hypothesis, once stated, will be proven with certainty – those still holding out for uncertainty, do it at their own peril. No Nobel prizes to follow.

Radicals

Recent research from McGill seems to prove the opposite to conventional wisdom – free radicals or oxidants – increase longevity, casting a long and dark shadow over the anti-oxidant industry. This is further proof that medical research is progressing backward looking to avoid incremental harm while missing out on substantial benefits. Humans, trained to see and analyze trees as a species, often miss the forest.

Biological systems present the ultimate tease to the shallow human brain, steeped in deterministic and engineering know-how – an unavoidable outcome of constant optimization in the presence of clear and simple objective functions. Sunrise signaled the beginning of the day and they knew they had less than ten hours to hunt, collect and compact within a territory that is well marked. They will start again the next if the nocturnal beings do not invade the cave. They could do this for over five thousand times, if they avoid strong animals and stronger plant toxins in their progress to certain  and unavoidable destiny. Stupidity and ego would force them to overshoot what was attainable, shrinking them to less than a few thousand in the narrow part of the bottleneck.

Humans were never equipped with the skills to understand themselves. They comprise systems of such non-linearity, their engineering brains never had any hope of discerning themselves. It is ironic that the ultimate knowledge that will fail the humans is understanding themselves.

The economics of a disaster

Ever since the metal tube vanished off the Asian skies, there has been a flurry of activities. The talking heads on the cable news network – some living in flight simulators for months, some parading an impressive array of “experts,” who repeat a few lines less adeptly than trained parrots, some worrying about black holes and others the lack of use of psychics in the search process, wolfs, jackals and green screen men – all came out ahead. The equipment manufacturers and service providers of search – sporting blue shrimp, whale and other such aquatic beings – all came out ahead. Those went looking for the black box and heard pings, here, there and nowhere – all came out ahead. The captains, admirals, security officials and their handlers – all came out ahead. Environmentalists, buoyed by sea garbage, found yet another cause to cry and shout, came out ahead. Politicians and leaders of countries – able to look and act like a leader and win bonus points from next year’s electorate, came out ahead. The engineers and data scientists who cut, diced and killed data to find the “final resting place,” came out ahead.

Was it incompetence or just merely for the show?  Who lost? The families of those lost in sea and the taxpayers who funded a grand show for nothing.

Data rich, analysis poor

A recent research (1) that shows studying the effects of drugs on yeast could inform drug interaction effects on humans, is revealing. Life sciences companies have lagged in the use of rich data they have collected from past studies. Although the yeast studies are potentially revealing, there is significantly more information hiding in the data from past experiments on humans.

Drug interactions are important from multiple perspectives – some indicating a reduction in efficacy and others showing enhanced toxicity. The yeast studies show interactions between drugs at very high levels, albeit in a different biological entity. The tendency of life science companies to collect “hard data,” holds them back. Every other industry is using data better to predict, act and optimize. It is ironic that the industry that thrives on data is bringing up the rear of analytics.

More importantly, we are fast approaching a regime in which personal efficacy and toxicity could be reliably predicted by individual. One could slow down innovation but it is unlikely that big pharma can escape the coming revolution in data analytics.

(1) Large-scale identification and analysis of suppressive drug interactions, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute

The sky distraction

Many have been worried about light pollution that obscures the sky and some have gone as far as speculating that the inability of city folks to view the stars overhead is eating into the human psyche. Those who have burned the midnight oil in North America to view the total lunar eclipse recently may be comforted by the fact that there are three more to follow soon. The sky is indeed interesting, but there are more interesting ideas to think about. Watching the sky is not going to change anything – thinking about what could be out there, may.

Conventional education methods have stressed such mediocre attempts to understand science – a trip to the planetarium and a stroll down to the backyard pond – on the premise that seeing, touching and feeling stuff will enhance understanding. In a world of accelerating abstract knowledge, such practicality comes with a huge cost. Real astrophysicists do not “look up” and real biologists are not enamored by the Petri dish. Knowledge comes from imagination and not by verifiable experiments. Mechanics and experimentalism can only sustain the status-quo and not advance it.

So, next time somebody implores you “to look up” to the heavens to learn, think about how much more could be learned by just looking down.

Optimized tactical death

A recent article in the Journal of Sociology speculates that as much as 1 billion people around the world could be living in poverty – on as little as $1 per day. The brain of humans, still by far the most important and scarce resource on Earth, has been sub optimized on every dimension. Lifting humanity from the abyss of ignorance could be the most strategic of actions any individual, organization or country could take. However, most are engaged in the tactical optimization of segmented wealth and presumed utility, they are unlikely to ever see the big picture.

Humans have been enigmatic. They seem to carry an organ of depth on their shoulders but most seem unaware of it. Most do not know that there are seven billion clones of themselves spread across the blue planet. They carry virtually the same genes – a quirk of a bottleneck that humanity encountered nearly hundred thousand years ago. But they spend most of their time reinforcing their boundaries and raising impenetrable walls across countries, religions, color, education and wealth. It appears rational if the objective function is dominated by material wealth but utterly incomprehensible if it extends into utility, happiness and knowledge.

One cannot underestimate humans – they fought their entire existence for things of no value. They are unlikely to move beyond the shackles of their own experiences and ignorance. They will optimize tactically and then perish.

Parallel handicap

Recent research from Microsoft “Research” and “MIT” apparently demonstrates more efficient ways to utilize multi-core computers through parallel processing. As the world turns over craving for more processing power, demanded by “data scientists” and “rules machines,” it is time that the “computer scientists” found ways to produce machines that crunch more efficiently.

They don’t. Media labs and AI labs aside, on both coasts and the Melon in between, there has been more hype than what could be doled out by a used car saleswoman. Personal computers arrived 35 years ago – a life time in the historical timescale of humans – and it has not changed the world. Engineers have never been creative and hyped engineers are worse as they portray incremental failures as advancement and self-driving cars as a game changer. What they don’t seem to understand and likely never will, is that even if cars drive themselves and drones fly at will overhead, they do not make much of a difference to the 7 billion humans across the world.

Massively parallel processed machines – envisioned by those with creative minds decades ago, held hostage by the constraints of “chip design,” may be unwinding. It is certainly not comforting to imagine that the mediocrity, more interested in publishing papers than inventing, will never make it happen.

Policy reversal

As somebody who attempted to study classical economics, I never supported raising the minimum wages. Although the prince of Princeton and his grandfather from Cambridge proclaim that all the world’s ills could be cured by simply borrowing money and burying it in the ground, intuition should tell any normal thinking human that it sounds just a bit too easy. After all, those who experience a hang over know well that only time and headaches could cure. And, basic economics instructs that profit motive in an efficient market system has the best chance of optimizing societal utility. Raising the minimum wages, almost fully concocted by the liberal economists, stand in stark contrast to the ideas of the champion of wealth redistribution.

However, I am now ready to reverse this belief – not because that the “other side” had it right but rather, I missed something much more subtle. As the airwaves are filled with the moans and groans to save the middle class, one has to wonder what the middle class actually do. For example, in the middle of a large company, one finds the “middle-managers,” who follow the constructs handed over to them from the industrial revolution. They watch over the “workers” as they build automobiles and industrial food as if such “watching” actually improves the productivity of the system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. They drain shareholder value and give those who actually produce value, a bad name.

In spite of the popular belief that the “top 1 %” actually work very hard, paying most of the taxes and many hardly make “minimum wages,” if you actually count the effort that goes into building companies and new ideas. And, the bottom 50% also work extremely hard and if they are given the right incentives to live and work could substantially improve the productivity of the nation. In the middle, we have incompetence – just as in large companies. They go to work adorned in suites and ties but contributes much less to society. In this context, raising the minimum wages will shock the system and ferret out the middle layer in companies and societies – fat, happy and incompetent. It will drive the owners of firms to question their organizational structures and it may substantially increase labor participation and thus lift the GDP.

Those who argue for a hike of minimum wages may have had it right but for the wrong reasons.

Dark ages of aviation

Aviation is considered to be one of a few technological discontinuities of the last century along with the computer and the internet. The duopoly in commercial aircraft manufacturing, however, seems to have significantly dampened the technology slope with new products sporting incremental improvements with little impact on overall speed, safety and convenience. The long metal tube with wings on the side has been the design choice for over 100 years. Packing humans like sardines in a can has been the mode of operation for the airlines. Consulting companies had projected “tremendous growth” for the tin cans, extrapolating from population growth and other such metrics.

The intelligentsia has been worried about the discontinuity for decades now. As a past president boldly proclaimed to go where nobody has gone – Mars, he thought he was ushering in a new generation of innovation. Nothing can be further from the truth. As mediocrity creeps into every educational institution, bringing up the next generation with little passion and lesser creativity -  every company, whether they are curing death, inventing self driving cars or constructing grocery and books delivering drones, humanity is sinking into a lesser state. They had no chance to advance the heart and now their brain is atrophying with no imagination.

As a few hundred souls rest at the bottom of the ocean, one has to wonder if the discontinuity one should be worrying about is the wrong kind.

Intelligence handicap

Humans have been handicapped with a huge quantum computer they carry on their shoulders. The miracle machine, that may house as much as a billion qbits, has been bored out of its wits for over fifty thousand years. The best physical systems could come close to replicating is a million times less powerful. It may be truly ironic if the species gets wiped out before it understands what it may have been capable of.

Excess capacity has been costly in most situations. In the case of humans, they have been endowed with an organ, they could never truly understand. A quirk in the objective function obscured intelligence and presented useless constructs such as ego and wealth that drive most of the seven billion specimens across the blue planet. Some have put down reluctance of adherence to conventional expectations as disease and many have attempted to bridge the chasm with chemicals treating the brain.

If intelligence is a handicap, then a favorable direction of evolution is less of it. And, that will likely minimize pain for humanity.

Noisy trials

A recent study in the European Heart Journal that shows that the common wisdom that high HDL has a protective positive effect on cardiovascular health could be wrong, is a warning signal to traditional medicine, handicapped with normality statistics and decades long practice of small randomized trials. As many other disciplines prove routinely, including the mathematically pure Physics, once stated, a hypothesis is easy to prove. And, as everybody knows, economists can prove pretty much anything including the Princeton hypothesis that 100 Trillion in US debt will cure all the world’s ills. Medicine, has been lagging for decades – driven by the collection and use of noise from limited observations to satisfy regulators blinded by ignorance and institutionalism.

Mendelian randomization (MR) that combines genetic information with clinical observations is in the right direction. But till the industry realizes that normality statistics have lured them into conclusions that are utterly wrong, it will continue on the well-trodden and disastrous path. With little market feedback, the scientists are unlikely to see the emergence of black swans or the assumption that white swans walk in a straight line is wrong – and this will continue to propel them into bringing incremental therapies to market with little patient benefit. In the financial market, incompetence is rewarded by bankruptcy but in science, generally, incompetence is rewarded with prizes as the lack of feedback let those adept at data manipulation rise to the top.

Statistics – may have led humans astray in most fields with complex non-linear effects – such as Physics, Medicine and Economics. The engineers, who are happy with this conventional tool, may ultimately end up leading everybody else into dead-end alleys.

Mathematical beauty

A recent paper in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal shows that the region of the brain – medial orbito-frontal cortex – is uniformly involved in the assessment of beauty, whether it is in art, music or mathematics. In a study where mathematicians rated formulae on a beauty scale, their brain activity seem to correlate with such assessments in other pursuits, including art and music. This fundamental and universal neuro-biological basis to beauty, possibly points to humans seeking elegance in abstract constructs and equating such a notion to beauty. Humans appear to generally crave for mathematical elegance, perhaps because elegance takes the least amount of energy to understand, imagine and internalize. Elegance, thus, is the most energy efficient sensation – something that is intuitively pleasing and inherently memory-forming – characteristics that are wrapped into a more complex construct of beauty. In this context, perhaps beauty can be measured by the overall entropy of sensation – lower entropy indicating higher beauty.

In a world, mired in complexity, nearly every field is rushing to higher order solutions to marginal problems. In the process, they create truly ugly solutions, creating chaos but not much else. In business, collecting big noise and crunching them with big computers in anticipation of insights is ugly. In Physics, nurturing the particle zoo and constructing heavy steel to smash particles in anticipation of the validation of the stated hypothesis is ugly. In medicine, mass manufacturing of the same dose pills and shoving them down the throats of willing patients is ugly. In economics, the complex dance between monetary and fiscal policies, fine tuning in anticipation of growth and inflation is ugly. In politics, the bureaucratic friction among the institutions of yesteryear that would not allow effective modern policies is ugly.

Elegance is beauty. Complexity is ugly.

The decision arbitrator

A recent study from Caltech provides tantalizing clues into decision processes employed by humans. Using experimental results, the study hypothesizes that distinct parts of the brain control habits and goal oriented behaviors and that there is an arbitrator region that makes an eventual decision after comparing these potentially conflicting signals. After the arbitrator receives the two signals (decisions), it selects the one that has the highest probability of success given the problem at hand. The authors propose selective activation or inhibition of these regions as well as the manipulation of the optimization logic used by the arbitrator, could result in more effective medicines for brain diseases.

Better understanding of how the brain circuitry works in making decisions is also useful in the design of business processes and complex organizations. Modern companies and technologies require decision-makers to substantially side-step their evolution driven logic engines. Making decisions under significant uncertainty requires logic that does not fit into habits or goal orientation. With the arbitrator lacking historical parallels to modern problems, it is likely to proxy the current unfamiliar situation with a combination of unrelated past episodes, leading to bad decisions, routinely. Multi-factorial uncertainty is indeed a new experience for modern humans and all indications are that they are perpetuating knowledge from an irrelevant past.

Leaders of organizations need to understand the physiology of their own brains and the physiology of the groups of complex humans they are leading, to be effective.