Selective Bayesian Updating

Confirmation and conformation biases, symptoms of a disease that is eating into science and technology, have wrecked havoc in many areas including pharmaceutical research, astrophysics, finance, healthcare and policy, just to name a few. It appears that participants in these areas, utilize a novel mathematical technique – Selective Bayesian Updating (SBU). It is not just that data are fine tuned to prove the hypothesis but even in cases where it could not be proved, the posteriors remain the same for subsequent experiments.

Take Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) as an example. It has been speculated that oceans that could support life exist in many icy and rocky remnants within the solar system – Titan, Europa and even the outcast, Pluto. Suppose the missions to these objects reveal no signs of life, will NASA and SETI use Selective Bayesian Updating for the probability of ET? Recent excitement around Kepler 452B, the most “Earth-like” planet ever found in the Milky Way, has led SETI to focus their instruments in that region. Suppose we find no signals of value, will the posterior probability of the existence of ET, remain the same? This is very convenient for those involved in the research. It is the ultimate free lunch in science – a negative result has no change in the posterior probability of the hypothesis being correct.

In pharmaceutical research, it has been shown that the efficacy of marketed drugs decline over time. This is a curious phenomenon as cutting edge research coupled with a vigilant regulator, the FDA, are unlikely to let marginal drugs into market. Was Selective Bayesian Updating deployed in the many experiments that led to the approval of the drug? Patients and providers, perhaps, are less susceptible to this problem and normal updating over a period of time, may be revealing the truth.

Selective Bayesian Updating, a disease that is substantially slowing the innovation slope in science and technology, could be treatable.

Perfect simulation

It has long been speculated that the universe is a simulation and it is not real. The observed heavy fine tuning of its hypothesized ingredients – dark matter, dark energy, matter and anti-matter – supports this view. It is believed that an addition of even a gram of ordinary matter into the system could substantially alter its expected end state and its progression toward that. Both the initial conditions as well as the fundamental parameters of the laws of Physics, appear to have been so carefully selected for this simulation to work. Whatever be the case, these cannot be proved or disproved by the participants in the simulation as it will require an outside the system view and/or experiments that span multiple such simulations.

Perfection can come in only two ways – either there are infinite trials that produced a perfect outcome randomly or the experiment is designed carefully. Granted, in this context, the definition of perfection is somewhat arbitrary without data on alternative simulations that may lead to systems that are equally perfect. However, the possibility that we could be living in a simulation has many implications, the least of which is the approach we could take to search for life outside our corner in the universe.

If it is indeed a simulation, it is possible that it is focused on biological systems in a singular space-time that evolves over time. However, if our current understanding is correct (which is unlikely), the space-time window afforded to these very special biological entities is so narrow that the scope of the simulation (the universe itself) does not make sense. This leads to either rejecting the existence of the hard space-time constraint or not accepting that the only currently observed biological systems are special. An alternative is that the observed single occurrence of biology is an error and that such errors are unlikely in a system that is so well tuned. If it is an error, it would not make sense to seek such systems elsewhere as the objective function of the game does not include biology. Another possibility is that biology is a central theme of the simulation and the game evolves from an infinite separate occurrences of such features, across the universe. However, given that the participants of the simulation will have no control over the outcomes of such a pursuit, it seems less interesting.

In general, if the universe is a simulation, it does not make sense to seek intelligence elsewhere.

Quantum business

Businesses, for many centuries, have been dealing with constructs analogous to Newtonian Physics. For example, traditional finance and accounting, based on agriculture and more recently manufacturing, have devised cash flows and Net Present Value (NPV), constructs most conventional businesses apparently still run on. They stipulate precise measurement of the stock and flow of cash and decisions based on those ideas. They also introduced risk, something that became more precise over time, an unavoidable bad to adjust the cash flows, considered to be unambiguously good. All of these are precisely measurable – just as the gravitational constant and terminal velocity on Earth.

Business schools, world over, are still enamored by these archaic notions and they continue to graduate students, adept at counting and dividing, skills that have no value in the modern context. Businesses have been forced to migrate into a different regime, in which counting is delegated to computers and the velocity of Intellectual Property (IP) creation, reign supreme. Accounting metrics, profits and tangible assets, and even more sophisticated ones, free cash flow from operations, have all become utterly irrelevant. IP does not often equate to cash flows nor does it allow representation in a balance sheet, a remnant of manufacturing. The regime of quantum business has arrived and it is likely going to divide those engaged in it, into parallel worlds, some chasing the past of cash flows and the other redefining the uncertain future.

Financial statements, the least representative of the value of a firm in the modern world, still waste a sizable portion of the GDP in their creation, interpretation and consumption.

The human algorithm

Biological evolution, speculated to be a mechanism to improve the operating system of Earth based life, by massive parallel experiments, may be running out of steam. Lack of future slope in incremental benefits may lead to a stalemate or more likely a retreat to previous and more stable states. The human algorithm shows significant instability, having specialized more in the individual and less in systems. Individual’s objective functions tend to be simplistic and tactical, primarily bound by hard constraints, such as expected and predictable life span. Meanwhile, society, with inexplicable false expectations, languishes.

The human algorithm, imperfect at best, shows no signs of improvement over time. Individual's objective function has largely remained the same for over hundred thousand years, with a few clear goals. Occasional excursions into irrational arts and science have been quenched quickly, with bone numbing efficiency. They extricated the few individuals who asked questions and then innovated ways to cleanse entire swaths of gene pools, who disagreed. Improvements in the operating system itself were delegated to fancy apps with attrition rates that rival fruit flies. Optimism was replaced by fear, appropriately so, with octogenarians making policies and taking courses in gerrymandering.

The human algorithm, inefficient and stagnant, requires motivation to move to the next quantum state.

Singularity, suspended?

There appears to be less noise in the airways about the impending singularity, recently. Perhaps, reality is sinking in, yet again. Many times in the past, humans have been lured by the exponential curve – some looking forward, ready to shake hands with ET and watch robot football. Others, looking backward, have been lamenting about the world running out of gas (fossil fuels, that is) and all associated problems. The exponential curve has led many astray.

The human brain, albeit a quantum computer, still remains limited in its ability to take advantage of exponential trends. For over 100 thousand years, they have been living in a linear progression, devoid of any major discontinuities. Apparent modern discontinuities – airplanes, computers and the internet – may have changed the slope incrementally, but the baggage carried by the human brain and psyche, will all but assure that there is no exponential ride for the race. They are prone to mean revert in any stochastic regime and the volatility afforded by the increasing stock – now approaching 8 billion – could all but assure they remain grounded.

As a minority in an ego bubble, worry about the singularity - for most, it is still, simply suspended animation.

Same beat, different drums

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that dozens of statistical universals are present in music from all around the world. The authors argue that all music are constructed from the same building blocks. They also hypothesize that music brings people together and it has been acting as a social glue. Regardless, the statistical observations are interesting.

It has been intuitively obvious that humans have an affinity to rhythmic beat but the observation that statistical universals exist across all genre of music is intriguing. Music, perhaps, a precursor to the more structured and rigid language, has spanned evolution, as many animals show an equal or higher level of skill. Human societies, fragmented by language and culture, could find common ground in music – a more foundational protocol of communication. The fact that the shape, type and color of the drums carried by different cultures do not matter as they produce the same beat, may come as a surprise to those trying to cling to meaningless differences.

Music, foundational to human culture, could be a powerful mechanism to bring people together. It could be more effective than older concepts such as religion and emerging tools such as science.

Wasting resources

A recent article in Child Development shows what has been obvious to many – stressful home environments have significant deleterious effects on a child’s development. Since such low level stress is generally negatively correlated with income and wealth, children from the lower economic strata are at a much higher risk of this phenomenon. As the technologists and politicians strive to build a “better society,” they are completely ignorant of the most important resources, being wasted – children.

As more than one third of the world’s children, impacted by lack of food, shelter and education, struggle to make sense of a system that seems to be moving backwards with lack of empathy and knowledge, we are fast approaching a stalemate. The intelligentsia, appear to understand the mechanics of Net Present Value (NPV) for their pet projects, but often miss applications of finance and economics for policy that may positively impact society. Even the Nobel Laureates from the “Chicago School,” famous for seeing beyond the mountains, seem to have lost the desire to make a fundamental change. Tacticians galore and in the process, we are losing.

Any policy, that does not have a positive impact on malnourished, undereducated and stressed children, occupants of this planet tomorrow, is not worth pursuing.

Societal memory

Recent finding that amnestic mouse brains are able to recall lost memories is encouraging for those with Traumatic Brain Injury and Alzheimer’s disease related memory loss. Lost memories, perhaps, the most costly aspect of human societies, have not been studied in sufficient detail. For most of the history of homo-sapiens, downloading memories was central to their development – with the village elder willingly transmitting knowledge to the chosen few of the next generation for perpetual propagation. Modern humans, virtual slaves to technology, seem to have lost the art of memory storage and propagation, yielding to the least effective mechanism for the same, computers.

Memories, that encapsulate experience and knowledge, are misunderstood by humans on a treadmill to nowhere. The rat race keep them occupied for most of their lives, unable to make memories or to appreciate those who create them. A society that is unable to store and propagate memories is not sustainable, for its content will be left undefined and its tactical accomplishments, fleeting. A human, the combined total of chemicals worth less than $25, is nearly worthless without memories – her own, or those of her society. In spite of all their technical accomplishments, humans will drift endlessly if they could not figure out how to create, nourish, store and utilize societal memories.

Memories – most valuable but least understood resource of a society – may ultimately define the path humans could take.

Inelegant science

Science, perhaps the only accomplishment of modern humans, is affected by the collective myopia of scientists – the tendency to spend too much time on details and little on larger questions. For example, recent revelations that indicate that the universe is so finely tuned to be flat that even an addition of a single gram of mass into the system could substantially change its future, seem to have gotten little attention. Attempted descriptions of dark matter, energy, flow and tilt – with heavy and incomprehensible mathematics is the status-quo. Some at space agencies world-wide get too excited about sending a craft to Mars or designing a sojourn with Titan. If one cannot answer the larger questions, it does not matter if the atmosphere of Europa could be finely measured. Answering, larger questions, however is more difficult.

Details, often the noise that destroys elegant solutions, have been dominant in every field. One could argue that an elegant, simple solution to the larger question, even if it is incorrect, is much more valuable than adding yet another particle to the zoo to explain phenomenon that will remain inexplicable with existing theories. Humans seem to be evolving downward, adding skills that aid detailed analyses – but losing the ability to see the bigger picture. Part of the blame has to go to educational systems worldwide – masters of creating cogs in the wheel, adept at taking standardized tests and soaking up text-books from the past, most of which have become irrelevant. Further, hiring managers in the dying behemoths, trained at conventional techniques prefer those who can deliver next quarter’s earnings at the expense of a valuable enterprise. 

We could be tending toward a world of engineers, doctors and scientists – who have no interest in answering why we are really here.

Light chip

Recent research from the University of Utah seems to get closer to silicon photonics and faster light based processors, many orders better than conventional products. Splitting light has always been easy but Utah engineers have accomplished it with beam splitters of a mere 2.4 microns of size. This may propel us out of the ongoing rat race of packing silicon ever closer on conventional chips for less interesting performance improvements.

Moore’s law, held sacred by technologists and used by exponential curve plotting, singularity seeking intellectuals, for stupid predictions, may have done significant damage to the psyche of innovation in electronics. Humans, grand optimizers of their limited life horizons, always fall into the trap of incrementally improving what is available. They appear to be satisfied with metrics that double over long horizons – such as years and this is in stark contrast to their keen awareness of limited time. With less than a thousand months of life span, a metric that doubles every 18 months appears so much less interesting than one that explodes by a few orders of magnitude in the same horizon. More importantly, doubling computing power in 18 months with no perceptible impact on existing applications is a waste of time.

It is time to throw out processes that grow within the same orders of magnitude every year – they will certainly employ people, but they will not make any difference to humanity.

Accent inefficiency

A recent study from the University of Washington at St.Louis, speculates that accents may have a high negative correlation to comprehension and recall to a population, that is native. If true, this is a significant loss of efficiency for 8 billion people, worldwide. Humans, already reeling from a plethora of disconnected languages and incomprehensible accents, seem to have painted themselves into a corner. Language, the foundation of communication that propelled humans away from their close cousins, chimps, may be their Achilles’ heel – as they struggle to understand each other.

And, most humans do not understand each other. Their natural inclination, driven by evolutionary forces, has been to distrust anything that is foreign – structure and accent. The segmentation schemes they have been able to invent – countries, religions and now, accents – have kept them bottled up from progressing any further for nearly hundred thousand years. As they take pride in their understanding of the universe, computers that run faster than ever, aluminum tubes that propel them across continents and into space, medicines that keep them alive and in pain for an incremental five years and ego that keep them stressed for ever, they are worried primarily about color, language and accents.

As the space agencies search for dominant extra-terrestrials across space-time, as the intellectuals seek a meaning for life, as physicists seek the next particle from heavy bombarding, as economists seek to define how money flow from one to the other, as chemists and biologists seek to keep the dying human on life extending machines, one has to wonder if a world with a singular language and indistinguishable accents could have made a difference.

Downward sloping cognition

Humans, apparently on top of the mammals’ evolutionary chain, appear to lack some basic cognitive capabilities, as exhibited by their distant cousins- rats. A recent article in Animal Cognition describes advanced cognitive capabilities in rats that unilaterally lend a helping paw to another who may be sinking in water. This instinctual reaction appears to supersede food based reward, a dominant aspect of mammal life.

Evolution, held sacred by scientists as a sure way to higher intelligence and cognition, has to be rethought. It appears that tactical advantages gained by random mutations are more likely to create freak systems – such as humans. If there is a physical reason for life – such as accelerated entropy, it does make sense at the macro level. Systems that are able to think many different permutations and combinations to enhance entropy, will be selected and humans certainly fit the bill. The organ they carry on their shoulders, certainly helped them invent fire and they have been burning everything they could find for over 100 thousand years. And burning, certainly, is a sure way to increase entropy.

Somewhere along this evolutionary cycle, humans, seem to have picked up some bad habits – such as observations, societal formation and learning. These traits are certainly against the prescribed objectives and will be deselected if the objective function is indeed very clean and includes only positively sloped entropy. Since rats appear to be significantly less efficient than humans to accelerate entropy, it is clear that the forward momentum of evolution will likely correct for any random noise that was introduced such as empathy, knowledge and the desire for better societies.

Humans, a dominant evolutionary construct, have been efficient in optimizing a simple objective function – accelerate entropy at any cost. And the laws of physics indicate that they will get more efficient at it over time.

Seeing is not believing

Experimentalism and empiricism, corner stones of modern scientific exploration, have substantially dampened step-function changes in knowledge addition in almost every field. In economics, availability of metrics and statistics in abundance have kept academics, spending most of their careers proving the established theories. In Physics, the ability to generate data at will with heavy machines has kept any innate creativity bottled up. In life sciences, manufacturers, staffed with conventional statisticians and a regulatory regime with little understanding of risk management have assured that breakthrough drugs are yesterday’s story.

It is a perfect storm. As a vanishing generation, steeped in qualitative and non-scientific processes of information gathering is bombarded by another, trained to see and analyze data, we are left with little hope to advance knowledge. For the former, data do not matter and for the latter, it appears, only data matter. Neither can be further from the truth. From a societal perspective, one has to worry less about the former as they are checking out from the ecosystem. But, it is problematic to see educational systems, world-over are catering to processes that start from data and not knowledge. The implicit assumption of modern science, that experimentalism and associated empiricism are necessary conditions for the creation and establishment of theories, is fundamentally incorrect.

If we create a society, enslaved to data and thus prone to considering experimentalism and empiricism as the primary tools to generate and advance knowledge, we are doomed.

The cost of thinking

A recent article from MIT (1) argues that consumers’ decision processes in the retail arena, replete with confusing choices and an overabundance of brands, are dominated by an “indexing strategy.” To reach a decision, consumers may be indexing (or utilizing a bundle of proxies to compare) rather than conducting an exhaustive search as such an optimization process could have high cognitive costs. If true, this finding has implications for companies in the retail arena for product design, promotions, delivery and pricing.

First, it opens up a dimension in the psyche of the consumer, that makes analyzing decisions more complex for the observer (retailer) even though it simplifies the process for the consumer. In a world of a large number of close substitutes for any product or service, a consumer with a preference for minimizing cognitive cost, will only consider a subset of products, that is not necessarily obvious to the retailer. As the consumer “indexes” against an unknown subset of substitutes, she will likely consider all aspects of comparability – as the simplified process allows her to do so, in the comfort of an already reduced cognitive cost. Ironically, these attributes may include both physical and virtual aspects – with differing weights, making it very difficult for the retailer to define “competition,” in a world of interacting product definitions.

Second, status-quo strategies that may include price discounting, bundling and couponing, may have a longer lasting effect on the “indexing strategy,” followed by the consumer. Such tactics by the retailer could move the brand away or closer to the indexing bundle, used by the consumer. Although the impact of such strategies on the near term decisions of the consumer is ambiguous, it does increase the complexity of optimizing such strategies. And, finally, retailers who have a rigid view as to “who their competition is,” may find themselves drifting – as the consumer preferences and retailing tactics may enroll or remove them from the proxy bundles considered by the consumer.

Retailers may have to move away from long held views on the competitive landscape and tactics that may have brought customers to their doorstep in the past. Flexible and dynamic strategies in design, delivery and pricing may be needed to win the consumer indexing game.

(1) The brain in the supermarket, Published: Friday, March 27, 2015 - 11:33 in Mathematics & Economics, Science News

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/03/27/the.brain.supermarket

Significance

Statistical significance has let many industries down and built fortunes for many, riding their luck. A recent paper from Duke University explains what most non-statisticians and non-financiers always knew. Models that do not make practical sense are unlikely to work. Industries on top of the modern economy, those who attract the best and the brightest – physics, medicine and finance – have been playing with statistical fire, discovering and proving everything there is – some for money and others for fame. As the Duke paper points out, almost any hypothesis could be proven by a sufficiently large number of trials. And proving hypotheses is front and center for any “scientific profession.”

In this context, it may be interesting to make the following predictions:

1. LHC : If 6 trillion trillion collisions are made and the data analyzed, LHC could prove God exists. Just 6 trillion was enough to find the “God particle” within 5 sigma. This is a good experiment. Proving God exists may solve many of the vexing problems faced by humanity.

2. SETI : If an antenna is provided to every roof top in the world and the “search” accelerated by a billion times, SETI could prove ET with pointy ears, a cone head and red white and blue stripes across the body exists in some distant galaxy.

3. Wall Street : If the number of idiots trading securities back and forth every day is increased by an order of magnitude, Wall street could create somebody who wins on every trade for 10 years running.

Statistics, the “science” that is foundational for “accelerating knowledge” of humanity, may singlehandedly bring knowledge-seekers to a standstill in the presence of “big data.”

Quantum games

Research from LMU in Munich attempts to test if quantum particles, such as bosons, follow prescriptions of game theory, a well established concept in economics. This is in a favorable direction as it may simplify quantum behavior by using constructs from macro systems. The incentives for bosons to be on the same wavelength as their neighbors is akin to incentives present in human interactions. And, if a simple objective function, such as profits or wealth maximization can be found for quantum particles, then, their behavior could well be predicted by economic theory. It has been noted that, at the extreme, the Bose-Einstein condensate behaves like a single super particle. It is conceivable that if such behavior is universal, it has implications for design for truly advanced societies.

The divergence of the behavior of quantum systems from human scale systems has been problematic not only for physicists but also for amateurs who seek simplification. Intuition seems to point to missing attributes or perhaps a completely wrong theory. If quantum behavior could be explained by those seen in bigger systems, then the chance of survival increases for the theory itself. However, this implicitly assumes that bigger systems are a natural progression of quantum ones and most available information seems to refute such a notion. Engineering bias force scientists and technologists to a unified theory – from parts to the whole - and it is quite possible that multiple universes with differing laws exist within the observable one in human scale.

Whatever the reality, the notion of explaining quantum behavior using larger systems is intriguing. If this is possible, such behavior could provide direction for better designs of human systems as well.

Publication pollution

A recent commentary in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, highlights most academics and those less academic, already knew – the need and desire to publish is a disease, aided by “plagiarism, fraud and predatory publishing.” Academics – held sacred by a vanishing few – now means brutal business and what comes out is mostly noise, stolen materials and joint incompetence. The acceleration seen in “academic publishing,” is a clear indication that the quality has declined and more importantly the authors mostly rely on a patchwork of stolen materials and ideas.

This is unfortunate. Knowledge creation, still the only attribute that marginally differentiates humans and animals, has been on the decline for decades. Information and noise, mistakenly attributed to knowledge by technologists, have been creating havoc. The “data explosion,” and the ever eluding “singularity,” have kept the precious little brain cells away from advancing knowledge. To top it all off, the ambassadors of knowledge creation have been busy plagiarizing and creating irrelevant publications.

Misaligned incentives, aided by limited time horizons of knowledge seekers, are likely to assure that humans will continue the rat race in a maze with no exits.

WISE, Not!

Recent news that NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory found no tell-tale signs of advanced societies in 100,000 galaxies studied, is a constant reminder that ET is likely more advanced than the big brains at the space agency. Blindly following the speculation made more than 50 years ago, that mid-infrared emissions in a Galaxy could be indicative of a dominant civilization of galactic scope, the engineers seem to have gotten it wrong, yet again.

And they will get it wrong many times in this century. An advanced society is one that does not emit radiation, something that does not show up in the archaic instruments created by the least interesting species in the universe. An advanced society is one that will have no intention to dominate, let alone “conquer” the resources offered by a galaxy. Stupid humans, driven by ego and materialism, seem to be assuming that “domination,” is hard-wired into intelligent life. Intelligence is least likely to be about “cornering resources,” and an advanced society is one that will leave no tell-tale signs or bread crumbs for the stupid to detect them.

Radiation seeking humans, constantly looking for TV programs to tune into from other galaxies, will be left sorely disappointed. If ET exists, it will absolutely assure that there will be no “contact.” After all, who would like to contact a species, that burns fossil fuels in a limited green house they are afforded, constantly fighting and killing each other for irrational belief systems and fleeting wealth, segment themselves into color, geography, language and physical proportions, cast a blind eye to those with poor initial conditions and completely incompetent in advancing knowledge.

ET has fascinated many – but it will likely remain a fascination.

Stuck in the weeds

Yet another policy choice and the reaction of our fearless leaders to it, show the level of ignorance and incompetence the country has to get over before it can advance further. The magic leaf has been with humans for thousands of years and it shows significant medical advantages already. Because of its status, research has been dampened and we have a large number of people sitting in jail for a crime because of legalese. Those who wear the badge of “free markets,” elsewhere should engage in introspection and remove the inconsistencies in their policy choices.

In addition to the limits, there has to be education and competence requirements for people who want to legislate. I do not mean “self certification,” but hard constraints including exams that politicians have to pass before they can run for important policy positions. The gap between the current generation and the ones in Washington is big and it is getting bigger every passing day. If doctors, engineers and scientists have to demonstrate competence through structured tests, it is unclear why this is not the case for those who could have profound impact on a large number of people. Educational Testing Services – please take note and design a PAT – Politics Admission Test – that could have weeded out the crop that is currently legislating.

Stuck in the weeds and frozen in time, our leaders are unlikely to move society to a better state.
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Engineers discover probabilities

Recent news that MIT engineers have finally discovered probabilities is heartening news. A “probabilistic programming language,” they “invented” appears to be quite competitive to conventional systems for vision and cognition. It is always better to arrive late rather than not at all. Determinism, the bane of engineering, has kept many bright minds back for long.

There have been weak attempts at the same many decades before. After the hype of Artificial Intelligence waned in the towering institutions of the East and the West in the 80s, some feeble attempts at programming in logic surfaced in unknown quarters. Such programming was all about probabilities – and it had no prescriptive GoTo statements. The originators underestimated the wrath of engineers – who generally knew everything there is to know. Prolog was shown the grave before it arrived.

Machine learning, the latest hype, has some potential – but not in the hands of engineers with deterministic education. Perhaps, the next generation can leave the legacy of ego and ignorance behind and really make something happen.

Frustrated

Recent research from Princeton that attempts to spin yet another particle – spinon – to “explain” frustrated magnets, is symptomatic of trying to fit existing (old) theories into observations. Contemporary education and learning institutions are so inflexible that they are simply unable to break away from tradition. If observations do not fit a theory, it is better to ask if the theory is right rather than incrementally attaching an error that is yet to be proven. Sure, writing papers are easier this way but it is unlikely to advance knowledge.

If magnets are not behaving as expected, it is ok to call them “frustrated.” But to hypothesize a particle that may explain such frustration is fiction. This is dangerous research  - as experience tells us that, once “speculated,” it shall be “proven” in Physics – either by unachievable mathematics or by generating mind numbing noise from experiments. It is ironic that there has been only a single individual for over hundred years who could create a framework to think in Physics.

Educational institutions, world over, adept at producing “bricks in the wall,” graduates – engineers, scientists and doctors – prisoners of the status-quo, have to rethink – and quick.

Stop time

Stopping time appears to have several advantages. The trick is the modality of stoppage. If time is stopped with an incremental move, say a day, and then repeated in an infinite loop and if information transfer is allowed at the boundaries, then knowledge can increase infinitely. Biological systems, with a hard expiry date, have been inefficient in the transfer of information across space-time. The Fermi paradox is an important notion in this context. Biology, appears to be highly inferior to systems that perpetuate – either through time or space.

Search for extra-terrestrial life does not make any sense in this vein. An advanced society is most likely to harness gravity and stop time rather than travel across space or even show themselves on Radar. The epitome of modern transportation – humans packed like sardines in an aluminum can with wings – should provide a hint that travel is the least of things an advanced society would do. The idiots with the telescope and antennas in the heart of Silicon Valley never asked why an advanced society will show themselves to their inferior finding techniques. My tax dollars are better spent elsewhere.

Humans, the least likely species to search the heavens for their next of kin, may be getting ahead of themselves. The fact that they found a toy to scan the skies, does not mean that it is the best use of their time.

The “habitable zone”

A recent publication in the “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,” uses “heavy Mathematics,” to show that there could be billions of stars in the milky way alone with multiple planets in the “habitable zone,” defined as the existence of “acceptable” temperatures with the possibility of water. Humans, are funny animals – with all their brain power and scientific knowledge, they are perfectly happy extrapolating from a single observation. The embarrassing use of Mathematics in the calculation of the probability of life in the Milky Way itself, that appears to be indistinguishable from 1.0, may surface many questions.

High energy Physics, not significantly different from fiction, is clinging to century old theories, that explain less than 4% of the observations. Meanwhile, ego driven space administrations, are on the edge, not being able to prove extra-terrestrial life, something they strongly feel should have been done by now. The tiny slice of space-tine, handed to humans, apparently is not a constraint for the big brains, who have adroitly forecasted the arrival of green women in less than twenty years, albeit, the proof could be less compelling than the “encounters of the fourth kind.” Meanwhile, the famous one in England, worried about the green variety life not being friendly, strongly admonishes against the search for the same. Clearly, there is content here befitting day time soap.

The only known habitable zone, a quirk in space time, could be easily destroyed before its occupants find another.

Lifeless water world

Recent news that Ganymede, Jupiter’s famous moon, may house more water than the Earth, is interesting. NASA’s bold claim that they “shall find” extra-terrestrial life in less than 20 years, should be viewed with abundant caution in this context. If significant water worlds in close proximity to Earth are lifeless, one has to question the logic of looking for water across space. The problem is that, once hypothesized, nothing remains unproven in contemporary science.

If Ganymede has underground oceans that rival the Earth, all efforts should be focused on finding life there – not in distant galaxies. If the presence of water is a necessary condition for life to emerge, as argued by the famous and the systematic, then they have to focus on the many instances of water in the solar system itself. If attempts at finding life in these close quarters come empty, then one has to question both the idea that life could exist elsewhere and if water is a necessary condition for life. One cannot have it both ways. Just as the “Higgs Boson” surfaced in mindless noisy data, it will not be sufficient to show spectral noise of oxygen and water, somewhere in a distant galaxy and claim extra-terrestrial life. Scientists, with egos that rival the stupid, have shown a weakness when it comes to proving stated hypotheses – and never even considering the alternative. But then, tenure and publications are more important than real science.

If there is only one observation of life ridden mass in the entire universe, then, the probability remains close to zero to find it elsewhere. No amount of mathematical manipulation is going to make this probability higher. And, if life cannot be found in conditions that are assumed to be favorable, the probability of extra-terrestrial life gets even less. It is depressing to think that the samples of life that can be observed on Earth, are indeed the best the universe could come up with. But that does not mean that they exist elsewhere.

Limited imagination

 
And then, she could see the heavens beyond her imagination
Out in the distance, Quasars shine but the physicists do not know
Near in time, people die, but the intelligentsia does not know
Champaign flows and the suits in glass houses get religion
 
8 Billion, too few to count, but too many for those, counting pennies
Brain cells, a liability for most, have failed again to make an impact
They sever heads in the East and intelligence in the West
It is, indeed, a show, nobody should miss
 
Blonde hair, racism and democratic intent on television and media
The ones in the South adhering to belief and those in the North to principles
Neither wins nor do they advance humanity
It seems futile and irrelevant to those with brains over their shoulders
 
Humans, complex animals and a quirk of evolution, normalize again
They should not be here, but now, they are ready to inflict damage
To themselves, and anything they may touch and destroy
They cannot measure damage, they write history with glowing language
 
Time, the only artifact with power, shall erase every action and thought
And space, inferior to time, shall close in on the incompetent and stupid
The predictable collapse, cannot be anticipated by those with constraints
But then, the question remains for the few who may be left behind

Small noise

Recent research from Penn State (1) surfaces interesting questions on privacy in the modern world. Privacy has become a stumbling block in the use of valuable data for research and business purposes. Penn State team advocates adding small noise to data to achieve “differential privacy.” Privacy, a theme picked up by regulators with little knowledge of technology, has to be advanced by foundational mathematics. High tech giants, makers of search, faces, operating systems, databases, flashy hardware and next-quarter’s profits, are ill-equipped to solve this problem.

Research has been lagging. Privacy is a mathematical problem and not a data problem. With less than 8 billion samples across the world, it should be relatively easy to assure privacy if its is solved systematically. Regulators, lost in time and space, are attempting to use archaic tools to solve a problem, they deem important. And, big businesses, who want to hoard and abuse data are unlikely to play. Hence, this is a problem, only academics can solve.

Privacy, as important as education and health in the modern context, can only be protected by the application of mathematics. With few distinct samples with limited time horizons, it should not tax academic minds, if they focus on it.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/02/16/social.network.analysis.privacy.tackled

Value of society’s health

Policy makers, both sides of the aisle and across the pond, often seem to miss the big picture. Sure, a democratic system that works in 4 and 5 year election cycles, is not amenable to strategy. Healthcare, a lighting rod for idiots running for office, is a complex question. For most of their history, humans were driven by simple objective functions – food and sex, dominating anything else. In the modern world, for most, the equation has not changed much. Although the village elders may have thought strategically about the health of the clan, as managing a portfolio of men and women with high specialization is not a trivial problem, such ideas did not flow much further.

The idea of society, an abstract concept, is very new. In the modern context of interconnected humans by technology, the definition of society certainly has been expanded. Facebook boasts of a society, nearly billion strong and that system is not significantly different from China and India. Although politicians would like to cleanly divide populations by faith, ignorance and color, fitting them neatly into societal fragments, such ideas have been rendered obsolete for a while.

Assuming that one can clearly understand societies – an interconnected organism - then one can envision the best way to nourish it. The foundational elements of a modern society are health and education. Every participant benefits from positive externalities associated with these common goods. Thus, policy imperatives that substantially enhance health and education should be dominant in a modern society. However, the tactics of implementation differ significantly. Health, for example, is as much the responsibility of an individual as it is of the society. Thus, an individual who does not care for her health and education (societal goods) cannot be helped by society. Her actions, then, will be against utility maximization for herself and more importantly, for the society.

Upgrading a society is likely a two-step process – first, information has to be widely available to all participants including the society’s objective function. Then market forces have to take over to move the system to a better state – providing appropriate incentives and disincentives to all participants as long as there are no market failures. If market failures are present in the provision and use of common goods, they have to be removed through appropriately designed constraints. And, all policies have to be consistently implemented.

It seems unlikely that modern humans can design next level societies as they seem to lack necessary knowledge and skills.

Cultural slippage

Human societies, from inception, have shown a positive slope, albeit small, toward higher culture – defined by a better and abstract understanding of extra-self. Arguably, contemporary modern humans show measurable slippage in culture. Alarmingly, this could be big enough to reverse many centuries of progress. The instruments used to sustain a positive slope in culture for centuries, such as religion, are largely responsible for reversing the trend, now.

For most of the history of the upstart humans, it was art that provided the fuel for a positive cultural slope. For the past several centuries, however, science has taken a dominant role. But it has been inferior to provide a sustaining momentum to the human psyche. Materialism, that spreads like cancer, coupled with prescriptive science, has largely assured that the trend reversal is permanent. It has been successful in dividing the world into tiny fragments, each apparently different but certainly fighting the rest. It is ironic that at the peak of pride for technologists, the world shows signs of humans returning to their origins, when little technology was present.

The slope of cultural progress, the only tangible measure of advancement for the human mind, has turned negative again with little chance of yet another reversal.

The utility of strategy

Strategy, a long term view of evolving uncertainty, has been misunderstood. Blue chip consulting firms and investment banks - sultans of PowerPoint and handlers of boardroom dramatics, have been leading firms in the wrong direction for decades. Business schools, filled with those adept at finance and accounting, have been drilling the wrong stuff into the brains of every budding graduate. The economy is suffering from ”stratgeists” and not from the lack of them.

Strategy, however, is a useful construct, not for individuals or organizations but for society. For the society, it provides guidance to nourish a stable, productive and improving population, able to propagate the human genes, across space and time. For individuals and organizations, with limited decision and harvesting horizons, strategy provides negative value. This inherent conflict – the whole benefiting from longer horizon thinking but not the parts, means that the former is likely to lose. Utility maximization for an individual or organization, is inherently constrained by limited time horizons and tacticians, indeed, add more value.

Strategy has to be redefined – it is not about entering new markets, culling dogs and embracing stars, maximizing equity value, next quarter’s earrings or next year’s bonuses. Strategy is a notion that may help assess and improve humanity.

Is living longer, better?

Statistics have been clear, humans are living longer (1). India, projected to be the most populous country in the world as the Chinese have been systematically controlling the birth/death ratio for long, cunningly culling the variety that could create more, has been able pump up nearly 20% of the world population to longer life expectancy. In India today, one is expected to live till 65 and the world at large to 71. The more important question is whether living longer is better.

Biological systems are preprogrammed to maximize life span. The basic equation is driven by reproductive requirements and those living longer are more likely to transmit their DNA to the next generation. Nature, with little flexibility to adjust to technological advances, seems to have gotten it wrong. Living longer is the biggest liability in the modern world, controlled by humans, who do not think straight. Today, over 80% of the healthcare costs of an individual is attributed to the last year of her life. For the individual, waiting to fade away in dignity, extension of life is likely utility destroying.

There could be an optimal life span for a human driven by the status of technology and the availability of resources. Moving outside such bounds is unlikely to be good and this has policy implications for medicine, education and societal formation.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/12/18/life.expectancy.increases.globally.death.toll.falls.major.diseases

Living on the edge

A recent article published in the open access journal ZooKeys (1) shows that the 10 Km wide asteroid that impacted the Earth, 65 million years ago – famous for removing the dominant species at that time, nearly terminated the weaklings, the mammals, as well. The paper portrays a picture that is striking – the placental mammals that dominate the world today – from mice to women – just got lucky. They do not seem to posses any significant advantages but the conditions afforded by the trauma, removed all competition, allowing them to thrive.

If mammals were any wiser, they would analyze this event in depth. Dinosaurs had technology – largely supported by biology but the discontinuity made the status-quo technology, a liability. Humans, apparently, on top of the food chain today, seem to be proud of their technology as well – most of which are finely tuned to current conditions. Their societies seem to have morphed into systems with little networked flexibility. Any minor perturbation could send them galloping back 50,000 years – hunting for food and sex, aided by a volatile organ, an evolutionary mishap, on their shoulders. Technology would not matter in such a discontinuity.

10 Km wide space debris are like pebbles in a system, teaming with primordial matter, sprinkled across an irrelevant planetary system at the boundaries of a less than ordinary galaxy, in a bubble universe, member of an infinite multiverse. Such an event is a near certainty for a planet that is in a straight jacket in limited space-time.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/12/17/asteroid.wiped.out.dinosaurs.may.have.nearly.knocked.mammals.too

BELLA rules

Recent news that the Berkeley Lab has achieved an energy of 4.25 Giga Volts in a miniature accelerator, 9 centimeters long on a desktop, continues on a profitable path to next level of discoveries in Physics. Traditionalists, steeped in the philosophy of “size matters,” have been on the wrong track for over 50 years. They dug tunnels and abandoned them in Texas and they dug longer on the other side of the pond, that could prove pretty much anything in the midst of mind-numbing noise in the data. Size and volume do not matter, insights do.

It is ironic that scientists bow to engineers in an effort to make fundamental discoveries. Engineers, bored out of their wits, need no invitation to build ever bigger guns. This combination is deadly – it is costly and it takes away any possibility of fundamental discoveries in Physics – Not the Nobel seeking ones, but real ones. Einstein's obscure paper on LASER would have given a favorable direction 100 years ago for the brilliant minds of this century. But in the midst of mediocrity, some even nourishing visions of accelerators, the size of the solar system, it was all about size. BELLA thinks differently – and that ultimately could make a difference to the “dark” ages of Physics – where anything inexplicable is tagged with “dark.”

Few provide insights – but many publish, build and run experiments.

Simplification

A recent paper in Nature and Communications that demonstrates that wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle in Physics can be explained by the same fundamental theoretical constructs, is instructive at multiple levels. First, incentives in the scientific and academic world has long been skewed toward the ability to publish – and often this means repackaging old wine in a new bottle. And, second, educational systems world over have missed a trick – learning the “established theories,” is a sheer waste of time for the next generation. In Physics, Medicine and Economics, most established theories are known to be wrong – as they do not explain observations or provide complex explanations that cannot be tested.

Engineering progress – largely based on empirical approximations of incorrect theories – does not necessarily mean that the knowledge content of humans is increasing. In some sense, it is the opposite. Educational institutions strive to drill complexity into the heads of budding engineers and doctors – draining any innate creativity. In effect, Universities manufacture zombies and automatons, steeped in tradition and the status-quo, unable to question or even think beyond what is in the text books. The idea that text books could be wrong is a major shock to the “educated,” as they have invested most of their lives learning what has been written down. But, writing something down and perpetuating it across generations, does not necessarily mean that it is correct. Modern technologies allow more rapid propagation of ignorance.

Simplification has to be the fundamental building block of knowledge creation in a world, mired in complexity and misaligned incentives.

Irrational life

Humans are often thought of as utilitarian, able to maximize individual and societal utility. In this scheme, however, life itself is irrational. With a hard constraint on time to expiry for the individual, society and the environment at large, extending all the way to the small part of an instance of the multiverse that is visible, utility itself loses all meaning. Utility, then, has to be defined in the micro – there is no impact an individual can make on the universe, she has been assigned to. But she could, certainly, enhance utility for herself within the hard constraints that exist – time, space and the limitations of knowledge.

Individual, then, provides any reliable subset of the measurement of utility. There are many parameters in this complex function, mediated largely by initial conditions. In very limited horizons, it appears sustaining herself is paramount. Sustenance, however, seems to have differing meaning for different people. The cost of sustenance appears to linearly increase with wealth. Perhaps, the slope of utility is a more meaningful measure for the individual. If so, those who start with a higher cost of sustenance are less likely to be able to enhance individual utility. For this cohort, life is even more irrational than the populace at large.

Life, a highly irrational notion, continues with inexplicable regularity.

Millennials’ tech

A recent article in the International Journal of Business Information Systems investigates how social networking could be used positively during campus emergencies. The generation gap between the young and the old has been growing at such a rapid rate that the knowledge held by the young encompasses most of what is relevant for the future. Octogenarians in the Congress, aging bearcats that govern the economy and those waiting to retire at the top of large organizations are slowing down technology progress to such an extent that most in universities today will never consider working for a company or voting. Recent elections that swept a “red wave” across the country accounted for a 35% turn out – most showing up to send their relatives back to Washington.

The millennials certainly have the technology – to eliminate crime, to grow knowledge and to create next level societies. If the “wise men,” could remove the shackles, they can grow a lot faster. For the status-quo, findings such as “social networking has a positive effect in emergencies,” seem to be a new revelation – but for the millennials, it is part of their life. The internet – as described once by a policy maker as “a series of tubes,” has taken a toll – not only on the ego of those who came before but also their ability to be effective. This has happened before – airplanes and computers themselves opened up discontinuities that separated generations – and it will happen again.

Those, unwilling to admit ignorance at the face of accelerating technology, will destroy knowledge, wealth and the security of future generations.

Sunny value destroyers

A recent article in the Review of Accounting Studies, that apparently demonstrates CEOs with “sunny dispositions,” –  have a positive impact on stock price, is symptomatic of the time and money wasted by accounting and those who research it. Accounting, the bane of corporate America, deploys so many people – in Wall Street and inside companies, measuring, monitoring and reporting numbers - that have little impact on shareholder value. Part of the blame has to go to business schools, still steeped in tradition, graduating people with irrelevant skills for the modern world.

Shareholder value is seldom created by accounting or “sunny dispositions” of the CEO or the CFO, as claimed by the article. Apparently, the authors mistake bumps in stock price as shareholder value – it is not so. However, “sunny,” the reporter is, those who invest in the stock of the company, do care about the real assets of the firm and how they are growing. They do not really care how “gold plated,” the investment banker is and how McSleasy the consulting firm is. And BS, has an expiry date.

The idea that dressing up numbers and reporting them with a sunny disposition enhances the value of the firm has no empirical validation. 

Economic value of segregation

Humans, still fundamentally driven by visible features, created by less than 1% of their DNA, could be ahead of themselves as they struggle to create better societies and structures. Their recent arrival on a planet, substantially more sophisticated than themselves, signaled a regime change – preferential to tactics than strategy. For 100 thousand years, a mere glimpse of space time, they have been struggling to sustain a clan structure – first created by proximity, then by the shape of the skull and distance between the eyes and in the modern world, apparently by the color of the skin, the least compelling of the segregation schemes they have been able to devise.

If humans are unwilling and unable to rise over their mental constraints – one has to sympathize with them as they had very little experience with it. It appears that societal utility could be enhanced by segregation in transition, something that may extend over a century. A recent study shows that humans tend to segregate when the space occupied – say in a city – hits a threshold level. This indicates that a hard wired need to segregate exists in every one of the currently existing 7.2 billion specimens. Countries provide an efficient segregation scheme and for half the word’s population, the problem reduces to regional schemes – language, imperceptible shades of skin color, height and food. In any case, the need to segregate is as fundamental as the human itself.

Although it may be alarming for some to consider, it is possible that segregation is utility maximizing in transition to a higher level society. The planet, a sitting duck in the midst of space debris, may need to consider local and temporal maximization of utility – and segregation could be a dominant policy choice to maximize societal value.

Ubiquitous Quantum

Recent observations from Princeton (1),  published in the Journal of Nature Chemistry advances the productive frontier of the intersection of Physics and Chemistry to influence biological systems. Scientists steeped in their chosen disciplines, chasing dead ends, have substantially reduced innovation potential and societal utility in the last few decades. The use of quantum mechanical modeling to expand our understanding of chemical properties and their interactions with biological systems is in the right direction. However, traditional life sciences companies do not have the skills or expertise to take advantage of this expanding knowledge.

Physics, the foundation of everything, is not understood well by scientists engaged in the use of chemical actions to impact even less understood biological systems. Chemistry, an inelegant and incomplete bridge, has effected a deadlock on innovation by encouraging incremental benefits. Better understanding of the nature and intent of electrons and the ability to predict their dancing clusters, may allow better design of interventions of biological systems by chemical means. More importantly, this may also open up possible magnetic and electric intervention pathways, something the status-quo appears to have little interest in.

Innovation is about the application of new ideas – it is not about incrementally improving what is existing.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/11/20/quantum.mechanical.calculations.reveal.hidden.states.enzyme.active.sites

Stochastically Jumping without a clue

Recent research from NYU (1) that apparently demonstrates that the modeling techniques used to forecast stock market fluctuations could be used to predict animal behavior – in this case, movements of zebrafish – ignores many fundamental aspects of modeling. First, unknown to most people in the financial industry, stock market fluctuations cannot be predicted.In spite of the proclamations of a recent Nobel laureate, who claims he could smell a bubble anytime anywhere, he is still to demonstrate a usable prediction ex.ante. And, high flying hedge fund managers, without insider knowledge, could never create alpha – risk adjusted excess returns, systematically. And, second, equating animal behavior modeling to stock market predictions shows a level of incomprehension in both areas.

Stochastic jumps do occur – the problem with such things is that they are not predictable. Perhaps what the NYU team is missing is the right language – the characteristics of the underlying process of the movement of the zebrafish appear to have stochastic jumps in it. But that has nothing to do with stock market modeling – an oxymoron. The reason the zebrafish is jumping stochastically is the same why stock markets do at times – arrival of new information. And, by definition these are not predictable.

As trillion $ slosh around an industry with no value added to society, further research toward predictions of stochastic jumps seems unwarranted.
(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/11/13/stock.market.models.help.nyu.researchers.predict.animal.behavior

The scope of ignorance

The scope of space and time appears incomprehensibly large – covered by what is visible to us in a narrow slice, covering 15 billion years and speculated to be at least ten times as large, beyond the horizon. This knowledge, albeit imperfect, has not awakened the intellect of the homo sapiens, most still locked in tactical struggle for basic necessities and the rest, perpetuating ignorance in every action and thought.

The scope of human ignorance is at least as fascinating as the artifacts of space and time. Their arrival on a planet that is impossible to detect in space-time – a completely insignificant event – seem to be of great importance to them.The most ignorant of the lot – the religious – seem to engage in such acts that a child would find objectionable. On the other hand, the intelligentsia, claiming superiority, simply make up stuff, as if they are allowed to do so. The most ignorant believe that color of skin and hair and useless religious beliefs are, somehow important. On the other hand, the intellectuals and academics, having figured everything out, wait in amazement why the world has already ended.

Humans, the most comical construct, will continue their journey to the abyss of ignorance.

Policy by convenience

A recent study from Duke (1) showing that politicians believe or disbelieve in scientific theories, primarily based on their policy orientation, should not come as a surprise to anybody who has been watching the campaigns. This is also the reason that half the country has checked out of the process, with no intent of ever returning. This number will continue to increase as more objective millennials take hold of an archaic system ran by octogenarians. The question is how long it will take to clean up the system currently dominated by a few people, with little understanding of science, technology and accelerating knowledge.

Climate change has been an interesting area of contention, as noted by the Duke study. It appears that politicians with free market based policies tend to disbelieve that it is happening. And those, with a passion for severely regulating everything to save the world, believe the world has already ended. This is an unfortunate side effect. Science and analysis should guide policy as forecasts and expectations are not religious. However, forecasts have significant uncertainty and policy alternatives often present flexibility – both in terms of timing as well as choices. Scientists, heady with data and modern tools, have all but sure that the fate of the blue planet is sealed. However, policy is about trade-offs, something academics do not seem to appreciate well. And, any trade-off decision needs to avoid premature exercise of options based on known (but uncertain) data, when waiting is often optimal for policy actions.

It is a conundrum – we have ignorant politicians attempting policy and dogmatic scientists, crying wolf. Neither is likely to get it right.

(1) Denying problems when we don't like the political solutions. Published: Friday, November 7, 2014 - 04:43 in Psychology & Sociology. eScience

Awakening by exercise

Exercise has been in the news – as the only non-medical route to avoid diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. It appears to be a good idea, especially in moderate amounts. But a healthy body without a healthy mind is value destroying for the individual and society. Not to be left behind, video games and other mind-exercising technology sites have been gearing up to awaken the little old grey cells. But they all seem to be missing the bigger picture.

The human brain, an energy hog and complex, does not exercise by playing games or solving puzzles on the computer screen. There is a lot of power behind the veil and most often, the organ simply retires to boredom. By feeding it prescriptive education and jobs that take nothing, society has been playing a losing game. The human brain has, substantially detached from the status-quo, for the problems fed to it seem so trivial and irrelevant.

Content, questions with the scope of the universe strategically and the world, more tactically, could possibly awaken the sleeping organ. More importantly, an advancing society could stitch live brains together to rediscover imagination, a feeling that has been dead for long.

White alpha

A recent study from Michigan State University seems to prove what the Chicago school has been asserting for nearly half a century. Although the study claims to be “first of its kind,” the conclusions have been known to most academics for long. There is no alpha – risk adjusted excess returns – anywhere. And, by implication, a blind man, a high flying hedge fund manager or a super-smart financial advisor has an equal chance of making random alpha in the market.

Mad and fast money experts on financial TV have been perpetuating a farce. The only alpha they make is the money they get paid by the producers of the show. That is indeed, alpha - if they spent that time trading, they would have lost money and alpha, if they knew what that meant. A trillion $ sloshes around the markets – idiots trading back and forth – as if it means something. Then, there are tens of thousand of “financial advisors,” most not qualified to advise anybody and the rest helping to destroy wealth systematically, in fees. The financial services industry destroys wealth to that extent that if the industry is made illegal, the economy will grow by an additional couple of percentage points.

Value is only created by real companies, innovating and creating new products. Those, trying to monetize and trade on them, simply destroys value. And, those who “advises” the common woman on how to invest, destroys more.

Stating the obvious

A recent study that states that controlling Ebola in West Africa is the most effective way to decrease international risk (1) seems to state the obvious to most straight thinking humans. Hopefully, this study did not burn too much money proving what could have been obvious to any high school freshman in her sleep.

Yes, it is indeed better to stop Ebola in West Africa. However, it does not seem to have sunk in with the less endowed – politicians and celebrities. Ebola, the most incompetent virus, unable to transmit without physical contact and exchange of fluids, has been riding high. It has travelled far and wide, without paying airfare. It has made a joke out of those living in the most powerful state in the country, led by the incompetent. It has killed humans after they showed up for treatment in hospitals. And they have successfully jumped from human to human, apparently using protective gear.

Humans are, indeed, prone to dramatics – and more stupid than they could ever imagine.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/10/21/controlling.ebola.west.africa.most.effective.way.decrease.international.risk.paper

Are we there, yet?

Recent news from Lockheed Martin that their engineers may have successfully tamed small scale fusion and practical generators, the size of a truck, could be available in a decade, is the type of discontinuity that the world has been craving for decades. The famous Skunk Works, may have done it again. Although academics are skeptical, if true, it will substantially change the game.

Humans, notorious for destructive tactics at the expense of strategy and damaging anything they touch, may still pull a rabbit out of the hat at the nick of time. Misguided environmentalists and compassionate politicians have been filling the airwaves with noise, with no benefit. The solution has always been zero cost energy and if the Lockheed engineers are right, it will mark one of the proud moments in the history of humanity. Now, they could afford clean water, air and environment, at no cost to society. They could shield the blue planet from countless projectiles from space. They could create airplanes that stay afloat and seaplanes that stay underneath for years – measuring, studying and rectifying the blue dot in the unimaginable void. They could print food, clothing, shelter and medications for anybody on demand. They could, possibly, bring happiness back to earth.

Engineers, behind thick glasses and adorable pocket protectors, may still save the world.

Humanity, –0.1?

Ebola, with low transmissibility and dormant, delegated to the guts of fruit bats, has been creating havoc world over. It has been a wild ride for the virus, simply unimaginable to them. They were nearly done – they needed a human to come in touch and then many more as they overwhelm the original host. It required meticulous planning – as transmission is not easy. They could not move by water, air or anything else – transmission required physical touch of the bodily fluid emitted by the infected. And they have done it.

The 7.2 billion simply stayed back and witnessed as the incompetent virus spread. The solvers of problems and hoarders of wealth – from Seattle to Omaha and San Francisco to Mumbai – have been silent. As they bought and sold stocks and provided nets to those who could be at risk of Malaria, they simply forgot the few in West Africa – as they have been circumvented by not only the virus but also the rulers of the land. As their organs failed and fever overcame any remaining senses, they simply vanished from the face of the Earth. Humanity has shown its hand –they remain to be colloquial and local utility maximizers. Healthcare workers, without boarders, remain to be the only shining beacon – something with flickering hope.

Humans have shown their depth and it is as shallow as a cup of tea.

Erasing bad memories

A recent article in the journal Neuron describes how bad memories could be erased in mouse models using light. This has broad applications in humans if the experiment could be extended to complex systems. TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) - both carry similar markers in the brain.If these could be erased, that has beneficial impacts on humans suffering from such CNS disorders.

The brain, source and cause of most human strife, remains to be largely unexplored by modern science. Memories, responsible for most pain for humans, have been left untreated as medicine follows complex brain altering mechanisms in the treatment of diseases. The ability to selectively erase memories could usher in a new era in the treatment of CNS disorders. A massive and misunderstood organ, the brain, holds the keys to happiness and diseases in human systems.

Memories – with a negative skew of disutility – are likely bad for humans. The ability to erase them could substantially enhance individual and societal utility.

Pipe dreams

A recent article in Physical Review Letters claims a novel form of “dark matter” known as “flavor-mixed multi-component dark matter.” The authors, who ran a large number of simulations on a super computer, conclude that they have successfully solved many of the vexing questions in the standard model – such as, “what exactly is the 80% of the stuff out there that shows gravity and if we do find it what may cause them not to collapse?.” These appear to be questions that a child will ask if faced with the status-quo theory. Adding a few flavors and components seem to show that the standard model is in fact “correct” and the “exotic dark matter,” is a bit more exotic than initially thought.

The amount of time, money, effort and computer time wasted to prove an incorrect framework that does not explain most of the observational data is alarming. This is a very rich area for physicists, mathematicians and engineers, as a complex and likely incorrect theory provides significant empirical flexibility to invent particles, fields and flavors. Academics, driven by the need to publish papers, are likely to simulate more garbage to prove what has been stated. In the process, they move humanity away from knowledge. There is little difference between fiction and current research in high energy physics.

Common sense, which has been “quantum evaporating” for a century, has to return to this field for it to move forward. This is unlikely to be aided by faster computers or wasteful grants.

Quantum AI

A recent article in the Journal of Physical Review claims that the application of quantum mechanics driven algorithms can substantially improve the performance of robots and other automatons that use artificial intelligence. This appears to be in the right direction as it is known for a while that the brain itself is a quantum computer. Mediocre and linear attempts at artificial intelligence by leading engineering schools have brought ill-repute to the field of AI for long.

The “new idea” brings into focus the need for robots to be flexible – able to learn and act descriptively, not prescriptively. Computer behemoths and computer science departments in universities have been battling with software and hardware constructs, totally useless for AI for many decades. To make matters worse, they showcase stupid applications such as Siri and Jeopardy winning Watson as examples of AI. These ideas have kept a generation of computer scientists bottled up, chasing irrelevant and incongruent ideas, in an attempt to create intelligence artificially.
Perhaps, we are approaching the exit of the dark ages of computing, held hostage by incompetent companies. The idea that intelligence is dependent on both qualitative and quantitative information come as a shock to the traditionalists, but much has been written about it. For any straight thinking person, it should be clear that intelligence cannot be coded in conventional languages and run on conventional computers.

Search companies and space administrations run by the government are unlikely to advance this field. It will require creative and uninhibited minds of the next generation, less worried about world domination.

Mathematical segregation

Recent research from Duke, that seems to confirm earlier studies, shows that human habitats tend to get segregated if the density exceeds certain threshold. They find that cities are more likely to get segregated along racial, ethnic and other dimensions, when the proportion of occupied sites to total available sites exceed 25%. They argue that mathematical simulations show such a result. Perhaps, a simpler explanation for the finding is that available space and associated options allow the inhabitants to delay the decision to segregate. As density increases, they are forced to exercise the option to segregate as further delay reduces their value. In either case, it is instructive to note that the need to segregate for humans is as fundamental as food and sex. The timing of their segregation decision is simply value maximizing and market based.

It seems humans, shackled to their clan legacy, are unable to break from the hard wired needs to be close to their own kind and far from the rest. What is ironic is that for most of their history – from 100,000 years to 10,000 years – the characteristics they used to identify clan membership included know-how and family ties. Modern humans, while maintaining the desire to segregate, have found much less substantial aspects to segregate – such as the color of skin and political affiliations. And recently, they have overlaid that with even more meaningless attributes – such as religion and location.

Those holding out for a more peaceful world, should understand that humans are ill-equipped to rise above the legacy they have been handed. In an attempt to rationalize it, they seem to have made it worse.