Sunday, August 30, 2020
Dunbar's Number
Thursday, August 13, 2020
A slap on the face of racism
The nomination of Kamala
Harris to the democratic ticket is a slap on the face of racism, worn by most
humans. A combination of black and brown, married to a Jewish person may be too
much for those seeking to be pure. She is contra-indicated for everyone, blacks,
whites, browns, and anything in between. It is sad humanity has reached this
nadir.
Attempts
at explaining the 8.4 billion specimens across the world share the same genes
have not been successful. It is not surprising as a sizable number believes the
Sun goes around the flat Earth. The attributes of color, religion, and language
govern decision-making for most, remnants of clan-based organization of
homo-sapiens. Modern humans have devised sophisticated ways to hide their
racist beliefs. But their actions speak volumes and the leaders of the greatest
and largest democracies always understood it. The electorate may talk a good
game but behind the screen in the election booth, their instincts kick in.
Racism
is the most prevalent disease of humanity today. It shows no signs of
abatement. It means that the training of the brain through information,
although necessary, is not sufficient to eradicate the disease. It appears to
be resident in the operating system and applications put on top of this foundation,
simply mask the instincts temporarily.
The
“progress,” of humans may become irrelevant if they are unable to put on a new operating system on their hardware upstairs.
Sunday, August 9, 2020
The Vanishing Species
Humans, a recent arrival on the planet Earth, appear to be on track to vanish in a few 100 years. According to a recent article in Lancet (1), population growth is slowing and the aggregate population is expected to peak in 40 years or so, just under 10 billion. With a Total Fertility Rate well under the replacement rate in many countries and the rest moving rapidly in that direction, humans are on course to a slow and painful extinction in the blink of an eye. In less than a century, the value of a human could rise to such levels that countries may fight for them or devise ways to manufacture them.
Humans were never expected to be here. A mere 75,000 years ago they were reduced to a few thousand samples during the Toba catastrophe (2). As they ventured out of Africa, just 50,000 years ago, they were given a palette of relative freedom to create their own history. They eliminated any other humanoid they found systematically, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans, albeit after mating with them, using abundant experience from clan-based violence borrowed from their ancestors (3). In less than 10,000 years ago, when humans settled and succumbed to agriculture and domestic animals, they exposed themselves to organisms that could wipe them out quickly. Their height and health started to decline since then (4) and with little knowledge of their invisible enemies, they remain to be sitting ducks in the midst of advancing pandemics.
There are three common themes that characterize Homo-sapiens all through their sojourn on the blue planet that possesses an incredible level of homeostasis. First, they are driven by a simple objective function, just like any other biological entity on Earth, a need for energy and a desire to perpetuate their architecture — more specifically, food and sex. Second, they try to maximize this objective function through violence, perhaps worse than other animals that have shown to be prone to irrational empathy. A freak evolutionary quirk ballooned their brains and that gave them the ability to strategize and collaborate to eliminate the foe. Ironically, the bigger brain accelerates their path to extinction as they devise weapons of mass destruction, religions, and caste systems. Finally, their long-practiced clan behavior pushes them to segment to ever so finer distinctions based on visible surface features and presumed differences. In other words, the deadly cocktail of food, sex, violence, and racism has set them up for the final assault by disease as their numbers naturally decline due to falling fertility rates.
Physics is yet to provide a reasonable explanation of life. The most elegant of ideas has been the second law of thermodynamics (5) and a systemic force toward increasing entropy at an ever-faster rate. Life certainly fits this as a biological organism is able to accelerate entropy by many orders of magnitude higher compared to a random combination of chemicals that make life. If so, it makes sense that Humans, an extreme form of entropy enhancing mechanisms, materialized. If the Physics holds true, they will be replaced by other forms that are more efficient in increasing entropies. The new species has to be more potent than humans in the current environment. Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics may fit the bill. It is more likely that the environment of contemporary life will be blown to pieces in a shock and awe process of massive entropy accretion.
Humans, the vanishing species, a quirky experiment of evolution, never had the staying power.
(1) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext
(4) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Sunday, August 2, 2020
Ignorance, the biggest threat to society
In the
midst of pandemics, environmental degradation, social unrest, and other
observable catastrophes, the primary threat to humans remains to be ignorance
(1). Merriam-Webster defines ignorance as a lack of knowledge, education, or
awareness. More generally, it is a state of being apathetic to emerging
information and a lack of a framework to evaluate such data.
It
should worry every human on earth that the greatest and largest democracies
have leaders who demonstrate ignorance to such levels that their mere presence
is a threat to humanity. It has been assumed that in a democratic system, fair
elections will guarantee that elected officials will be competent at the very
least. It was also an implicit assumption that democracies will avoid those who
have evil intentions to roll back the ideals of the system. It is clear that
these assumptions do not hold and it may be time to ask if the democratic
systems, as designed, are appropriate.
The concentration of power has always been a problem in a democratic system. The
world’s largest democracy, which purports a unitary system, has accumulated
power at the center and that has led to the uneven treatment of states all
through its short history. As the pandemic illustrated, the center has
schizophrenia, taking credit for what works and blaming the states for the
rest. In the world’s greatest democracy, which is apparently getting greater
every minute, the dangerous effects of concentration of power in the executive
branch are becoming clearer.
Democracy
has always been a fragile system. It relied on the intelligence, foresight, and
compassion of elected leaders to perpetuate it. All it takes is one or a few
individuals to turn it back. Large democracies are sitting at the precipice of
a societal tsunami. How they manage through this period will have a profound
impact on history.
(1) https://www.amazon.com/Flexibility-Flexible-Companies-Uncertain-World/dp/1439816328
Sunday, June 28, 2020
The knowledge paradox
Gaining knowledge is costly. It takes time, effort,
and money. Rational decision-makers will partake in this activity only if the
risk-adjusted excess returns from it are positive. Since the risk associated
with investing in gaining knowledge has both a systematic and idiosyncratic
component to it, if the individual is able to diversify the unsystematic risk
by accumulating varied and less correlated knowledge items, the relevant risk
for computing returns to knowledge is only the systematic component. Thus, it
may be dominant for a young person to garner knowledge in uncorrelated domains.
In this context, education systems that force an individual to specialize may
be responsible for reducing overall returns to knowledge for the individual and
for society more broadly. Further, the value of specialized knowledge declines
in a regime of high volatility as the aggregate option value of the portfolio
will be higher if it is constructed with diverse and uncorrelated knowledge
components.
The value of knowledge, however, declines with age.
Both the returns to knowledge as well as any diversification advantages that
exist from varied knowledge decline sharply after a certain age. Thus, it is
puzzling why older people will engage in the accumulation of knowledge in
diverse domains. It has been observed that individuals take on foreign
knowledge domains, such as new languages, music, literature, and even science
after retirement. Since the computable and observable returns from these
apparently irrational activities are negative, it has to be that there are
benefits that are intangible. Such benefits may include an incremental
extension of life by keeping the brain active and packets of happiness
emanating from gameplay if knowledge-seeking is constructed as a game. These
are difficult to measure and may depend on the individual.
As the expiration date of an individual is
predictable within reasonable error bands, it may be possible to tease out the
motivation for knowledge activities through longitudinal studies. Controlling
for the individual’s mental deterioration with age, it is possible that the
individual will continue to enhance the diversity of her knowledge portfolio.
If the extension of life is the dominant objective, this activity should
decline over time with a sudden drop closer to expiry. If gameplay drives the
motivation, it should hold steady and perhaps even increase as the individual
nears the irreversible outcome.
A diverse portfolio of knowledge appears dominant
whatever age one is, except very close to expiry.