Elite efficiency

A recent paper (1) studies the “distributional preferences of the elite” and makes a somewhat obvious (startling to them) conclusion - “the elite” prefers not to distribute compared to the general population. There are many problems with the study including the premise and the definition of the “elite,”  comprising of the graduates of the Yale Law School (YLS). The assertion is that these graduates are destined to power and influence (and presumably wealth) and hence the “branding” of “elite.” Institutions and researchers looking backwards and frozen in time, may be in for a shock when they look outside their theoretical and historically adorned windows and see the future.

How do we test a hypothesis that YLS students prefer not to redistribute compared to a random graduate? Could we use the same study and data? Suppose we prove that YLS students are not “elite” at all because the probability of a YLS graduate to have any influence on society is roughly equal to a random graduate, what would it imply for the study? Economists tend to use fancy words and create complexity so that they can live within their secluded ivory towers, contributing nothing to society. In this context, what exactly does equality-efficiency trade-offs mean? Does it mean that the “elite” like to keep the money for themselves and phenomena that cannot be understood in this framework is assumed to maximize efficiency?

Practical educators and researchers should stop wasting time assigning labels and useless observations in a label prone, segregated and tiring society.

(1) The distributional preferences of an elite
Raymond Fisman1,*, Pamela Jakiela2, Shachar Kariv3, Daniel Markovits4
1Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
2Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
3Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkely, CA, USA.
4Yale Law School, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

The human syndrome

The human syndrome, a disease that has been with humans ever since they arrived, has been declining for several centuries. A complex phenomenon, that has many symptoms including empathy, compassion, anonymous charitable giving and effective altruism, has been tackled well by modern humans. Eradication efforts around the world that include institutionalized religion, racism and a variety of modern segmentation schemes, have been exceptionally effective in reducing the prevalence and spread of this horrible disease. Systematized education at all levels seem to have also aided the efforts to eradicate the disease.

It has been a triumph for humans. They have been able to nearly get rid of irrationality and imagination, characteristics of environments that aid the spread of the disease. More recently, large swaths of humans immersing in prescriptive sciences, engineering and technology, has acted as an inoculation against it. Although complete eradication could be a few decades away, the reliable negative slope in prevalence is encouraging. The biggest danger appears to be the tendency of humans to be emotional and their occasional excursions into thinking about the world as a system. Such CNS deficits, could be treated effectively with available medicines. Perhaps a cocktail of such medications coupled with the policies pursued by the ignorant, could do the trick.

The human syndrome, that has held humans back for over 100 thousand years, is nearly history. This is apt as the “singularity,” dreamt by the technologists would require humans and mechanical robots to be indistinguishable from each other. We appear to be very close to it.

Fusion, it is here (almost)

Ever since a brilliant member of the Homo Erectus produced fire for the first time nearly 2 Million years ago, their descendents have been trying to tame and use energy optimally. More recently, humans have been getting smarter with alternatives to wood burning, including fossil fuels, biofuels, nuclear energy, hydro, solar, wind and tidal. For many decades now, it has been obvious to many that most of these are inelegant solutions to the energy problem.

Burning hydrocarbons, albeit easy to do, has possible long term negative effects on the environment and biofuels take more energy than they produce. Nuclear fission, often fails to account for the costs associated with the storage of waste materials, with half lives exceeding 50,000 years. Solar, the darling of environmentalists, is not economical – in all varieties, photoelectric and concentrating-solar and it is an industry propped-up by subsidies, devised by politicians looking for brownie points. Hydro power has displaced massive populations across the world, with long term deleterious effects on the ecosystem. Finally, tidal and wind, better understood by public, show low efficiency and they are pushed by “green companies,” who make turbines for profits.

The energy problem is far from being solved. Lately, however, there are glimpses of hope – Lockheed, Alpha Energy and National Ignition Facility – to mention a few, seem to be making great strides to taming fusion. Ever since humans understood how stars worked, it should have been obvious that there is only one avenue to pursue to solve energy. Better late than never.

Fusion could lead to zero cost energy and that will make most tactical problems that consume humanity currently, utterly irrelevant.

Accreditation revoked?

The famous school in Philadelphia, that has produced many capable people in politics and business, appears to be running out of steam. Its recent entries into politics appear less convincing – some paranoid and others ignorant, that the professors of the illustrious school may be holding their head in eternal shame. Even its business school, famous for finance and business, seems to have produced somebody who does not understand that the asset side of the balance sheet is not equivalent to net worth. Did the business school allow skipping Accounting 101 in its business program? How else would one explain it?

In a world crowded by educational institutions, accreditation should be at risk if graduates of a school, that it has awarded degrees to, do not understand basic stuff. Even if that person got a D in Accounting, the fact that the school was willing to hand out a degree, should be sufficient to put its accreditation at risk. It does not matter if it has Nobel Laureates in its faculty, if the school graduates a person of complete ignorance, one has to question the system. It has been tried before, another famous son of a school, up north, argued, he did not know accounting to avoid going to jail.

It is time for the famous school in Philadelphia to give up its accreditation, for its graduates seem to lack basic intelligence and knowledge.

Advanced society

As the astrophysicists look for advanced intelligence across the universe, it may be worthwhile to reflect what an advanced society may look like, conceptually. As asserted by the knowing, it appears that an “Earth-Like” planet – similar size, rocky and in the “habitable zone” from its star, harboring water and possibly Oxygen, are all that is needed for ET with big brains to emerge. A more subtle question is if ET is actually advanced, what characteristics are more likely in such a society. Perhaps, this is less interesting for the scientists, but it could be almost as important as water.

The going in hypothesis appears to be that an advanced society will unambiguously try to dominate its neighborhood. Metrics such as the quantity of radiation at certain wavelengths were suggested as possible proxies a few decades ago and accepted without question, even now. The desire and ability to dominate their planet and galaxy, appear to be necessary conditions for “advanced intelligence.” As the presidential race heats up in the US, we do see some “highly advanced intelligent beings” in the race, according to this metric, used by NASA and other ET seeking organizations. One of them, so dominant, he is scaling his domination of real estate to this universe and the next – a sure sign of ET like intelligence.

An advanced society, one could argue, is one that has solved space-time to its advantage. Such a society is unlikely to be restricted by such trivial things as water and Oxygen and they will have no interest to come eye-to-eye with ET seeking sub-intelligence. They are unlikely to be wrapped in radiation, emitted by systems of incompetence and ignorance. They are unlikely to be interested in the tactics of “domination” for there are so much more interesting thoughts that can span the multi-verse. 

More practically, one has to wonder if humans are equipped to seek intelligence elsewhere, as they appear to be lacking it.

Superior Agnosticism

A recent study that uses conventional metrics to show a positive correlation between atheism and intelligence, may be erring in the scientific principles it purports to use. Religion and atheism, both irrational based on observable data, have divided whole populations into polar opposites. In a world, where strife is derived from these two fundamental concepts, one has to argue that society is stuck on irrational thoughts – led by scientists and religious leaders. Scientific dogmatism, as damaging as religion, has been leading an entire generation down rabbit holes. The scientist who shouted, “Nobel prizes all around” after finding the “Higgs Boson” by using inescapable noise from trillions of experiments is no better than those who lead populations down blind alleys based on religious hypotheses, that remain un-provable.

The only rational thought is agnosticism, wrapped in humility – a complete acceptance that known information remain insufficient to prove anything. The value that can be imputed to remaining flexible and agnostic is significant for the individual and the society. Creating noise by large volume of data cannot prove anything – scientific or not. Similarly, asserting religious beliefs, by definition, cannot be accepted at any level. The parallels between these two streams of thoughts are surprisingly high – one using old scriptures and the other, newer ones.

Agnosticism, the only rational dimension of humanity, could be fast losing ground – struck from the left and the right.

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.