Ben Goertzel — Life Is Complicated

On "complexification" (complexity + complication) and modeling systems.

So why has the success of complexity science been so, well, complicated?

Some would say it’s because the core ideas of complexity, emergence, self-organization and so forth just aren’t the right ones to be looking at.

But I don’t think it’s that. These are critical, important ideas.

Rather, I think the correct message is a subtler one: Real-world systems aren’t just complex, in the Santa Fe Institute sense of displaying emergent properties and behaviors that self-organize from the large-scale simple interactions of many simple elements.

Rather, real-world systems are what I’ll -- a bit goofily, I acknowledge -- call “complexicated”.

That is: They are complex (in the Santa Fe Institute sense) AND complicated (in the sense of just having lots of different parts that are architected or evolved to have specific structures and properties, which play specific roles in the whole system).

The Multiverse According to Ben
Life Is Complicated

Ben Goertzel | Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics and financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series.

ht Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution

My journey to trading success and why the mental game is everything. And introducing, "Norman's Law."

I have been trading for 35 years. I've been a member of four exchanges, a floor trader, prop trader for a major international bank, commodity trading advisor, trader for a major hedge fund and all around money manager.

With all this experience I can tell you positively, unequivocally, that the secret to successful trading is mental. One hundred percent mental. No systems, no charts, no quants, no algorithms...just mental. Once you understand that; once you can master the YOU in trading, you can trade pretty much continuously with uninterrupted profitability.

So why don't people do it?

Closest A Modern Politician Ever Got To Understanding The Dynamics of Adaptive "SYSTEMS"?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. 

"This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.

"When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very rational account of a man's life, that he has always acted right but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence." 

Edmund Burke

(Hat tip to RM Mitchell, who rediscovers the oft discussed concept of "Innocent Frauds," yet conflates it with guilty or knowing fraud.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economics_of_Innocent_Fraud

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_622.pdf

http://weeklysift.com/2011/07/18/the-sifted-bookshelf-seven-deadly-innocent-frauds/

How to NOT Understand Tuning and Adaptation of Recombinant Systems!

commentary by Roger Erickson

Russell Huntley forwarded an article from ZeroHedge, prompting the following question.

With a declining innovation premium, will innovation only be able to exist as "open source"?

Wrong, question, really. This is just a belated restatement of Walter Shewhart's famous axiom about the statistics of complex systems.

"The highest cost, by far, in any complex system, is the cost of coordination." Walter Shewhart

The inescapable corollary was considered so trivially obvious that it was left unstated by Shewhart, Deming, Shingo, Boyd and the entire statistical process management field: "The highest return, by far, in any complex system, is the return on coordination."

That's simple system dynamics.  Call it auto-catalysis if you want, but the simplicity of the logic remains the same.  What's the innovation premium on writing the US Constitution, going off the gold std in 1933, or launching NASA?

With a steady source of uneducated beginners, however, it's absolutely necessary to restate the obvious, every day. Yes, it's rather comical to see how it takes these ZH guys to catch on, but they simply reflect the average situational awareness of students coming out of our schools. Face it, 99% of the electorate is about 4 decades behind logic, just in the field of computer software alone.

The innovation premium has always been this way! For about 3.5 billion years, just for life on planet earth!

It's called optimal "recombination" - quite literally

ZH is just defining "return" as personal return - to components in a supposedly organized system - in the form of personally hoarding static assets. Once they grow up enough to recognize the far greater return as group return-on-coordination, they've at least approached the logic of primeval biology. Social species invented alternate hoarding strategies: distributed hoarding of dynamic assets, i.e., the methods for tapping return on coordination.  That's how social species and organized teams leave Libertarian hermits in the dust.  EVERY organized system is based on the principle of optimizing recombination. Every coach or instructor tries to teach the value of teamwork, but apparently mostly in entertainment areas like sports, music, dance & drama.  Once grown up, of course, we also practice organized war.

Sheesh!

Something is terribly wrong with our education system. Are we purposely TRYING to dissociate? Or is distributed situational non-awareness just a coincidental byproduct of growth in numbers?

We better hope that that temporary group-clumsiness post rapid group-growth is a transient phenomenon, or else we'll find ourselves a cliff to clumsily fall off of.

This is not so different from any adolescent going through a growth spurt, and getting clumsier before they can get agile again. The only difference between one growing adolescent and one growing nation is that growing systems, including human cultures, are ALWAYS going through a continous growth spurt. Subsequently, they are ALWAYS desperately trying to re-establish group agility, and keep it within shouting distance of group growth.

This ain't rocket science, just simple system dynamics. There's no reason why every kid shouldn't have completely absorbed this by age 10, as their fall-back habit.

Paul Meli — Sectoral Balances within the Domestic Non-Government

There are many important laws that determine the behavior of various systems within the Universe but as far as economics is concerned, none is more important than the concept of a closed system.


From Wikipedia:

”In non-relativistic classical mechanics, a closed system is a physical system which doesn’t exchange any matter with its surroundings, and isn’t subject to any force whose source is external to the system. A closed system in the classical mechanics sense would be considered an isolated system in thermodynamics.”

What does this mean in the context of a monetary economy? What could properties of a physical system have in common with a system based largely on the relationships between stocks and the flows between them? It turns out that some math systems behave according to the same rules that constrain elemental physical particles, i.e. the concept of the conservation of matter holds mathematically for the “conservation” of currency units within the system.

If we define the closed system as the universe of state-backed US dollar assets and liabilities, including state-issued bonds held by the public, it means that the net dollar assets existing in the economic system cannot change over some period of time t without an add or subtract from a source external to the system.

New Economic Perspectives
Sectoral Balances within the Domestic Non-Government
Paul Meli

Peter Fryer — What are Complex Adaptive Systems? — A brief description of Complex Adaptive Systems and Complexity Theory

Short description of complex adaptive systems.

trojan mice
What are Complex Adaptive Systems? — A brief description of Complex Adaptive Systems and 
Complexity Theory
Peter Fryer

Dmitry Orlov — In Praise of Anarchy, Part III

This is an important post about discoveries in complexity theory and the difference between anarchic systems (biological) and hierarchical systems (social). As you probably have figured out, I think that systems and institutions are where it's at for gaining understanding in sociology, economics and poli sci.

This is part three in a series explaining anarchism as the opposite of hierarchical structure and institutions. I suggest reading the whole series if you have the time. It's a good intro to anarchist thinking that blows away the myths and disinformation.

Links to parts one and two are provided in part three, linked to below. The first two parts are largely about the work of Peter Kropotkin, who was a life scientist as much as a social activist. As Orlov notes, Kropotkin was an anarchist, that is, anti-hierarchical based on his understanding of life science, and not a Communist, since he considered its organization to be hierarchical.

Club Orlov
In Praise of Anarchy, Part III
Dmitry Orlov

Steven Rice — Group Intelligence Correlates With Social Aptitude, Not IQ

Considering the complexity and global nature of business today, work is nearly always a team activity, and often those teams are embedded in ever-shifting networks. A new field of study, collective intelligence, is measuring the ability of teams to solve problems. This research is yielding powerful insights into improving the performance of networks, teams, and other collective groups. One breakthrough finding shows that collective intelligence is variable and measurable and — most surprisingly — correlates more with the social abilities of the team members than with the team's aggregate individual IQ....

In large 21st century organizations, executives have recognized that networks and teams play a key role in organizational excellence and are a form of collective intelligence. It's true that networks foster innovation through informal collaboration and the exchange of expertise and ideas. Networks also move information quickly and freely and determine where work really happens and how. Whether we like it or not, hierarchies are more and more relics of the past while networks determine where value is created.

The Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Group Intelligence Correlates With Social Aptitude, Not IQ
Steven Rice

"Collective" means that "networks, teams, and other collective groups" are social systems comprised of elements and subsystems, together with relationships, usually rule-based and characterized as cultural or institutional. Cultural relationships are informal, based on tradition and convention, and they are implicit. Institutional arrangements are generally formal and explicit. A collective group is structurally and functionally different from an aggregate. Collective groups exhibit collective consciousness and coordinated behavior that is different from aggregates.