Encefalus

Encefalus wishes you a happy new year!! This blog started near the end of july 2008 with a 100 visitors and now has over 140.000 unique visitors! I want to thank you all for your support, e-mails and comments. Let’s hope this year will be better than the last one.

Let there be new synapses into our brains!

Stephen Wolfram

Lately I’ve been reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. As you can guess from the title, Wolfram makes a few great remarks about the future and the methods of science.

Traditional science uses mathematics. What mathematics do, is to quantify problems, find regularities and then use equations to describe these regularities. What this means, is that mathematics lie in a continuum, upon which we can jump from one point to the next.

However, this approach has met various difficulties. For example, mathematics never had any real chance in social sciences, or in biology. Mathematics have worked wonders for physics, where systems are characterized by stability to a very large extent, but for other systems, where we are faced with a high degree of randomness or complexity, mathematics have failed to us to a great extent.

Encefalus, for example, has written some articles on the problems that mathematics had to deal with in economics and what this has to do with the recent economic recession: A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis

What Stephen Wolfram proposes as a complement (or replacement) to mathematics, is computation.

Wolfram studied a set of systems called cellular automata, and other similar systems. What these systems have in common is that they are compromised by a set of discrete steps and a few simple rules.

What Wolfram proposes is that every system, no matter how complex, can be represented by a set of simple rules, which through the evolution of the system, can create complex and emergent phenomena, like certain shapes or the phenomenon of continuity.

Of course, what Wolfram proposes, while it may seem very interesting, it could also be false. After all, computational models are just that, models, and they could be completely wrong and oversimplifying. However, somewhere in the middle of the book I found something that intrigued me. In chapter 9, in section 3 (http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-9.3), Wolfram shows a computational proof concerning the violation of the second law of thermodynamics. What Wolfram says, is that, throughout the evolution of a system, there can be trends towards increased order and towards increased randomness other times, while the second law implies that all systems move towards entropy.

Example of cellular automata

Well, that may seem interesting, but still, cellular automata might not agree with reality. A New Kind of Science was written in 2002. In November 2008, this article came out in Scientific American: Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics? In the key points we read

1. Evolution leads to a homogeneous state.

2. Evolution leads to a set of separated simple stable or periodic structures.

3. Evolution leads to a chaotic pattern.

4. Evolution leads to complex localized structures, sometimes long-lived.

It is class 4 that Wolfram considers the most interesting. In this class, simple rules create complex structures, and any more complexity in the rules does not lead to more complex behavior.

Note: Wolfram’s classification scheme is believed to face some problems which Epstein tried to correct in his own classification scheme (see here: Classification).

It was originally thought that systems capable of universal computation would be found among Class IV automata - since only they exhibited interesting behaviour and signal propagation mechanisms such as gliders.

However, as Eppstein pointed out rules in all of the classes actually support gliders, and some non-class IV rules also look as though they exhibit universal computation e.g. see here. Since they contain gliders, universal computation may well show up among the other classes as well.

Eppstein’s scheme is as follows

1. No pattern expands: If no pattern can never expand, no gliders exist, and the rule is not universal. A similar phenomenon occurs with rules which remain within a finite bounding box - though they may compute functions which only require bounded resources to calculate;

2. No pattern contracts: If no pattern can ever shrink, no gliders exist. However universal computation could still occur in other ways; for instance the boundary of an expanding pattern could simulate the behavior of a 1d universal automaton.

3. Both contraction and expansion possible: Only in the remaining cases can gliders and universality exist. Our investigations show that a large fraction of the remaining cases do indeed support gliders; much more work would be required to show that they are universal.

Well, certainly there are many things we didn’t cover in this article. What I wanted to show, however, was that maybe computation can indeed be proven to be that new kind of science that Wolfram dreams of. Only time (and science) will tell.

In the latest post we talked about the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos: The death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos (drugs, guns, cops and tasers part II). Since then, Greece continues to be shocked by riots, protests and various forms of resistance against authority.

Some people even managed to occupy the national tv network, at the same time, that prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, was speaking in front of his political party.

Link: www.youtube.com

These protests and actions have caused similar demonstrations in other parts of the world. However, all these protests raise some very important questions. In european countries for example, we don’t see such actions. We don’t see violent protests happening every day. Many of these actions are could be considered unacceptable by western standards. Nonetheless, these "uncivilized" protests, have found imitators. Even in USA, a country where police authority holds supreme, we saw the occupation of the New School University in New York: http://www.newschoolinexile.com/.

What is considered acceptable or not is usually determined by the current authority. And it is authority we will discuss about in this article.

One can see authority in many different ways. In a first view, we can say that authority is something that has appeared in one form or another in most human societies throughout time. It can serve many purposes, and certainly, plays a major role in the shaping of societies and civilizations.

Most people in western societies view authority as a protective and beneficial force. Authority is there to preserve law and order so that we can continue with our peaceful lives. All offenders are caught and punished. However, we must not forget two things about authority. First, authority is compromised of people. Secondly, authority can be described as a system unto itself.

When we say that authority is compromised of people, we try to state something that many people forget. Authority is not to be treated like a supernatural alien entity, but rather, as a group of people which can be studied like all groups. Many times we tend to refer to notions just as the juridical system as something that lies in some higher plane, and we forget that it is controled by people which possess the same limitations and abilities as us. Additionaly, the institutions which control authority constitute certain environments. Wherever we have a certain environment, we have a certain set of attributes which are deemed adaptive. Whatsoever, these abilities, might not be the ones that are most productive for general happiness and social prosperity.

A very nice view on the subject can be seen on this video on youtube, concerning the concept of Pathocracy (even though I disagree with many of the things this guy says, the core concepts he describes are quite good)

Link: www.youtube.com

When we say that authority is a system unto itself, we mean that it constitutes an entity that forms its own laws that shape its interaction with itself, the members that consitute the system and the other systems which are affected by it.

Furthermore, man, as a social being, has evolved, through natural selection, various evolutionary traits that determine its attitude towards authority.

It is now that we must refer to the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch concerning obedience and conformity. Detailed explanations of the experiments can be found in wikipedia: Asch conformity experiments, Milgram experiment

What Asch’s experiments have shown, is that subjects many times changed their beliefs in a task that constituted in a simple task of deciding which straight line, among three, was the longest, due to peer pressure. Even though Asch considered his experiments to show that man can resist peer pressure, nevertheless, they have been stable hallmarks in the scientific literature of obedience.

Solomon Asch

Milgram’s experiments showed how someone under the guidance of an authority figure, which in the experiment was a scientist in a white coat, could torture someone. The experiments raised a lot of uneasiness, since they had been done only 15 years after the end of the second World War and showed some evidence that nearly anyone could become a torturer, as long as he was ordered by a figure in authority. Wikipedia quotes

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Stanley Milgram

Of course, we can’t leave out Philip Zimbardo’s experiment on imprisonment (Stanford prison experiment) which has also been transfered in the movie Das Experiment. Wikipedia quotes

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After a graduate student Zimbardo was dating objected to the inhumane conditions in the prison, and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that everyone including himself had become too absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.

Philip Zimbardo

As you see, many elements are combined to create a strange mixture which has evolved through time into modern societies, where self-claimed democracies, ruled by chaotic bureaucratic institutions, allow various groups with different and opposing opinions and forms of actions to survive, while at the same time, trying to supress their existence to allow the existence of the system of authority.

The line between right and wrong is highly blurred, due to the many interacting groups. The western states dissaprove the use of violence, while at the same time they use it to control their citizens. What is beneficial for society is confused with what is beneficial for those in power. In this article we presented some very basic stuff concerning notions and scientific facts about authority. In future posts we will delve deeper into the subject, presenting additionaly political views on this matter.

One of the first articles I had written was this one: Drugs, Guns, Cops and Tasers. I promised to write part 2 some day. There is not better occasion to write this article, than this one.

In the previous Saturday, on 6/12/08, Alexandros Grigoropoulos was murdered in the greek district of Exarchia in Athens.

Alexandros Grigoropoulos

Since then, Greece has been shocked by a series of violent riots and civil unrest (2008 Greek Riots). Meanwhile, the greek goverment does nothing to solve the situation, refuses to quit and the cops continue to attack violentely against protesters.

What better time to write about the nature of the current "democratic" states and law enforcement than this one?

Greece has to see such an appraisal since the riots in 1973 that led to the fall of the junte. Local and global newspapers have some really good analyses of the current events. However, what is also very intriguing, is the fact that some of these protests spread around the Europe (and even outside of it), as demonstrators were gathered outside of greek embassies in many countries, including Moscow, Barcelona, even New York.

But why does this happen? Certainly, cops here have murdered people many times before. To understand that, we must first look at the order of recent events, as well as how the current states work.

First of all, concerning the role of law enforcement, many people wonder why cops murder this boy, or why cops treat like that citizens, throwing tons of illegal chemicals (in about 5 days, the cops here had thrown about 4 tons of tear gas). What these people don’t understand is that the very nature of law enforcement is to torture and kill. The raison d’être of law encorcement is the preserve the current state as it is. If a cop catches a thief, then he does so, because his has been given the job by the state to preserve the law, and thus, the current state.

This is the same reason, that while corrupted politicians and bankers that have stolen the money of millions of people in the recent crisis are free, the cops are all too eager to send junkies to jail. The system has been created by those in power, for those in power. The junky threatens the system, while the banker is there to benefit from it. So, in the light of this analysis, we can understand clearly why murders are justified in modern "democracies".

 "It was not an accident, it was the very nature of the state"

Now, we need to comment on why this upraisal started and as to why other states in Europe are afraid that similar protests might start there.

The first decade of the 21st century saw a series of never-seen-before historical events. First, we saw the fall of the twin towers. After that, we saw the fall of neo-leoliberalism in the face of the recent economic crisis and then the election of the first black president in the United States.

The recent economic crisis was what led to a global unrest, but no protests or riots like those in greece happened. One of the reasons, is that european and american goverments have turned their citizens into sheep, with the meaning that Friedrich Nietzsche gave to the word. People are afraid of violence and this works in favor of an oppressing state.

Modern "democracies" are governed by bankers and social elites, while the average person can’t say a thing on the state of affairs. The only power he has, is his vote every 4 or 5 years. Whenever a protest happens, police controls it, to preserve law and order.

Epaminondas Korkoneas, the cop who killed Alexis Grigoropoulos

However, Greece is not a european country. Surely, it belongs to the european union, but it is not european in the sense that its civilization and culture are not like that of the average european country. It has the worst economy in the euro zone (maybe the only worst is that of Portugal’s) and it is the second most corrupted country after Italy. The greek state was established in 1829. Before that, it was under ottommann rule and in the greek culture, many turkish elements are still preserved. The two most obvious are those in the greek vocabulary, which contains many turkish words and in nepotism and corruption.

While the greek goverments have tried to establish a capitalist state, they have failed to do so. Money does not flow like in the american society and people don’t get a job based on their qualifications, but rather on connections and people they know. Greek youths study in greek universities, travel to Europe (usually in Britain) for one or two years to get a master’s degree and then they come back in their country to face poverty and jobs that give a salary of 600-700 euros, while everyone knows at least one person who got involved in politics and became rich because of their involvement.

So, while the greek goverments never quite managed to turn the economy into a capitalistic one, the greek culture never turned into a european one either. Protests and riots are quite common. The murder of a young greek boy from a middle-upper class family could not be ignored. It was the event that sparked a chain reaction. Of course, the cops had murdered other people before, but they were either immigrants or anarchists. This time, the murder happened in cold blood.

What makes this upraisal different from other ones is that in the riots there were not only anarchists and leftists. There were also students 14-years old and middle aged family men and women. People of every age and status were angered against the cops and the state for what had happened and for the living conditions we all face here everyday. People started to embrace violence. They started to realize that the only way to resist an oppressing state is not through peaceful demonstrations, but through violence against the oppressor. The only way for the cops to understand that they can’t kiil anyone they like, is to be attacked at every corner and every street, until none of them remains and those who remain realize that no-one wants, nor no-one needs them.

Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis and his gang

However, while the living conditions may be the worst in Europe, they are quite similar with that of other countries. What makes Greece so different, is that people here still take their politics to the streets, finding the original and ancient meaning of democracy. However, the european goverments are afraid that people there might start to protest too. The politicians that are most afraid are those in France who had faced violent protests in the ghettos a couple of years ago. They are afraid that the people might wake up from their sleep.

Well… I better hope they will…

Due to various circumstances, the regular update, which the last few months happens every week, will be postponed. I will probably post the new article this Sunday. Read some of the older articles to keep yourself occupied

Those of you who read Encefalus, probably remember this article: Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society

The reason I am mentioning this, is this article I found on the web: Ten Of The Most Controversial Books!

The latter article refers (pretty obviously) to books that have been considered extremely contradictory, that have touched very sensitive social topics and have been widely critisized or have raised violent reactions.

What is most interesting in this article, is that the books span a range of about a 100 years. The oldest book in the list is The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin by Mark Twain, published in 1884. The newest is the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, published in 2003.

During a 100 years (99 actually ) a lot of things have changed concerning the morality of societies. This article gives us a a hint as to how easily moral values change, yet how in every different age, most people will abide to them fervently. We also observe how people can be irrational in the face of ideas that insult their own view of the world, acting more based on emotion than on logic.

For example, concerning The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin we read the following

Because the word “nigger” appears more than 200 times in the book and it was perceived as racial, it has initially caused much controversy, especially so in the 20th century. This book was also criticized for the coarse language. Earnest Hemingway commented that “It’s the best book we’ve had.”  

Well, here there is much controversy. I haven’t read the book. However, the word nigger on itself doesn’t constitute necessarily a case of racism. It all depends on when the book was written and the meaning this word had back then. I haven’t studied thoroughly the age and the book, but considering the fact that slavery in the USA had just recently ended, we can suppose that the word "nigger" was all too common, and, while there was racism back then, maybe everyday people would use it, even if they wouldn’t be called racists at the time.

A case of racism in the animal kingdom

In wikipedia we find the following concering Mark Twain

Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and emancipation, even going so far to say “Lincoln’s Proclamation … not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.”^[49] He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying “I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature….but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him.”^[50] He also, notably, paid for at least one black to attend Yale University Law School, and for another black to attend a southern university to become a minister.^[51]

Anyway, whether I am right or wrong, this case is a good point to discuss what Steven Pinker has analyzed in his most recent book: The Stuff of Thought.

In that book, Steven Pinker argues that swearing once involved religious words that at the time, were considered serious offenses, because the people actually believed in them. For example, saying to someone "Go to hell!" was a serious offense considering the fact that people really believed in hell. As society started becoming more secular these insults were replaced with insults that concerned bodily functions and parts.

Steven Pinker

All words that are used for swearing first activate the limbic system, and not the cortex, thus inducing a strong emotional response, that warns the person insulted that is threatened.

If you think about it, we make a real deal about people (especially children) not hearing words like "fuck" on television. However, what is so wrong about a word that everybody knows? Especially, why are we afraid that children might hear a word, that they either know, or they’ll learn sooner or later? The reason for that is out of logic and lies in the realms of emotion and into the limbic system.

The bodybuilding site T-Nation has a very nice article on swearing and Steven Pinker’s latest book: What the %!#*&#?

I believe, the same thing happens with the word "nigger". No matter the context it is used, its very existence elicits a strong emotional response, especially in today’s society where political correcteness has turned into a kind of some new religion.

Other interesting book in this list is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1955.

Vladimir’s Lolita caused a storm of controversy when it was published in 1955 in France, and have shadowed the book ever since. This novel explores the mind of a pedophile named Humbert Humbert, who narrates his life and obsession for nymphets like the 12-year-old Dolores Haze. It was banned in France, United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina. But in America, it was a huge success and said to be the first book ever since ‘Gone With The Wind” to have sold 100,000 copies in the first three weeks.

It is pretty obvious that the subject of pedophily is highly controversial one, but why should a book be banned? Can a book really provide the incentive for such actions? Are those people who are not pedophiles, suddenly turn into pedophiles because of a book? The subject of the book is so controversial that I don’t think much thought was put into why it was banned.

The last three books in the list all concern religion: The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie (1989), The Harry Potter Series – J.K. Rowling (2001) and The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (2003).

This book by Salman Rushdie sparked controversies galore because of the controversial topic it touched. The title, “The Satanic Verses” refers to an incident that is disputed between fact and fiction. Some called it a blasphemous treatment of the Islamic faith as Rushdie refers to the Prophet Muhammad as Mahound, which is the medieval name for the devil. In Pakistan, there were riots in 1989, where a few people were killed and many injured in India. In spite of Rushdie issuing an apology, the Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the author publicly, and went to the extent of putting a $1 million bounty for killing the author and if the assassin is Iranian, it would be $3 million. Even Venezuelan officials threatened 15 months of prison for anyone who read or even owned the book. Japan imposed a fine on anyone selling the English edition and a Japanese translator was said to be stabbed to death for getting involved with the book. Major U.S. booksellers removed this book from the shelves because they received death threats. Rushdie himself lived in hiding for almost a decade. Such was the animosity towards the book, the makes it all the more appealing.

Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code raised similar (but less violent) reactions by religious and groups who thought that these books constitute an insult to religion and to Christianity. Harry Potter has been claimed to corrupt children and promote occultism.

Harry Potter fans corrupted by the books

It is self-evident that these reactions are the result of societies where religion is still so strong that emotion overcomes sentiment. It is highly shocking how in an age of scientific advancement people are insulted if someone talks about or critisizes mythological figures and supposed prophets. In fact, they are insulted so much as to raise protests or kill people. Why someone would do that is beyond me.

Anyway, the subject of dangerous ideas is something that we see again and again in various contexts. My opinion on this matter is that there are really no dangerous ideas, only dangerous people.

Until next time you can keep yourself occupied with the list of controversial books in wikipedia.

Further Reading:

List of controversial non-fiction books

Category:Lists of controversial books

Lately I’ve been digging into the subject of agent based models of social sciences. Agent based models are defined by wikipedia as following

An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network, with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. It combines elements of game theory, complex systems, emergence, computational sociology, multi agent systems, and evolutionary programming. Monte Carlo Methods are used to introduce randomness.

What an agent based model actually does, is provide a "social life simulation". Every theory strips many factors out of reality and focuses on others in order to create a logical and concise way of interpreting a set of events. Every theory has to do that on based on a certain level of reduction. Psychological theories, for example, deal with the person and discard most other factors, while economic theories discard psychological factors.

No, we’re not talking about this kind of agent

What agent based models do, is to try and emulate higher order events, based on lower order entities, called agents. An agent can actually be anything, like animals, people or robots. Since we are talking about social sciences here, we will focus on people.

Scientific American recently had this article on the recent economic crisis: After the Crash: How Software Models Doomed the Markets. In this article we read the following

The software models in question estimate the level of financial risk of a portfolio for a set period at a certain confidence level. As Benoit Mandelbrot, the fractal pioneer who is a longtime critic of mainstream financial theory, wrote in Scientific American in 1999, established modeling techniques presume falsely that radically large market shifts are unlikely and that all price changes are statistically independent; today’s fluctuations have nothing to do with tomorrow’s—and one bank’s portfolio is unrelated to the next’s. Here is where reality and rocket science diverge. Try Googling “financial meltdown,” “contagion” and “2008,” a search that reveals just how wrongheaded these assumptions were.

This modern-day tragedy could be framed not only as a major motion picture but also as a train wreck or plane crash. In aviation, controlled flight into terrain describes the actions of a pilot who, through inattention or incompetence, directs a well-functioning airplane into the side of a mountain. Wall Street’s version stems from the SEC’s decision to allow overreliance on risk software in the middle of a historic housing bubble. The heady environment permitted traders to enter overoptimistic assumptions and faulty data into their models, jiggering the software to avoid setting off alarm bells.

For its part, the quant community needs to undertake a search for better models—perhaps seeking help from behavioral economics, which studies irrationality of investors’ decision making, and from virtual market tools that use “intelligent agents” to mimic more faithfully the ups and downs of the activities of buyers and sellers. These number wizards and their superiors need to study lessons that were never learned during previous market smashups involving intricate financial engineering: risk management models should serve only as aids not substitutes for the critical human factor. Like an airplane, financial models can never be allowed to fly solo.

We need better models…

Well, the readers of Encefalus probably remember older articles that dealt exactly with the problem of merging psychology and economics(Some thoughts on a new micro-economic model and paradigm, through the integration of psychology into economics, Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis). However, the basic notion of agent based models is founded upon something that most modern science ignores: the study of complexity and emergence.

Complexity is a term that is very loosely defined. A June 1995 Scientific American article (From Complexity to Perplexity) reports that there are more than 30 definitions of complexity. The elusiveness of this definition can mean many things. Many people might say that this proves that a science of complex systems is actually something that doesn’t offer many things. Others might argue that complexity is a term that relies too much on the nature of the observer.

Anyway, the definition of complexity isn’t something we will deal with right now. The phenomenon that makes complexity so interesting is emergence. The basic notion of emergence is that out of simple rules, complex systems arise. And these complex systems, while at their most basic levek might seem nearly chaotic, they actually give rise to certain patterns that are emerging through the apparent chaos.

Complexity…

So for example, let’s think once again about economics. What has allowed economists to create theories that work to some extent is the existence of emergence. Of course, the economic models we had until now, are far from perfect as we have said in previous articles(Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis) and as it is obvious from the recent economic crisis. However, the fact still remains, that from simple interactions among people within a set of given rules, some patterns arise at a higher level that justify the creation of a science of economy.

However, while the emergent patterns can be studied by themselves, they don’t arise by themselves. They arise from the interactions that happen below them. At this lower level, lie the agents. Behavioral economics for example, can provide clues about the behavior of buyers and sellers in few persons setting. But how can we apply the new found knowledge into the domain of the market? Or, how can we predict future credit crunches? The only way to do that, is to create a representation of a real person, embed it with the features that we consider relevant for our study and then let it roam into our virtual world with the rules that with consider relevant, along with other agents, in order to see the emergent pattern of interaction arise.

Many people might consider that the emergent models can deprive science out of its humanity. However, the goal of science is to study, and if our goal is to study people, then we must make the necessary abstractions in order to create our models.

How can we predict future crunches?

For example, someone might say that we don’t allow free will into the equation. Casting aside the philosophical question concerning free will, that we have written about in the past (Free will revisited in the face of quantum physics, Free Will - plain and simple), if you think about it, no-one is completely free, since we all operate within certain boundaries. And these boundaries are the tools that we use to make our models.

Another example that could be used for an agent based model, came to my mind while reading this article: The spread of disorder - can graffiti promote littering and theft? (or read this Can the can on the Economist that refers on the same topic). These article comment on a recent research concerning the Broken Windows Theory. This theory postulates (and the research that the articles above commented on, proved it to some extent) that if in a neighbourhood there are a few broken windows, then the neighbourhood will degrade further. People will break more windows and further vandalize the neighbourhood. Or if there are litter on the street, the people will tend to throw more litter.The explanation for this is simple social norms. People have a strong tendency to conform (and they usually do so at any chance ).

Anyway, this information is valuable for agent-based models of social life, since such an information, for example, could be used as a rule for the interaction among agents.

Santa Fe institute in California

I hope I made clear a few points about this novel approach to social sciences. Computational modelling is something that has been used in many other sciences. The closest relative to the kind of modelling we are talking about now, happens in biology where biologists also have to deal with ecosystems made of agents.

Of course there are many more things that we haven’t discussed, such as complexity and emergence. Concerning all the subjects we talked about today, the main supporters of this theory can be found in the Sante Fe Institute in California (Santa Fe Institute entry in wikipedia). This institute has been founded with the purpose to study complexity. If you want to learn more on this subject this is the place to look.

Furthermore, we have Princeton’s Press series in complexity and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.

Stephen Wolfram

I promise to return on this subject. Until next, keep thinking!

Lately I have been reading this book: The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind. The book deals, quite obviously, with philosophy of mind and all the matters that touch this subject, including free will. The author is Ben Goertzel who happens to be a very interesting person. He holds a PhD in mathematics, but has dealt with cognitive science, and economics and currently focuses on AI research. He has written many more books, although this is the first one that I read.

Ben Goertzel

What seperates Ben Goertzel’s writing from that of others is his ability to combine philosophy and eastern religion into a unified perspective, like a new-ager, but unlike a new-ager, he creates logical and mathematical proofs for his problems. Don’t get me wrongs, but those people into new age philosophies have a tendency to mesh-up everything around, creating arguments that seem plausible (at least to those with no formal scientific background), but they are truly meaningless. Ben Goertzel truly embraces the problems from a scientific perspective.

The reason I am writing this article is that I found a very interesting piece of theory in this book. Well, actually, the book is full of interesting theories (and facts) and even though I’m just in the middle of it, it has got me into a lot of thinking. However, what really caught my attention was a theory inspired by quantum mechanics that really simplified the problem of free will.

First, we must explain a few fundamental things about quantum physics.

In quantum mechanics a certain property of a particle can be in superposition of its states, that means, it holds many values all at once. The most famous example is Schroedinger’s Cat. In wikipedia there’s a very good explanation of this experiment

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part One

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part Two

While searching the web the other day, I found two very interesting introductory articles on neuroeconomics on Psychology Today. The author is Paul J. Zak who is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. In his bio on his blog (The Moral Molecule) we read the following

Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. Professor Zak is credited with the first published use of the term "neuroeconomics" and has been a vanguard in this new discipline (emphasis mine). He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Zak is a recognized expert in oxytocin. His lab discovered in 2004 that an ancient chemical in our brains, oxytocin, allows us to determine whom to trust. This knowledge is being used to understand the basis for modern civilizations and modern economies, improve negotiations, and treat patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.  

So, what better way to learn a few things about neuroeconomics than from the founder himself?

Paul J. Zak

Further Reading:

Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis

I was reading this book the other day: Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. It’s a very interesting book that deals with the cutting edge of current social and cognitive science: the application of computational modelling in social sciences. I will not talk about the details of this book here (I’ll probably talk about agent-based theories and computational models in other articles). I want to talk about something else in this article. In this book I found a term I had never met before: deductive indeterminism.

This term refers to the inability to deduce by logical means a cause for an observable effect. The book was giving an example of a model of how cities form. The model could start with two possible premises, that people want to aggregate together, or that they want to stay alone. In each of the two cases, the computation resulted in the formation of two big cities. Therefore, no matter the cause the effect was the same. Therefore, we couldn’t deduce the cause. This is what we mean by deductive indeterminism.

The reason I was so glad I found this term, is because this was exactly what I was thinking about history and I couldn’t put it in two words.

The study of history is plagued by the diseases of a posteriori-ness and of deductive indeterminism. The scientific method is based on experimentation. However, in history, experimentation is impossible, since things happen only once. So, what historians do, is write huge volumes of books that contain many vague theories with vague notions and models about the procedures that drive history forward.

Of course, what we mean by the term "history" is a matter unto itself. After all, history can deal with many specific things (and their evolution through time) or with almost everything and anything. It’s actually a profound philosophical matter, since if you think about it for a while, this term carries an immense amount of complexity.

History is, actually, a science of facts. However, what kind of facts should a historian find interest in? If we say historic facts then we have made a fallacy, by basing our theory on a cyclical argument. History deals with historic facts and we call some facts historic, because they are part of the study of history. This is obviously the wrong way of thinking.

Furthermore, the term fact is somewhat ambiguous. After all, how can we be sure that something has really happened and constitutes a fact?

There are clearly many sub-fields of history

Wikipedia defines history as following

History is the study of the past, particularly the written record and oral traditions passed down from generation to generation verbally. New technology, such as photography, sound recording, and motion pictures now complement the written word in the historical record. History is a field of research producing a continuous narrative and a systematic analysis of past events of importance to the human race.^[1] Those who study history as a profession are called historians.

This definition of history is probably good enough. History doesn’t deal with facts, but with records, which we hope to provide accurate descriptions of facts.

Now, that we have dealt with this issue, we must elabore a little bit on the methodology of historical analysis.

The problem with history is that it does not constitute a pure science per se like physics. History constitutes a science according to the roots of the word science, the word scientia (latin for knowledge). However, history lacks the two things.

1) Experimental testing

2) A standard methodology

The second doesn’t constitute a real problem, since many sciences have to deal with this problem (like psychology). The first however, clearly proves the problems that history has to deal with.

Not your average historian…

Therefore, what historians do is to try to combine facts with their theories in order to create a cohesive narration of the events they try to explain. And there’s where the problem lies (along with the incentive for this article).

The narrations that historians provide may seem cohesive, but this does not provide any credibility to their theories. Why is that? The answer is simple: deductive indeterminism. Without the chance to experiment on a certain procedure we can never be sure that a theory is right. Until a theory has been experimentally tested every and any theory is at the same time wrong and right. A posteriori every theory seems valid and invalid at the same time.

Of course, many of you might think, "what is this guy saying?". After all, in our everyday lives, we usually deal with theories about everything (from friends to world scale events) at an intuitional level. The theories that the historians provide clearly seem "intuitive". Therefore, why should we reject them?

The reason is simple (but not intuitive ). Think for a while about non-Euclidean geometries in mathematics and theoritical physics. Do these constructs have anything intuitive in them? No. But scientists accepts them. Why? Because they have been given proof about their validity.

The problem with every social science, is that man, the subject that performs the study, is at the same time the object of the study. Our brain has evolved in a certain way to deal with the social reality that surrounds us. We are not used to deal with the social world in terms of statistics and mathematical models. However, these are the only tools that science has verified as truly valid.

Think for example of psychoanalysis. Many people, when they first learn about it, are convinced by the simplicity of the theory. However, as you delve deeper into psychoanalysis, you see that it gets increasingly complex without any particular reason. Vague notions are intertwined with vaguer theories that seem to go nowhere. The same happens with historical analysis. And the reason is simple. If a theory can’t explain clearly a phenomenon you are forced to increase its level of complexity by adding more definitions and notions in order to make it seem more cohesive. The results are theories that provide no explanation for the phenomenon at study.

Maybe not dude…

A posteriori every theory seems valid and invalid at the same time. So, how could history create valid theories? The constant effort of historians to combine different cultural terms, with not actual definition, from different eras of various civilizations in order to create a model of cause and effect for a certain event is, probably, something doomed to fail. So, where should we look for the answer? The answer lies in experimentation.

However, how can historians experiment with their theories? Can they enter into the time machine and go back in time? Or should they create theories about the future and wait for a hundred years to see what happens?

Well, none of these need to happen. I believe the answer to lie in two seperate schools of thought.

The first one is the reductionist school of thought, where by simplifying social processes at all levels, we can find the basic blocks of social and mental life.

The second one, is the school of computational modelling. As we know, many (or even most) systems in nature are complex and non-linear. Most social systems tend to be complex as well.

Computational Modelling

Therefore, what we truly need is to create a science that is based upon the basic blocks of mental life (which will probably be found in our neurons) and then use this base for the modelling of a society. In that case, we will be able to truly simulate decades, centuries and millenia through a computer.

Of course, can this provide true validity to our theories? Maybe not, but this approach will surely provide a solid and clear foundation upon which we can describe and explain social procedures. Should we be able to find the core of social life, then history will unfold as a complete logical sequence of events with no need to appeal to vague terms and strange theories.

Of course, maybe historical analysis still has some things to offer. After all, in our previous post A different view on economics: maybe all we really need we mentioned how Nouriel Roubini rejected mathematical analysis in economics, and forsaw the credict crunch of 2008 through historical analysis.

Nouriel Roubini

Only time (and science) will tell…

Further Reading:

Neurons, politics and economics

As some of you might have noticed, my RSS feed shows sometimes earlier articles. I am writing this to tell you that I’ll try to solve the problem, so don’t worry. If you want to get updated on the latest articles just visit http://encefalus.com to be sure.

The readers of Encefalus probably remember this article: A different view on economics: maybe all we really need.

I found this article recently in the New York Times: The Behavioral Revolution. It is an article that expresses some views similar to the ones we expressed in A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, indicating how psychology can help economists explain the recent credit crunch (for the recent economic crisis see here: Financial crisis of 2007–2008). The publishing of such an article in a newspaper the size of New York Times, clearly shows that here we have an underlying new trend in economics and psychology that breaks the disciplinary boundaries.

David Brooks, the author of the article, makes some very interesting points based on a basic premise: people are irrational.

However, I am always amazed by the chasms that exist betweent the various disciplinary fields. If people were truly rational , as economists, believe, then psychology would have no place as a science. We would study instead formal logic. The study of psychology is nothing more than the study of the laws that define human behavior. And if people acted based on logic alone, then psychology would have reached its final conclusions a long time ago.

Of course, there is always another view on the subject of rationality. Sure, people are irrational, but we can make two exceptions

1)People act rationally in times of danger, like the recent crisis

2)Through the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, the noise inherent to the system that is constituted by the interactions of irrational economic agents, is stabilized, resulting to a kind of symmetry that approaches the normal distribution curve and can be analysed by the current mathematical models that the neoclassical economics (the main trend in economics) use.

The first argument can be summarized and refuted by a few words from The Behavioral Revolution article

Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.

But during this financial crisis, that way of thinking has failed spectacularly. As Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he was “shocked” that markets did not work as anticipated. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

In addition to this statement by Alan Greenspan, I have a very good blog to show you, concerning the first argument: Predictably Irrational. It is a blog by the author of the book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely from where I found the above link the the NY Times article. As its name clearly implies, it deals exactly with that subject, the irrationality of the human being. There you’ll find many tiny pieces of the grand puzzle of irrationality that works wonders into our heads, making us taking decisions, while at the same time the true reasons of our decisions remain obscure. These ought to convince you over this fact.

Another case of irrationality…

Of course, Encefalus has written many articles on this subject before, since the deconstruction of the hyper-bolstered ego of the human race, is an activity I am really fond of :-). You can read these articles for more information: Lotteries, poverty and social implications, Lotteries, poverty AND credit cards this time along with the proper social and scientific analysis :), Subliminal messaging, subliminal advertising and subliminal learning for a subliminal post , The cookie effect

The second argument posed can be said to be the standard choice for the mathematics that concern many fields of the social sciences. The modern portfolio theory of economics is based on the premise that the system follows the normal distribution curve.

Now, concerning the second argument, we should take a look back at the article A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, where I mention the french mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I copy from the original article 

[...]On the other hand, we got the second view we mentioned above, that we need new math. This view has been expressed in many articles in Scientific American. The oldest (I think) and, probably, the most important is this: How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street written by Benoit B. Mandelbrot himself, the mathematician who discovered the famous Mandelbrot Set. 

In this article he discusses how portfolio theory has been based on the wrong assumptions (like the normal distribution curve) and therefore, provides wrong results. He proposed the use of fractal geometry instead, which can explain extreme events. In portfolio theory extreme changes are considered unlikely and, therefore, not worth mentioning. In fractal analysis, extreme events are considered a part of the system.

So, the second argument is false as well.

David Brooks mentions many researchers that have explored the field of irrationality

Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely. 

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what’s happening, he saw it coming. His popular books “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan” were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.

In “The Black Swan,” Taleb wrote, “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” Globalization, he noted, “creates interlocking fragility.” He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — “when one fails, they all fail.”

Nassim Taleb

Then the article continues by elaborating on the work of Taleb

In “The Black Swan,” Taleb wrote, “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” Globalization, he noted, “creates interlocking fragility.” He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — “when one fails, they all fail.”

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

The article also includes Taleb’s interpretation of the recent crisis

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other’s risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events don’t underline this worldview, nothing will.

I

In wikipedia, you can find some more clarifications 

In 2006, in The Black Swan

Globalization crea