Cultivating genius

Another perspective on where good ideas come from, this one courtesy of Jonah Lehrer, writing in March 2012 Wired.

he starts from David Bank's paper on the problem of excess genius. Bank notices that genius comes in clumps. He postulates that this is due to a confluence of factors

My sense is that high points in cultural history require the confluence of many factors; some of these are more important than others. When all or most of the factors coincide, then one has a Periclean Athens, Laurencian Florence or Elizabethan London. When only several factors combine, the cultural eruption is more humble -- one gets Goethe's Weimar, or the Lake Poets. Things trail off gradually; if virtually none of the factors obtains, then we call it a Dark Age.

He tests many, and finds none.

Jonah Lehrer thinks the answer is in Paul Romer's concept of meta ideas, from his essay on economic growth

meta-ideas are ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.

Romer gives the 17th century idea of patents and copyrights. Lehrer lets this slide. These meta-ideas at SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ideas, and NO LONGER SUPPORT THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF IDEAS, they block it.

Romer concludes

We do not know what the next major idea about how to support ideas will be. Nor do we know where it will emerge. There are, however, two safe predictions. First, the country that takes the lead in the twenty-first century will be the one that implements an innovation that supports the production of commercially relevant ideas in the private sector. Second, new meta-ideas of this kind will be found.

Only a failure of imagination, the same one that leads the man on the street to suppose that everything has already been invented, leads us to believe that all of the relevant institutions have been designed and that all of the policy levers have been found.

Oscar Omoro (a FX trader) has this to say about meta-ideas and currency values

Meta-ideas come from a previously unknown source, and possesses the power to propel a large and growing audience into thinking in some new way.

Meta-ideas contain a kind of formula to perpetuate themselves. This formula can include a degree of fear (or greed), such as the fear (or desire) that gold prices will rise and a nation’s currency will decline. The formula has power because it associates some well-recognized truth with the particular emotion it intends to sway.

Lehrer concludes that we shoud support genius in science/arts the same way it is supported in sports. The US has a tremendous system to cultivate athletic talent at every stage of its development.

Swarming networks

There is an interesting analogy between swarm models and adoptive networks. Need to develop a zombie model of it.

How to do high-impact work

What question do people want answered?

Need to be early or first, find/define an emerging subject.

HIV was a field before Thomas, but not statistical learning and HIV.

Protein docking was a field before Thomas, but not with flexible protein structures.

What is mine?

Thomas suggests integrative model stretching from cell to population

A page from my notebook

I doodled some ideas during the one non-relevant talk at a recent workshop.

The brand as a tribal god.

Maybe I should publish this as "lost ideas" because I don't have time to coherently follow it up now...

modern tribes, defined by the brands they choose, which makes the brand the tribal god.

My whiteboard

thoughts to mike

Dear Mike,

Great talking with you last night! I really want to move our conversations away from the collapse of civilization and on to the resiliance of cities, please help me with this.

I understand you want to have objective standards you can use to inform policy, for the benefit of all and not just because that state's senator is on the appropriations committee. You are doomed to failure with such an unrealistic attitute, you should know this by now. Wise up, bro!

Cities are incredibly resiliant. What kills them is when the resources which support them fail, but then civilization collapses. Anything else, and they just re-build. Can you name one city abandoned in the last 500 years because of a disaster? Heck, people still live in Rome two millenia after the barbarians sacked the place.

Phoenix will run out of water. The water problem is really really hard to solve. I think we will end up drinking Lake Superior, and water pipelines will be the next big business. Drink, baby, Drink!

Energy is not so hard. Like it or not, we are going to go nuclear, and build more efficient houses/buildings. Green architecture.

Food is an issue, read on vertical farming. Just as you can use a city as an energy souce (see efficient houses, above), so can you use it as a farm. Get the transport on non-(locally)-emitting technology (bikes or electric vehicles) and emmissions are not a problem, so the food is ok to eat.

Yes, you can and must think of cities as individuals, just as you think of people as individuals, but one must also realize that they form networks. The network rises or falls together.

Do not step on your brother! We do not step on your brother!!

The debt book: Read this interview. Have Cara preach a sermon on it. Have her send me her sermon notes, I would like to know what she thinks.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

Tiger's thoughts on the next step in US politics:
Latest thoughts on the political process: Apparently there has been a sea change in public opinion in the last month, similar to 9/11 if not quite as intense, which the polls are only beginning to pick up. Due to the deficit extension circus, few people are able to take the US govt. seriously anymore. It's not a question of "throw the bums out," because the whole process is seen as broken. The political logic, it seems to me, is as follows: 9% projected unemployment essentially dooms the present administration. Perry & Romney cancel each other out, and both are seen as deeply complicit in the current political system, in which people have lost all faith. GOP strategists begin to realize neither has sufficient pull to prevail in what should be an easy win. They turn to Petraeus (if he's willing), as a new Eisenhower, now that he's being somewhat civilianized as CIA director (c.f. Eisenhower's brief stint as President of Columbia University), and the public goes along in the democratic equivalent of a military coup, in which "the politicians" as a whole are ousted. Not that logic, political or otherwise, always prevails, but this is how it looks to me at the present.

Oh, and collapse equals opportunity.

Cheers,

+glenn

--
-----------------------------------
Here miracles become marvels, and
marvels recurring wonders.
-- William Beebe

Dr. Glenn Lawyer
+352 661 967 244
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics
Campus E1 4
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://bioinf.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~lawyer

Protein Folding I Ching

Protein folds are divided into 7 families. Each protien will have several domains, each of which falls into one of these families.
http://scop.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/scop/count.html#scop-1.75
Make an I Ching which uses two adjacent domains.

Blurb for the book/app:
DNA codes proteins. Protiens, then, determine everything with respect to life. This knowledge, while new to western science, is actually quite old. We recently found an ancient manuscript, from the
mountains, written in a Vedic script. Translation showed that it associated each combination of protein fold families with a particluar fortune. We are thus proud to present the Protein Folding I Ching.

Nuance based search FOUND!

Yes! I had saved the idea as a text file on my desktop. Here it is:

Nuance or Overview

The web has become our primary source of information. And search engines have become the curator/gate to this information. This is great when our motivations align with the search engine, and not so great otherwise. LP of Google defines the ultimate search as one which returns 1 result, the one you are looking for. Many times, however, I am not looking for one result. Rather, I want an overview on a situation, or background information on a topic. This current work describes an architecture for such a tool.


* what about mobile? How does this change the perception.

Use cases:
1) Greek/EU debt. Relevant information could include
2) Researching an investment/stock.
3) State of the art in molecular biology.
4)

Archetecture:
find everything relevant to the topic.
Sort by theme/relevance/filter bubble
Present as a tree, with a history tree (not just forward/backward)


Improvements:
Named filter bubbles-- how would celeb X view the world?
Allow people to volunteer to share their bubble!
Auto-blogging, with immediate relevance to what the person was searching for!


Number of top-level branches in the tree?

DRAFT-- (im)morality of debt

This is an idea I wish to develop more.

Posting an early draft version, full of flaws

The morality of US debt

I did a favor for someone recently, which involved money. They thanked me and said they didn't know how they would ever repay me. I said getting the money back would be enough.

Debt. It is essential to social function, to a functioning society. But even more important than debt is debt forgiveness, redemption. Debt is obligation, debt is bondage, and ultimately, debt is slavery.

Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, writing in the Boston Review in 2005, discuss the sorry state of middle America's finances. There seems to be a cry from the right wing and from banks that this is middle America's fault, that if only they weren't so consumer crazy, always buying the latest and best fasion and gadgets, all the while living beyond their means, then they would be in better shape. The cry was turned into a major re-write of bankrupcy laws, laws which were in essence written by the lenders.


But the data does not show that Americans are overspending, in fact they spend less of their income on food/restaurants, clothes, appliances, cars, etc. then they did in the 70's. Instead, they face higher costs, for taxes, health insurance, child care.

http://bostonreview.net/BR30.5/warrentyagi.php

My neice was unemployed for a period of some months. She doesn't have a savings built up because she is young, having just graduated college, and hasn't had time. So she lived off her credit card. Irresponsible? I hardly think so. The bank charged her 24% interest on the credit card loan. How do you repay a debt which has an interest rate of 24%? Who is acting immorally here? In her defense, the debt has been repaid, along with the usurious and exploitative interest charges.


And wait a minute, wasn't it these same prophets of the right who encourage middle America to spend? Who was it who urged us, as our 'patriotic duty', to go shopping after 9-11? Since when did consumption become a patriotic duty?

That question has, in fact, been answered in the great BBC documentary 'The Century of the Self'. This describes how the industrial revolution lead to excess of capacity, threatening the foundations of the industrial society, and, more importantly, the bank balances of its leaders. Something had to be done. Something was done. Advertising convinced us that the route to personal fulfillment was through buying things. This is a message which is continually rammed down our throat, in ever sophistocated means. It is, in fact, a precept. If we measure a country's growth in terms of GNP, then GNP must increase each year, which can only happen if consumption also increases each year. Our economy is built on a model of continually and exponentially growning consumption.

Whenever the right wing gets moralistic, they turn to Christianity to back themselves. This is quite odd when applied to debt. One wonders what would happen if they prayed the Lord's prayer, the way Jesus taught us we are supposed to pray. "Forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. But was Jesus talking about money here? Well, yes, he actually did have a few parables about people who owed money. Nor should we forget the Year of Jubilee, as decreed by God the Father, during which all financial debts are forgiven. Certainly the debts in the Lord's prayer are more than financial, but just as certainly they do not exclude the financial.

And at this point it is also instructive to think about where all this money which we supposedly owe comes from. Did the banks take from their hard-earned resources, which they had carefully built and saved over the years, and risk them to help us? Not hardly. Thanks to the glory of fractional reserve banking (and yes, this is a good thing), the money is, in fact, something they just made up.

And didn't we, in fact, just spend billions (or was it more) of OUR money, earned by the sweat of our brow, via our taxes (remember that the ultra rich and the corporations do not pay tax, only middle America), to bail out these banks?

Something is very wrong with the Repulican party

Network structure

1) Nature re-uses ideas.
2) social networks reflect structure of society-- the human hive mind.
3) ants/bees also have well studied hive minds.
4) what network homologies exist between 2 and 3? Other systems (schooling fish, herd animals, flocks)?

Idea inspired by a comment from Nadya.

project organizer

A to-do list, and a progress bar which shows how much work you have put into it & also how much you have to go.
Default shows it as started (just writing it down is starting)

List can be re-organized and tagged.

but let's not get carried away.

Stray quotes and ideas

You can find a needle in a haystack, but first you have to find the haystack.

What if the default in the calendar was not blank space, but rather "thinking" or "planning"

The Ikea effect. You work so hard to build the stuff that you value it much more than it is worth.

Salt donkey

A way to get salt to inland villages

Tim Wu

Came up with the phrase net neutrality, consultant.

Starts with the story of a guy at Bell Labs, who invented magnetic recording. ATT squelched out because a survey showed that 2/3rd of phone calls were "indecent". They were afraid that people would stop using the phone if they thought they were being recorded.

Will the internet stay free? reviews history of other communication breakthroughs, all of which end up with a monopoly.

Positives: internet was designed with freedom in mind.

Negatives: economic principles and human nature. Most people want the bell curve, no one likes dissenters.

He seemed strangely unprepared for the questions. Most seemed obvious given his talk, but there was no evidence that he had rehearsed answers. In many cases it didn't even seem he had thought of the question.

He was carefully neutral on everything he said. Not strongly against anything. Not a boat rocker. Very concious that if he seemed anti business, or anti any one business, he would catch hell.

The New North-- Laurence Smith 03/24/2011

His focus is on the arctic, which he sees as a developing region as it is supposed to hold a large portion of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas.

The melting of the polar ice cap will make accessing these easier-- but only in some ways. Melting ice opens up the ocean, but closes the ice roads built across the tundra.

Global trends he considers-- urbanizing and growing and aging populations. The growing demand for electricity.

E-publishing

Article in Herald Trib on Amanda Hocking, who is the first major breakthrough author from self/e-publishing. She writes pulp fiction fantasy romance (her description, she has no pretension). The books take about a year to develop in her head and 4 weeks to write.

She studied books in bookstores to learn what worked, what sold. She priced her books low: under 3 bucks.She used Amazon and smashwords.

My idea: I want to write pop science books.

Diversity

Inspiration comes from the Wired article on the angels share, which commented that fungus live in every environment, no matter how hostile or artificial.

Thesis: single celled or simple life can maintain more diversity than larger forms, with extreme minority variants able to maintain the barest existence up until they happen upon favorable environments, such as a whiskey warehouse.

The general theme of preserving a few outliers just in case. Most of the time they are not god for much, but every now and then they save the species/civilization.

More from John Gray

Define progress as cumulative and irreversible change. This is clearly possible in science and technology, but he maintains it is not so in politics and ethics. Evidence: a US president condoning torture.

More Sustainability

John Gray RSA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray

More Sustainability. Doesn't this sound good? Don't you want it? Don't you want more of it?

Expands on his philosophy that "volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray writes that 'humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them" -- from the Wikipedia article

Not every human culture has been built on capitalism. But is there another way?

What about science as the new magic

"The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge... Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."


Which reminds me of my earlier thoughts on The Lord of the Rings as the death song of the agrarian society. Harry Potter is the new king. I just noticed that HP has few animals, and even fewer nature references. Yes, tons of magical creatures, but there is such a strong urban basis. And, as I have remarked earlier, HP is strictly visual, while LOTR is auditory, a collection of the best folk tales and characters of 500 years of civilization.

Which brought me to wonder what the folk tales of the new world should be, when everything is in the grid.

Today is rainy.

And the song for the day. Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac, whose only good album (Rumors) was written as their marriages were falling apart. (ok, Tusk was also pretty good).

"Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?"

see also Dreams
"Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams and
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of Loneliness like a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering
What you had
and what you lost
And what you had
Oh what you lost.

...

When the rain washes you clean you'll know
You'll know.."

Did I mention that it has been raining (and cold) for the last 2 weeeks?