CS855 - Week 1 - of things in different times and patterns

After reviewing some of the first week comments from CS855 posted by CTU class participants and replies from Cynthia and of the first Breeze class session (of which I was regrettably not able to attend while I drove across state highway 83 in South Texas which runs alongside the Rio Grande border, never more than a mile from that border - a sort of wild west frontier still), I am still amazed at the super progress of the hard sciences since the publication dates of the assigned books, in particular, The Fortune Sellers (his play on the phrase, Fortune Tellers). Again, this is not a direct criticism of Sherden (he writes for another period), but I keep on finding disagreement with many of his conclusions, especially his fatalism of the indeterminism of the social sciences, economics, and other fields of discipline that purport to model social phenomena. Things have changed dramatically in a little over one decade. In fact, by adding just a decade to the time periods of many of his criticisms of how scientists "got it wrong" during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s", they happened to have got it right after all. This is not just a coincidence. Because we better understand the technical aspects of complexity and of black swan and long-tail events, social scientists are better at describing phenomena and consequently many of their meta-projections, albeit nothing is perfectly tuned to the future because of quantum fluctuations, etc., and  notwithstanding the calamity of the banking crisis of 2008 and the heartbreak of 9/11, both events of which we could easily have been forewarned of using existing intelligence data and technologies at those time periods. However, Sherden, when he does mention quantum mechanics, uses it in a abusive manner - he doesn't quite understand that it describes microcosms and not so much macro-worlds such as social constructs at our scale. Scalability when used in terms of emergence in adaptive complex structures is another matter all together - it actually has technical meaning. Apparently, evolutionary patterns take place across scale boundaries in complex adaptive structures and this  is when things really take shape, so to speak, at the meso-scale level. I have been evangelizing this for two years now, since my work on computational information evolution started. Secondly, there is such a phenomena model called stochastic chaos and that type of chaotic structure is not deterministic. In fact, it is your worse nightmare in terms of modeling. It does not stop there. There is also quantum chaos as well. Quantum probability and stochastics is part and parcel to that chaotic model. So, chaos is not so clearly defined and even more interesting, hard to discern when trying to find out if a phenomenon is indeed a chaotic process. Time series analysis is usually done as a first step in order to approximate whether something approaches being chaotic.

On economic forecasting, Sherden dismisses entirely chaos as a tool for economics based on brief statements from Brian Arthur and others at the SFI. However the SFI understands the importance of meta-patterns introduced by the idea of chaotic processes as models. In particular, while Mandelbrot's development of a fractal chaos describing some economic processes such as the macro stock market dynamic is not a micro-definition, it nonetheless is instructive in finding economic meta-patterns. Stochastic modeling of prices in the markets is what quants and arbitragers do, especially in applying stochastic processes (usually Ito-type and variants of Black-Scholes models) to those markets and they all failed in predicting the banking and housing crisis of 2008 and other micro movements, but that was not the fault of the mathematics per se. Incomplete information mixed with a larger than expected uncertainty in synergies, plus the mob irrationalities of all of us trying to get things we want instead of things we need contributed to these mistakes. That is essentially the point that Nassim Taleb (he of black swan fame) was trying to say. These sub-phenomena are all capable of being modeled to more accuracy now, as well as knowing the adaptive complexity of their compounded processes, at least in meta-patterning. Sherdan hand waves through all of these very hard scientific methodologies and pronounces them impotent in one wand movement. Not even Taleb (a former math quant) does this.

I propose that futurists, when endeavoring to prognosticate based on projections of current technology, as Sherden correctly asserts, use situation bias to limit themselves - must look beyond their own skins, their world and beyond yet, their dreams. The decade figure I threw out before seems to point to a perceived future lag in these situation biases. Technical futurists, like Michio Kaku recognize these lags and have adjusted some of their prognostications. That is probably a good idea to get projections more in the "ball park" or realm of possibility. I like the proposal that the late great sci-fi writer and chemist Issac Asimov had about developing a social physics that looks at history paths as patterns and not so much as data for predictions. I think that patterns are more important than data or statistical analysis per se. Complexity is really about non-linear dynamics and that dictates that fluctuations (quantum or not) introduce too much uncertainty in the beginning or while a process is alive, to make any sort of precise determination of pinpoint future events. Patterns, on the other hand, are a way of categorizing what could happen and therefore, what risk portfolios we might want to adapt. We should all have our own built-in insurance plans.

Sherden does pay proper homage to Karl Popper's foundational work on complexity, society, and technological advances. But, again, Popper could not have possibly foreseen the progress of science in a century. Einstein thought that the hardest problems are and will continue to be those of individual human movements. Societies are built out of these atoms, but structures, as adaptive as they may be, display patterns and again, that is the key to "seeing through and beyond time". Which brings up my most important point about the future of futurology - time dilation or the redefinition of time will make all this a moot subject because then it is just a matter of running continuous time lab experiments - we are all, again, rodent petri dishes.

On the point of what forces are (those words ending in "al", although mostly anything could be turned into such things), should we not define them more dynamically and precisely, otherwise, they become too general without precise meaning and purpose? I like to look at forces in the physical sense. These are precise quantities when things are measurable. Forces can then be described by fields which are another very useful, ubiquitous, and beautiful abstract construct of mathematical physics (not the mathematical object, although the two could be woven into a single overarching abstract entity). Humans and social groups cause forces by the intermixing and synergism of different actions and these actions could then be quantified to an approximate extent.