On Friday, in Doug's Zoom, we began discussion of a crucial, concrete intellectual challenge before us (and especially for the few who can really focus their minds on it). This week, I call it "SIMaD", sustainable intelligent market design. This is only PART of what would be needed to construct a sustainable internet integration, but it is the core challenge for now. I think of it as "the brain" ... but remember that there is also need for "an immune system" (firm rules keeping out viruses" and better hardware (e.g., the real quantum stuff). SIMaD is PART of the larger challenge of Sustainable Intelligent Internet, which I also sometime think of as "E3" (etherium 3). Economic recovery from covid will depend a LOT on how well we do with SIMaD, or else how well we learn to live with E2, the version already coming to us from China which will invalidate what Trump hopes for from the Federal Reserve system he is relying on.
In discussing market design, a few of us actually know something about microeconomics. (Macroeconomics and mesoeconomics are also important, but they were more important to OTHER important Zoom discussions this week.)
It is a crucial fact of life that the efficiency of markets IN THE PAST depended on certain basic axioms, well known to any serious microeconomist, reflected in theorems proven by people like Ken Arrow (who, by the way, served briefly on my Harvard PhD thesis committee in 1971/72). Among those axioms were COMMON SHARED PERFECT INFORMATION, AND LACK OF UNCERTAINTY.
In our group, we certainly know about uncertainty, probabilities, Von Neumann, and the important PRACTICAL work in finance trying to address uncertainty. BUT WHAT OF THE MARKET DESIGN ITSELF?
A lot of the current problems exploding in the world run by internet are problems of information which is not true and not shared. The term "fake news" and the growing problem of fake videos are part of it. In our discussion, as guy named David asked: "How does BIOLOGY deal with this? More precisely, how do BRAINS deal with the problem?"
Well, Yeshua and I do know how that works. (https://www.frontiersin.org/
On the "cognitive" (information) side of it, there are THREE MAIN REPOSITORIES OF INFORMATION available, at some level, to EVERY part of the system. Roughly, these are: (1) the thalamus, a common repository of WHAT WE SEE out there at any time, from raw sensor data (lightly preprocessed); (2) the Giant Pyramids of the cerebral cortex, more powerful spiritually than any great pyramids of Egypt, giving a COMMON IMAGE of what we think the state of our world IS at the current time, based on a kind of universal integrated prediction system; and (3) the LOCAL information in interneurons, which are like bushes living in the shadow of those great trees (the giant pyramid cells look a bit like trees, with high canopies overhead and proliferating roots down at the output level). (To make the story complete, I would add comments about basal ganglia and temporal and spatial chunking, but this is complicated enough for most of you, no?)
And so I claim: a PROPER, EFFECTIVE SIMaD design to free us from the growing dangers of fake news and growing oppression, MUST HARDWIRE certain mechanisms, analogous to thalamus and giant pyramids, providing a common open vetted repository of truth, provided by networks trained (incentivized) by the standards of TRUTH uncorrupted by conflict of interest (COI) effects biasing the outcomes. These must be a COMPONENTS of SIMaD. And, like the giant pyramid cells of the brain, they must have DYNAMIC design, in the sense that the metrics of truth and current memory operate OVER TIME, in such a way that a FORESIGHT CAPABILITY is a basic part of the architecture. (But that does tend to require additional features mirroring capabilities of basal ganglia, which are analogous to mesoeconomics. In a way, the basal ganglia provide structures similar to corporations in the world of stochastic finance, EMPOWERED by the greater market of the cerebral cortex, but subject to a certain probability of failure as their specific goals may or may not be achieved over time.)
OK, that was one conversation.
But in another conversation... I saw a later manifestation of deep dialogue of folks connected to a little place called UNESCO which all of us should know about, which ALSO has a role to play in deciding the future of the internet and the prospects for economic recovery.
Most of you should be quite familiar by now with WHO, CDC and even NIH in dealing with covid. UNESCO, a UN sister agency of WHO, has a similar mix of essential mandate, great accomplishments and great failings enough to drive a President crazy. The limitations of UNESCO were less serious a few years ago, when the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a sister of NIH or CDC, provided great leadership to the whole of world science. The Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), strongly supported by Jian Zemin and his people (who stayed in power until Xi JinPing changed the game) linked to NSF and mirrored it in many ways.
Even now, I often walk by the old NSF building near the Ballston Metro station. I remember a day in 2014 or 2015 when I had an intense feeling of spiritual connection, recalling what I had felt before in places like Hagia Sophia and pyramids on Latin America (and later in Ireland, in the temples which predated Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt). HERE I felt, inside that building, really is in its way the greatest true temple of Truth in the history of humanity! The vision of Vannevar Bush had guided us to a level of authenticity, consciousness, intelligence and focus far beyond anything else before it. Yes, it was imperfect (as good Otto engines "waste" most of the fuel energy poured into them), but if we focus on the actual motive output, it was staggering. UNTIL, in 2014 or so, the dark shadow of political corruption, spearheaded by Congressman Lamar Smith, turned out to be far more serious and debilitating than any of us imagined possible.
Quick bottom line: in the market, one company's lapse creates a hole which is another one's opportunity. Could UNESCO become that other one? it would certainly not be easy, but as science and truth are under pressure at all levels, all over the world, it would be VERY important to explore what hope there is of filling the hole.
This is about TRUTH, a very basic universal principle, visible both in intelligent system design and in the realm of Platonic forms. (Did I mention the novel Vita Nostra? That and Schroder's novel Stealing Worlds are the only two works of fiction I have brought myself to read for almost two years now, the only ones real enough to hold my attention at this point.) Certain SIMPLE principles, like the utility function which a global brain learns to maximize, are crucial to making things work.
What's more, the best run review panels at NSF did become real exercises in noetically connected collective intelligence, a tool for the pursuit of truth far beyond the pie slinging contests and groupthink I see in so many other institutions. That kind of tool for STRENGTHENING connection and truth and relevance when HUMANS are part of the network is an important clue to SIMaD design!!
After Smith did his thing... every time I walk by that gleaming but decaying building in Ballston... it feels me with the same kind of sadness I felt in the archeological district of Rome, where the greatest forum of dialogue and democracy of the time... well, decayed. When I walked by in this covid period... I am reminded of the passage in the Book of Revelations, where they talk of decay... a hill beset by vultures and emptiness. (Actually, vultures DID descend on that building at about the same time as Lamar Smith appeared!! Really. they even tried to descend on my own house a mile away, but our friends the hawks really dive bombed THEM away! Still, a few of them did move to the house of a neighbor, who died of cancer shortly after.)
When I mentioned this with sadness to a friend at a local Quaker discussion, he compared it to the great destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70AD. "It seemed like a disaster at the time, but that destruction was actually one of the greatest good things which ever happened to judeo-Christian culture. That old temple was powerful, but only WITHIN CERTAIN limitations or barriers of deep importance which needed to be transcended. And so a NEW church was created, a virtual and international organization for centuries (held together in part by letters from Paul? I think Yeshua enjoyed that joke.. ) BEYOND the bedrock constraints which limited the old place.
So: more concretely, by analogy: could UNESCO somehow be morphed or expanded to fill the hole left behind by the old NSF, BUT CLEARLY OVERCOMING THE CONSTRAINT OF NOT GIVING DE RESPECT AND ATTENTION TO THE NOOSPHERE? Whatever else the noosphere is (I disagree with the fine points of the model of de Chardin and Verdansky), it gives FULL RESPECT AND ATTENTION to the spiritual or PSI side of human experience. It entails CONNECTION beyond the mundane level, which can be fostered in a way which DOES NOT obey all the diverse religions of the world BUt IS CONSISTENT with a basic principle striving to connect us all in a relatively harmonious way. (As in a market, there is still always some competition, and NO requirement for uniformity or homogeneity, but a few respected boundaries.)
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Last night, I also read Chogyam Trungpa's little book on meditation, which I downloaded for free on the web. That too was interesting, but perhaps this email is too long as it is. For later.
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My response to a follow-on question I received:
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My response to a follow-on question I received:
Dear Paul What do you think of Pope Francisco efforts to build a new economic paradigm? Is is compatible with your views of UNESCO and the noosphere?
I do not know the DETAILS of those efforts.
Lately, I have often thought about how people like Trump, Sanders and the Ramanuja Foundation have a complicated relation to their BASE, which they have to work with to achieve their goals (though in all cases they could have taken more advantage of help from beyond their base). (Maybe what we really need here are new connections, and your post may be important to that.) I do not know what the collaboration of Pope Francis and of bis base have created so far, but i DO know a lot about the basic VALUES and GOALS of Pope Francis, at a relatively deep level. I do view him as an unusually bright light in the world of world religions. I even visited the church in Buenos Aires which was once his base, and... many connections.
The NOOSPHERE is the most important of these connections.
But: NO NEW economic order can be relevant UNLESS it can be connected to the changes in the internet which will be administering any new economic arrangement. To be sustainable, the new arrangement has to be BALANCED, not oppressing the people as much as E2 and other new internet designs are on course to doing, BUT NOT creating false hopes of infinite consumption for no work. Strongly resisting strict left AND strict right.
It reminds me of a movie I once saw (Being There), and of yesterday, in our dialogue with the deer. Yesterday, a deer came to our back yard, showing us her new born (Bambi?). It was so important to project BOTH sides of our message to them. yes, we love you folks, yes we are fighting to defend your whole world and your way of life, and the plants you love. BUT NO, we don't want you to "eat from the fruits of the wrong tree." Not my wife's flowers! not from the juicy things which should grow up to provide much more than the quick pleasure you would get form just eating the flowers now. SEE that imaginary glowing wall between your forest and our garden. We love you and would be happy to see more of you ON YOUR SIDE of that glowing wall...
I once saw a grief piece on pope Francis on TV, a week or two after we returned from our own trip to the exact same place in Japan. The TV quoted him as saying: Those who would preserve the life of this planet should first begin to truly feel love reaching out to the life of this planet (direct and personal and tangible spirit of love). We have been in regular dialogue by Zoom with people in Brazil and Peru, VERY SERIOUS about manfesting that spirit of love, and the noosphere, and new enterprises designed to INCLUDE the health of nature (By metrics much better than COP25 kludges) . We are doing what we can to take FULL ACCOUNT of noosphere values, from nature to human connections, in internet design, though it is tricky to REALLY do it.
If Pope Francis wants us all to REALLY attain/manifest these goals, we really should be doing that in alliance.
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By the way, we also had a discussion: could India be part of it? Well, they have had a great biochar experiment, but they also have many anti-human would-be oppressors, and people sitting on the fence not yet decided. The old Harvard Vedanta Society was a great ray of life, but the hard cold basements near Princeton are a different matter altogether. Abdul Kalam was a great partner, but died of old age, like so many people I worked with. For now, we put energy into places where people have a clear will to make positive contributions, and I do see Pope Francis as one of us.
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