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Social Sciences becoming true sciences – a key opportunity for our future.

I have long been thinking that Social Sciences need to become true sciences, subject to experimental verification. The counter argument so far has been that the underlying subjects are too complex and evade modelling. But before we figured out quantum mechanics and its complexities, we had to fumble our way starting with the planetary model of the atom. So social sciences should go back to basics and first try to model simple phenomenons.

Now the emergence of smartphones and explosive growth of sensors is finally providing new means of quantifying social sciences. I have been reading the book “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science” by Alex Pentland. It’s a difficult read as the style is really poor, but the content is fascinating.
Amazon Link here.

Now think of the implications – if we knew how to really spread memes that drive peaceful cooperation towards economic prosperity in a society, we could make the rebuilding of broken states like Iraq a matter of years instead of generations.

The counterpoint is obviously that the same techniques can be used to make Nazi propaganda seem crude and inefficient. Recent examples, such as Italy under Berlusconi and Hungary under Victor Orban,  show that modern democracies do allow for concentration of media and educational powers in the wrong hands. Imagine what they could do with the power of truly impactful social sciences.

So this could be the most dramatic change in human history. We learnt to master the material world around us, we have now the opportunity to master our own individual and group Psyche. We still behave very much like the primates we evolved as, so getting a scientific grip on what drives our motives, behaviors and actions would truly be revolutionary and evolutionary !

Interesting Concepts I learnt of in 2014.

Confabulation : (Wikipedia) In psychology, Confabulation is a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive. Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false.
(“You are now less dumb”, David McRaney) Neuroscience now knows that confabulations are common and continuous in both the healthy and the afflicted.

Over Fit of Model : example Fukushima where available data showed fewer highest intensity earthquakes than predicted by the Gutenberg-Richter fit. Japanese experts concluded that there was an inflection in the curve, and rationalized that the geological characteristics of the region explained that. As a result, the estimate for the probability of a magnitude 9 event was 1 in 13,000 years vs the Gutenberg-Richter prediction of 1 in 300 years …

Complex System : example heap of sand. Each grain you add from top will either stay in place or go down the heap. Once in a while one will trigger a sand avalanche. Key property : large periods of apparent stasis, sudden and catastrophic failures. Not random, but so irreducibly complex that cannot be predicted beyond a certain level. Differs from Chaos theory. Theoricized by Physicist Per Bak.

Random technological innovations ideas

A “brick of light” – a segment of outside wall that is pierced with minuscule holes through which fiber optics bring the light from the outside. The holes are spread out on the outside, and converge to the inside of the house to a tight pattern, that diffuses external light to the inside.

An electronic bookmark allowing synchronization between a paper book and its ebook equivalent, as well as definitions lookup and search on the paper book.

An “assisted Unicycle” – a compact mode of urban transportation on a single wheel. Uses a reaction wheel for stability assistance ?

An intelligent mattress that would real-time modify is shape to best support the sleeper’s body 🙂

Long term thinking.

A major turning point for mankind will be when we change our time horizon for societal actions from a very short term to long term ie one generation or more. Our ability to make real changes is now very high, but all our systems are geared towards short term thinking. eg in the USA we believe that sending lots of folks into jail for low level transgressions is good, but doing so we place massive amounts of folks outside of society and break them for good – the long term impact is just awful. eg if we let a generation grow without proper education, the short term impact is nothing, but it breeds disaster in the long run, which will have no quick fixes.

The evolution of human civilisations – and a glimpse into our future

I am almost done reading “Why the West rules – for now” by Ian Morris. It is simply one of the most impressive books I have read in my life.

The author starts by trying to answer the question “why did the west get to the industrial revolution first, and hence got to dominate the twentieth century ?”, but the book is not really about answering that question. Along the way Ian Morris analyses how civilisations grow, evolve and decline. It is a lot of learnings from the past, but also gives insights into our future – some of them quite scary 🙂

It is extremely well written, fun, entertaining, a real page turner. It’s a book you really enjoy reading, but which messages echo well after you have put it down.

Here are some of the learnings and questions I took away :

  • All human have gone through the same stages of evolution, through social, economic and technological development.
  • They also have all faced a ceiling, a limitation to their development inherent to their social and technological levels.
  • And when they reach that ceiling, most often they don’t just plateau there, they also collapse and lose from their peak level. And some of these collapes are just not pretty to live through.
  • Geography and climate have played a significant role in determining the pace of development and the fate of civilisations.

Now for the great and also the scary part : the “Social development index” that Ian Morris has measured from 14,000 BCE to today shows a huge steep increase in the past 100 years. One component of that index is the energy capture, ie how much energy we use to lead our lives, including the food we eat, animal muscle we leverage, or fossil fuels we burn. In prehistoric times this was at 4 kilocalories/person/day, and 14,000 years later during the Roman empire had gone up to 31. It then collapsed and only reached that level again in the west in 1700 CE (China had reached that level earlier in 1600). By 1800 it was still only at 38. But with the industrial revolution everything changed, and it had soared to 92 by 1900 (The eastern world by then had slipped behind and only reached 49), and further accelerated in the twentieth century to reach a whopping 230 (the east is on the same course and even though it is at “only” 104, its growth curve is rapidly catching up).

So we should feel priviledged to live in that “world of plenty” that is our era. It is not only unprecedented in terms of the civilization levels we have achieved, it has also seen a dramatic acceleration of wealth and possibilities in the last century, and does not give any signs of deceleration. It might also be the first time we have have a shot at building one global civilization, instead of the conflicting empires or nations of the past.

But we should also be scared that our civilization might hit a development ceiling like we always have before, and that we might have to live through a collapse in development level, with its accompanying unrest and destructions.

So how do we build new social models that will take us through that ceiling, and let continued technological developments keep carrying us forward ? Is climate change going to undo our progress at planetary level as it undid might empires in the past ? Will we really build that global civilization we have started to create, or will states, nations and empires prevail and be the main barriers to progress ?

History is the best way to put our humanity in perspective, and it gives us insights into who we are and the challenges lying ahead of us. This books provides a unique lens to think about our future, and to consider how technology and social models will shape our destiny – a must read !

The Dunbar’s number

Happening to read about mammal history, learnt today that the neocortex is unique to that class of creatures. And the size of the neocortex has in turn been correlated to social interactions … Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, suggests that for humans the number of people one can entertain stable social relationships is around 150. This has probably some implications on how we can best organise our enterprises … More at wikipedia’s entry.

The surprising truth about what motivates us

We so often get caught into “management school thinking” that we forget about common sense. We know that people don’t work just for money, we also have seen first hand recently the kinds of disasters created by grossly overpaid people, so this video should not come as a surprise. Research has identified that monetary incentives only drive performance for repetitive, mechanical tasks. For tasks requiring intellect (which is most of the work nowadays), money is only a factor if you don’t have enough of it, but additional incentive don’t drive performance.
What matters most is Autonomy (ie do your work self directed), Mastery (ie have the opportunity to grow your skills), and Purpose (ie knowing the positive impact that your work will have).
When I reflect on my work life, I find that I know this but have still too often succumbed to the concept of cash incentives for performance. Also I have seen others drive these for real reasons, mostly greed frankly. For them, implementing high cash bonuses for their teams had a real advantage : they would mechanically drive their own compensation up, regardless of the real impact of the bonuses.
So, a great video to reflect upon, and to share with your teams.

The most heartening piece of news this year so far !

As a 13 years old boy from New York was looking at trees, he observed that there was a pattern to how branches were positioned. Enquiring further, he found they follow a fibonacci sequence … Nothing extraordinary so far, this is a fact already known, except that few thirteen years kids will figure that out 🙂 … The extraordinary thing is that he then thought of comparing how solar cells placed using that pattern compare to a regular flat array of photovoltaic cells, and found that they generated 20-50% more power !!! Through natural selection, trees have apparently evolved over millions of yrars to adopt that configuration and increase the amount of energy they capture, but no-one had thought of using this for solar panels before.

This is such a refreshing story … One of curiosity, intelligence, and one that proves again that there is no limit to understanding more and more of the world around us, and use the learnings to improve our lives !

To read the paper written by that boy, Aidan Dwyer, himself, follow this link.