Year: 2016
Type: book
Abstract: Some thoughts on education and political priorities SummaryAlthough we understand some systems well enough to make precise or statistical predictions, most interesting systems -whether physical, mental, cultural, or virtual -are complex, nonlinear, and have properties that emerge from feedback between many interactions.Exhaustive searches of all possibilities are impossible.Unfathomable and unintended consequences dominate.Problems cascade.Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.A growing fraction of the world has made a partial transition from a) small, relatively simple, hierarchical, primitive, zero-sum hunter-gatherer tribes based on superstition (almost total ignorance of complex systems), shared aims, personal exchange and widespread violence, to b) large, relatively complex, decentralised, technological, nonzero-sum market-based cultures based on science (increasingly accurate predictions and control in some fields), diverse aims, impersonal exchange, trade, private property, and (roughly) equal protection under the law.Humans have made transitions from numerology to mathematics, from astrology to astronomy, from alchemy to chemistry, from witchcraft to neuroscience, from tallies to quantum computation.However, while our ancestor chiefs understood bows, horses, and agriculture, our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors. Maths, complexity, and prediction.Can we make breakthroughs in understanding, prediction and control of complex nonlinear systems?'All great things have their origin in that which is small.'Lao Tzu.'What can be avoided Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?Yet Caesar shall go forth, for these predictions Are to the world in general as to Caesar.' Julius Caesar, II.2.'Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call Complex; such as are Beauty, Gratitude, a Man, an Army, the Universe.'Locke.'I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.' Newton, after the South Sea Bubble 'Ponzi scheme'.'Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war… Countless minor incidents -the kind you can never really foresee -combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.Iron will-power can overcome this friction ... but of course it wears down the machine as well… Friction is the only concept that ... corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.The … army and everything else related to it is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage.But ... each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction… This tremendous friction ... is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured… Friction ... is the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult... Finally … all action takes place … in a kind of twilight, which like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance.' Clausewitz.'It is a wonderful feeling to recognise the unity of complex phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.'Einstein to Grossman, 1901.'All stable processes we shall predict.All unstable processes we shall control.'Von Neumann. 'Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.' Richard Feynman.At the beginning of From Russia With Love (the movie not the book), Kronsteen, a Russian chess master and SPECTRE strategist, is summoned to Blofeld's lair to discuss the plot to steal the supersecret 'Lektor Decoder' and kill Bond.Kronsteen outlines to Blofeld his plan to trick Bond into stealing the machine for SPECTRE.Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.'This convergence arises not because of any "low-level" or "microscopic" connection between such diverse phenomena as car crashes, human height, trading profits, or stellar velocities, but because in all of these cases the "high-level" or "macroscopic" structure is the same, namely a compound statistic formed from a combination of the small influences of many independent factors.This is the essence of universality: the macroscopic behaviour of a large, complex system can be almost totally independent of its microscopic structure.'The universal nature of the central limit theorem is tremendously useful in many industries, allowing them to manage what would otherwise be an intractably complex and chaotic system.With this theorem, insurers can manage the risk of, say, their car insurance policies, without having to know all the complicated details of how car crashes actually occur; astronomers can measure the size and location of distant galaxies, without having to solve the complicated equations of celestial mechanics; electrical engineers can predict the effect of noise and interference on electronic communications, without having to know exactly how this noise was generated; and so forth.'Many other phenomena (e.g.terrorist attacks, earthquakes, stock market panics) produce a 'power law' and trusting to a CLT model of a phenomenon when it actually follows a power law causes trouble, as with the recent financial crisis.24 When examining phase transitions of materials (e.g the 13 23 In the 1950s people feared 'the hidden persuaders'.Now they fear data-mining.There are two main tools used regularly by organisations such as Amazon or Netflix: 1) 'regression analysis' (finding correlations in data) and 2) randomised trials (testing the effect of a particular thing (e.g. a drug, a political intervention) on a random population).24 When David Viniar (Goldman Sachs CFO) said of the financial crisis, 'We were seeing things that were 25-standarddeviation events, several days in a row,' he was implying that events that should happen once every 10 135 years (the Universe is only ~1.4x10 10 years old) were occurring 'several days in a row' -so he was either ignorant of basic statistics (unlikely) or not being honest (Buchanan, 2013).His statement refers to the probability of a '25-standard deviation event' happening if the underlying process follows the normal distribution.But stock prices are fractal and follow a power law, so large events like the 2008 crash are not actually as rare as predictions based on the normal distribution imply.Unfortunately many financial models are based on the normal distribution, hence they collapse in crises that they predict should not occur (see Section 7 and Endnote). 33Social and physical networks involve trade-offs between cost, efficiency, and fault tolerance.Making networks more robust means introducing redundant pathways that are not cost-effective in the short-term.Evolved biological networks provide clues about how designed networks could be improved.E.g.An experiment placed the slime mould Physarum polycephalum in space with 36 food sources representing the stations of the Tokyo area rail network, watched how it evolved a network, and compared it to the actual rail system.Such self-organised biological networks, with no central control or global information, can provide mathematical models that can improve designed systems such as remote sensor arrays, mobile ad hoc networks or wireless mesh networks.Cf.Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design, Tero et al (Science, 2010). 2034 There are costs of decentralisation too.E.g.The decentralised Kmart was destroyed by WalMart's use of computers to create a network of shops operating in a more centralised way.35 '[T]hat which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning.The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions' (Burke).36 Cf.Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow.37 E.g a disgraced or assassinated leader, a vital unit watching porn on the web, like the infamous SEC regulators.Cf.Barabasi's Linked.38 E.g.Chongqing (China) saw the evolution of a new ecosystem for designing and building motorbikes in which 'assembler' companies assemble modular parts built by competing companies, instead of relying on high quality vertically integrated companies like Yamaha.This rapidly decimated Japanese competition.39 In one of the most famous speeches, Pericles singled out the Athenian quality of adaptation (literally 'well-turning') as central to its extraordinary cultural, political and economic success.40 Our brains evolved to solve social and practical problems, not to solve formal mathematical problems.Translating mathematical and logical problems into social problems makes them easier for people to solve.Cf.Nielsen.41 'People are not accustomed to thinking hard and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that comes quickly to mind.' Kahneman.But this is not necessarily foolish (cf.Vernon Smith, section 7).42 'The advantage scientists bring into the game [trading] is less their mathematical or computational skills than their ability to think scientifically.They are less likely to accept an apparent winning strategy that might be a mere statistical fluke' (Jim Simons, mathematician and founder and CEO of Renaissance, the most successful hedge fund).48 E.g.Renaissance Technologies, a very successful and secretive hedge fund, hires leading pattern-recognition experts.The Heilbronn Institute's partnership with GCHQ on applied mathematics: how many other bre
Source: SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks
Author: Susan Pickard
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: CERN, Royal Society
OpenAlex ID: W2482464320