This TED Talk by Alain de Botton addresses an interesting issue. Secularists (atheists, secular humanists, etc.) may be missing some vital social and psychological benefits enjoyed by religious people. Entirely apart from the questions of whether various religious doctrines are valid, the social structures and aesthetic infrastructures of religions meet real needs that even nonbelievers possess. de Botton raises a question I recently discussed with an atheism activist, “To be healthy and effective in developing, living, and promoting their worldview, don’t secular people need social support structures similar to those found in organized religions?” Is there something inherent in human nature that needs the kinds of social systems and even the sorts of physical-spatial-temporal organizing systems found in religions?

Best presentation I’ve seen on how brain structures and processes give rise to consciousness and the sense of self

Stanford University, a premiere higher education institution, is offering a growing number of free courses. Currently, courses with a free, non-credit option are all in the computer science curriculum, but may soon expand to other disciplines.

This is a positive development for quality higher education–a much needed experiment in a time when growing acceptance of mediocre online education programs contributes to the general decline in well educated Americans.

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market. Our analysis is reality-based.” So says James Glattfelder, member of a Swiss team that used complex systems science and advanced data analysis and modeling tools to reveal ownership and control relationships among the worlds largest (financially) corporations. The fact Glattfelder refers to is that a relatively small number of transnational corporations (TNC)–most of them banks and other financial institutions–control about 80 percent of the global economy through complex networks of share ownership. Within the ecosystem of 1318 TNCs exists a so-called super entity consisting of 147 closely interlinked companies which, collectively, own each other. The super entity includes well known global titans such as Goldman Sachs (source of most U.S. Treasury secretaries and other nominally public sector controllers of our system of exchange). Within the super entity, a cartel of less than 1 percent of the companies exploits network effects of share ownership to control 40 percent of the companies, further demonstrating the power concentrating capacity of strong network ties.

This sort of metacorporation wields a degree of global market control unimaginable to industrial era  robber barons and other simpler monopolists. A key aim of the Swiss study was to begin to understand the composition and dynamics of the network, with respect to questions about its emergent qualities–such as whether it has an inherently stabilizing or destabilizing effect on global economics.

Glattfelder’s statement about the complexity of reality requiring reality-based analytic approaches, rather than dogma or conspiracy theories, highlights the stark differences between scientific and popular approaches to recognizing and coming to understand real phenomena. In consensus reality, popular impressions are taken to accurately reflect the true nature of things. An honest, perceptive person only needs to watch or listen to a few minutes of any popular media news programming–particularly of the culturally or politically polarized sorts (FOX News or any Newscorp outlet, MSNBC, CBN or other religious ‘news,’ Pravda, etc.)–to see the constant, relentless effort to shape consensus reality by manipulating human biases. A scientific approach, if honestly applied, seeks to identify and understand actual entities and phenomena (as opposed to consensus beliefs), relationships and dynamics of exchange among entities, what causes phenomena and what–in turn–phenomena cause, etc., while also identifying and minimizing the effects of our biases on this structured approach to knowledge building.

Whether or not ownership (of a controlling percentage of shares in a company) actually manifests in overt control of a company, it provides a mechanism for such control. Not explicitly addressed in the Swiss study is the obvious fact that the small number of super-powerful financial institutions, like Goldman Sachs, which exercise an astonishing degree of control over global economies, are run by a relatively small number of people, like Goldman alumni Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner (who each became secretaries of the U.S. Treasury). Such power brokers, and others like them, would appear to be the actual decision agents within the nucleus of the super entity the Swiss study has revealed. The Swiss study takes a very important step away from the typical sensationalism of the popular media and the natural human hunger for conspiracies that support our fears and biases. It uses the same approach and tools that have proven so powerful in studying other complex systems, such as the Web and climate, to reveal the structure and dynamics of human economic systems. Continuation of this approach offers a way potentially to escape the perennial, self-reinforcing systems of collective self deception we call the news, policy analysis, etc., and many forms of pseudo-science sponsored by various political and commercial interests.Technorati Tags: network science, complexity, economics, Goldman Sachs, super-entity, monopoly, multinational corporation

Exactly like being right — Insightful talk on the bubble of rightness we are each stuck in.

I arranged to be replacing a heating element in my glass-top cook surface when my friend Jerry–troubleshooter and fixer extraordinaire–arrived to retrieve some project management books I’m loaning him. Jerry had given me a multimeter last year. I had never removed it from the package, and had little idea what to do with it. Wife, Deb, had suggested I have it out for an impromptu lesson. When Jerry arrived and saw the cook top raised up, exposing a network of wires and insulation, he lit up like a kid in a hobby shop. In no time, Jerry was schooling me on the use of the multimeter to test the voltages on the various leads into the misperforming heating element. After confirming the voltages were correct, he tutored me through gently disconnecting the leads (I had already drawn a color-coded schematic), replacing the element, and reconnecting the leads. I am a multimeter virgin no more.

My advisor was sufficiently satisfied with my dissertation idea paper to form my review committee. Welcome to Drs Mark Givins and Qi Wang. I look forward to pressing on to completion!

Maybe one of the most important videos you could watch this year — learn how web search progressively cuts you off from the world you live in.

Scientific American provides an example of the sort of risks and costs we tend to lose sight of while worrying about flashier, more politically marketable, yet relatively minor risks, such as losses to terrorism:

It is the ultimate paradox of American health care: going to the hospital can kill you. Every year nearly two million hospital-acquired infections claim roughly 100,000 lives and add $45 billion in costs; that is as many lives and dollars as taken by AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. And with antibiotic resistance rising steadily, those numbers promise to climb even higher. 

The article goes on to explain that most of these deaths and associated costs are avoidable.

In a guest blog article, author David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, outlines a few of the main points from his book. The bottom line is that we are not, first or foremost, rational beings. Our (yes, yours too) perceptual systems and minds are burdened with certain well researched limitations that regularly lead us astray when it comes to recognizing comparative risks accurately.

What to do? Many pilots have crashed following their instincts while experiencing perceptual illusions and ignoring their instruments. If you care to improve your own risk thinking and decision making, be prepared to frequently work against what feels or sounds right. Be prepared to make decisions based on the best facts available, based on research by competent experts applying valid methods and tools.

After reading Scientific American for many years, and having added its web content to my mind diet a few years ago, I have gained a great appreciation for the incisive commentary of much of the readership. In keeping with informal observations and research on social conventions in various modes of communication, letters to the editor (those that are published in SA, at any rate) tend to be well formulated and generally polite. Comments to SA online, particularly to blog posts, are often less constrained. Consider the case of comments to this somewhat unfocused post on nuclear power concerns raised by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Several readers were compelled (perhaps by their NT temperaments–specifically by the high values they ascribe to competence, accuracy, staying on topic, and logical argumentation) to admonish the blogger, and SA, for what they judge to be shoddy scientific journalism.

This sparks an idea for how to possibly leverage the expertise and mental acuity of this community for feats of targeted, distributed cognition. Say I’m writing a research paper, such as a thesis or dissertation plan or report, that would benefit from expert peer review, but that would normally not have access to a competent panel of experts. No problem! Create a pseudonym, sign up with blogging privileges on a scientific web site, and submit my draft as one or more blog entries. Nearly instantaneously, experts begin responding with comments to correct my facts, challenge my arguments, recommend better sources, and provide other insights into how half-baked my draft truly is. Following up on those recommendations should result in a much more coherent, rational, and meaningful product. The true beauty is that obtaining such feedback is free.

What are the caveats? First, the writer must still exert the skillful research effort required to validate the supposed experts’ recommendations. Second, writing under a pseudonym violates a core social convention of scientific collaboration. Such duplicity, if discovered, could make the writer a pariah in the community. Not to mention, what happens on the Web, stays on the Web–forever (in human time). Do you want that evidence of your cognitive confusion and ignorance out there for all to see, like that scar on your forehead from the last time you tried to recreate a Jackass stunt? Lastly, the writer could end up in a situation having outstanding, substantive reference material from the blog posts, yet being unable to cite those inputs, because few if any peer-reviewed journals or university research review panels accept blog entries or comments as legitimate sources. (To the extent commenters provide peer-reviewed, traditionally published references, the latter issue is moot.)

Still, the notion of getting rapid, useful critical reviews of a draft from so simple a technique is intriguing. Perhaps science communities online could officially embrace a blind review process in which researchers (and wannabes) would post their drafts to a blog or other Web service under temporary anonymity (say, two weeks–an eternity on a social network). This period would be open season for any subscribers who wished to provide substantive or administrative corrections and recommendations to the writer, in the form of comments viewable by the readership. Commenters would also be able to correct each other. After the blind review period, the writer of the original post would be revealed and have an opportunity to reply to commenters.