Is a flock of sheep just a group of many individual sheep, or something more? What about schools of fish? (start at 56s. I chose the timings of all these videos so you just need to watch each video for ~10s) A starling murmuration? (start at 1m33s) You don’t need to be a vertebrate. What about ants?
However, I have a comment about the type of network that I think has not been
covered in your article.
You do not discuss what I would call the "Hierarchical Network", a system where
the decisions the network takes go in a a "top down" direction. Most companies
follow this approach. In information terms, the data follow one path (in both
directions), but there is another one-directional path of information (orders
or directives) that flows from top management down to lower levels of decision
making.An army is an extreme example of a hierarchical organization.
The other important point is that in a meeting of several people in a room, the
quantity of information that can be exchanged is somehow limited by what in
computing terms may be called the "bandwith" of our speech processes and
inforrmation processing. For conversations where every person can exchange a
meaningful amount of information whith everyone else, the group is limited to
about 10 to 15 people.
The roman army, for example, had their troops divided into groups of ten, with
a Decurion in charge, who in turn formed part of a group of ten Decurions
coordinated by a Centurion, etc.
In many companies there is a board of around 10 people, and countries are
governed in general by a Cabinet of 10 to 15 Ministers. The Ministries are then
subdivided into working units, perhaps not down to the lowest level, but most
organizations follow this hierarchical model.
In a very simplified analysis, taking 10 people in each level (sort of like the
Roman Army), a General (Manager, Prime minister, etc.) commanding 1,000 troops
is three levels removed from a soldier (ten Centurions, 100 Decurions, 1000
common soldiers). We have in this way 4 levels for a big company with 10,000
employees, and 6 or 7 for countries with populations in the millions. We
therefore have a pyramid of decision making, from tactical problems of detail
in the lower levels to the larger, strategy decisions at the top. In a decision process it is a problem, since the different levels tend to move in restricted circles, as far as meaningful information is concerned. Status and wealth also play an important part, so the problems faced by the common folk are not well understood by the leaders. Of course, the more hierarchical
the organization, the problem of asymmetric decision making and information
sharing becomes worse. The king is not so responsive to the lower levels as the
politician and the General can make decisions even disregarding the lives of his soldiers.
Less meaningful information can be exchanged in larger groups. Assemblies of
Citizens, as in ancient Greek City States or Swiss villages can be of several hundred or even thousands, but again the speakers to the assembly are restricted to a few., and the rest are more passive, until, as is ussually done, the decision is taken by a vote. Most Parliaments or the Houses in Congress follow this model, and in most there are Comitties of around ten to 15 people who discuss the proposals in detail.
The above is related more to decision making than to information exchange, and to face to face communication than to the Web, but the "bandwidth" problem of the human brain and speech (or reading speed) remains. In the sharing of information in our networked computer communication, it is true that direct communication with millions is possible, and a few nodes
act as spreaders of information to thousands or millions of receptors. They can talk, but not
really listen to everyone. The exchange of two-way information is still restricted to smaller groups, although hopefully the best ideas will be spread by more people, and the hierarchy effect will be less important in a loose and not hierarchical organization like the WWW. In any case, some hierarchy remains because some outlets are more followed than others.
Of course the above ideas are basically a cartoon of what happens out there, and as the saying goes "God is in the details" but I thought that drawing attention to these limitations of our communication skills as individuals may be worthwhile.
Thanks again for another thought provoking article, abrazo
But you go into a lot of detail in a very interesting and important topic, the microinteractions between neurons. I think about that a lot too.
10 ppl is a max for a free-flowing conversation. I agree. But when you start including mechanisms for improved communication, things can go faster.
For example: the main issue in conversation is that bandwidth is limited to one person talking. How can you increase that bandwidth?
One way is with breakout conversations. 2 convos double the bandwidth. What's discussed can be summarized and then shared with the broader group.
Another one is to extract some common messages and use another channel for them. For example, agreement and disagreement are very common and useful, but if they stop the flow we lose bandwidth, and if they don't get expressed to avoid stopping the flow, then we lose info. One way to solve this is by using a non-verbal message. For example, in all my working groups, I introduce the idea of finger-snapping to convey agreement. You can't imagine how useful this is.
As you mention, internet is yet another realm. But there are some interesting mechanics that can be used.
For example, do you remember how dumb Youtube videos used to be? They were mostly ranked by recency. Now they changed the algorithm, and they're ordered mostly by Likes, and the result is much better.
The key to keep bidirectional communication as one node connects to many more is to select filter the feedback for quality, be it through a simple filter, through composition of several pieces of feedback, through sentiment analysis, or equivalents.
You would definitely be interested in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The central thesis is that the earth and (almost) all life on it, is in fact a giant supercomputer commissioned by hyperintelligent pandimensional beings to finally work out the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life?
The obvious, but unstated paradox is that despite being hyperintelligent and pandimensional, these beings haven't been able to work out the meaning of life themselves! Perhaps a subtle dig at human hubris and self-congratulation.
fascinating images!! Now how do we get the "deplorable neurons" to neutralized themselves? The fish creating a scary sea monster is the best! Thank you Tomas.
On the tenth day of Christmas my truelove gave to me ten pipers piping.
1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=10? Nope. The answer is either twenty-three or minus five depending on whether you like Highland pipe band music or not, so I think maybe an orchestra would be a better example.
The point is that the sum of the individual parts is not equal to the whole. To create something special you need to have good players, but they also need to give up their individuality. A good conductor sees the whole and isn’t just there to co-ordinate but also to add balance, interpretation and expression.
There is always a competitive tension between the individual and the group. What an individual might desire isn’t necessarily what is best for the group. The key is to keep the right balance between individual rights and the rights of others. The end result of creation can be truly awful if the players don’t play nicely together, the conductor doesn’t co-ordinate well or the project was never a good idea in the first place. The bigger the group the harder it is to conduct because the leader can become disconnected from the followers .
Human society is made up of individuals, but people behave differently on their own than they do in groups. In the well described phenomenon of bystander apathy, if one person comes upon someone who needs help, they are more likely to act than if many people are present. This is partly because a group gives us cover to avoid taking responsibility for a problem, but also because humans display some level of herd behaviour and we instinctively look to others for guidance in an uncertain situation.
In the examples of prey animals, the action of one individual can "spook" the whole group into a communal chain reaction. We are not quite as group focused as some of species in the videos, but we are aware of the mood of others and there is such a thing as the social mood. That can be a problem, but also a solution.
Apparently the bystander effect is more a dilution of responsibility, where ppl assume somebody else is in charge and will do something. I thought it was a nice nuance to what you say.
The phenomenon usually refers to a group of strangers, but my guess is that the group dynamics would be different if some or all of the people knew each other.
> What about DAOs—(Distributed Autonomous Organizations)? They try to encode networks more rigidly. Does that reduce emergent complexity?
Good DAOs should encode networks less rigidly than a traditional corporate structure. The point is to increase individual autonomy. Whether that increases or reduces complexity is hard to say.
Yes, DAOs are so new that it's difficult to judge them, but the tradeoff you highlight is probably one of the most important ones to assess. My guess is there needs to be standardization to facilitate bandwidth, but how that standardization is the key. Eg internet and stock markets are standardized protocols that achieve exactly what they need to achieve for high throughput without much cost in terms of flexibility. That's what DAOs must aspire to.
And building a tool that allows to do that for decision-making is my goal.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! To answer your question, I'd like to take the four network phases you've isolated (speech, writing, broadcast, internet) and tilt the perspective on them slightly.
These have each led to revolutions, but this isn't necessarily because of an increase in network "power" or connectivity. It could be the case that each was novel, and had a relevant use case. This framework allows us to see them as different tools for different situations. I think this is an interesting idea to flesh out more, and leads to some arguments why bigger networks aren't always better a la social physics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics).
In this case however, let's look at substack - the medium through which uncharted territories currently exists. It's a blend of internet and broadcast networks (but mostly broadcast). With your unique perspectives on applied systems thinking, I think this is a fantastic choice. I also believe that you succeed in your goals of gathering cross disciplinary people who can spread ideas to their communities.
I do wonder if there are ways that uncharted territories could transition to a more internet based model. It seems hard, because the internet model seems most effective when many nodes are contributing substantially. This could require other brilliant narrators and full time collaborators - a tall order! For now, this is the maximum amount of time this node can contribute. Until next time!
This exchange is proof that this is much more bidirectional than traditional broadcast, but in this community I'm way too central a node.
For example, to reduce my centrality, there are some specific issues that I think could be crowdsourced rather than me focusing on them alone. Climate Change is probably a perfect candidate to test it.
One way this could work is I lay the high-level framework and ppl pick up pieces, they are all part of a group, and then emergent complexity can start appearing from there. This is a more traditional "internet-like" behavior that could be relatively easy to do. I still want to do other things before that, but I'd like to try something like that in the coming months.
My eventual goal is to build a much better system altogether though, and I struggle between the intermediate and eventual steps.
Now that the volume of information on Uncharted Territories is getting so much greater, I wonder if a search function is possible at some stage.
The other thought is that creativity is partly a function of being able to connect seemingly unrelated information that we already have. Ideally, I would at this point link to Vic F's post about the Free Will article (and my response) rather than having to cut and paste. I think some sort of cross-referencing system within UT would be very useful for developing connnections between ideas.
This is very interesting! I appreciate your willingness to jump into the comments and discuss with everyone. I hadn't considered the value of growing a network through broadcast style means, then changing the connections to another kind of network... I'll have to think more about this!
The communication methods are only tools: they can be used for good or bad purposes. We are still working out how best to use the internet (or not). Some methods will be more useful in one particular situation but not in others. Networks can be good or bad, it depends on the specifics of the nodes involved that are sending the messages. It also depends on how the information is received by "the brain" i.e. how it is filtered and what info the attention of the conciousness focuses on (or not) Then it depends on how "the brain" processes that information i.e. the software, and what action (or not) it decides to take.
I love that you created UC without fully being conscious of what it was about. Your "software" just told you it felt like the right thing to do. Rule eleven and a half of life is: when we say something, we are often actually talking to ourselves (The problem is often that we don't actually listen to what our own brain is telling us). Writing things down makes them more explicit and not so easily forgotten. See my comments on free will.
That’s funny. Reminds me of that quote about psychologists and the fact that they don’t help you figure out what you should do. You already know that. They help you figure out why you don’t do what you know you need to do.
There is a lot of truth in that. Therapy is partly about raising awareness of things that are getting the way of what we'd like to do. The options from there are the same as always: change those things or learn to accept them as they are (or a combination of the two).
There is competition for the attention of our consciousness from within the brain as well from the outside world, in part between "gut feeling"/emotions and the slower-thinking logical part. It's not always easy to know what to listen to, so bouncing the options off someone else can be helpful.
Haha! Imagine my surprise to find that you have written an article about my favorite research subject! Wonderful to have an excellent story-teller such as Tomas Pueyo presenting this topic to his readers. The power of emergent properties, in which patterns and complexity can arise among a population of simple actors following simple rules, is a topic well worth examining. In my tiny corner of the universe, I became fascinated in understanding how a colony of tens of thousands of honeybees organized their colony functions, bringing in the proper balance of nectar (carbohydrate) and pollen (protein) to feed the growing larvae, making complex foraging decisions, and organizing food stores, air-conditioning their hive, as well as locating new nesting sites when swarming. All without any centralized control, without any single individual (even the queen) knowing the overall status of the colony.
Unlike yourself, and possibly most of your readers, I have little interest in humanity and its follies. I simply wanted to understand biological evolution had come up with incredible mechanisms (such as decentralization and networks) to solve the many challenges facing living organisms.
I suppose it could be wonderful if human beings took some "advice" from ants and bees, but I suspect that our arrogance, hubris, and innate over-riding obsession with personal self-interest, prevents us from making a multitude of wise choices. You have given us examples of such folly in the way many countries have poorly managed the COVID pandemic.
If you wish to read a bit more about bees, ants, fireflies and slime molds, check out my book:
Very interesting. I work with MIT’s center for collective intelligence, and published some of my thoughts here - the starting point is similar Www.supermind.design
My interests tend toward understanding the elegant mechanisms that have evolved through decentralization, rather than trying to apply these mechanism towards best practices for humans. However, my colleague, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, has applied his work on ants in an attempt to optimize transportation and traffic organization in human societies. With the enormous processing power of the human brain, and its ability to manage problems using centralized control, humanity has generally overlooked the advantages of a decentralized network in which decisions are made using simple rules based upon local information. Traffic management is just one example in which decentralized control might contribute to solving difficult human problems.
Hey Scott, let me answer here because the thread width was becoming too narrow.
I didn't take your points negatively at all. I couldn't answer swiftly. I truly appreciate the conversation.
I agree with you that things aren't black and white, and that some interventions can definitely help autists. I was not sharing the truth, but rather the shallow understanding I had of the topic. Collating points of view like yours help a lot.
If anything, your response shows how much we still don't know about how to help autists. I would love to know and do much more on the topic. I hope to pick up the topic in the not-too-distant future, and ideally in the meantime I'd keep learning, from sources like you now. So thank for sharing, and if you have specific ideas, I am all ears.
One way you can get in touch with me is by responding to my newsletter. I receive those emails.
Tomas, as biologists, we often try to make our basic research relevant to human endeavors, and we sometimes push the issue too far, trying to convince the funding agencies that our work has "real-world" relevance. I am content in this arena to simply marvel at the incredible mechanisms that evolution has come up with. Consider the situation with COVID. It is almost beyond comprehension to see how coronavirus has evolved with such ferocity, with the Delta variant now coursing through the human population..... a simple virus, not even a living pathogen, that has "managed" (with what we metaphorically consider consciousness) to increase its contagiousness with just a few simple amino acid changes on the spike protein (and probably elsewhere in the genome).
Tomas, I also wanted to broach again the topic of real world problems that could benefit from the type of analyses you apply to issues. These two real world problems are the treatment of autism, and the management of opioid addiction using buprenorphine. Both these issues impose an enormous burden on society, on the families affected, and the individuals affected.
I am more than eager to tackle autism, as I am close to some autists. The 1st thing I wanted was a DB of all the "symptoms" / phenotypes / behaviors for clusterization, in order to segment ppl according to prognosis and hence potential support. I have seen nothing here.
I am also open to other approaches here. What do you have in mind?
As always, a very interesting article. Thank you!
However, I have a comment about the type of network that I think has not been
covered in your article.
You do not discuss what I would call the "Hierarchical Network", a system where
the decisions the network takes go in a a "top down" direction. Most companies
follow this approach. In information terms, the data follow one path (in both
directions), but there is another one-directional path of information (orders
or directives) that flows from top management down to lower levels of decision
making.An army is an extreme example of a hierarchical organization.
The other important point is that in a meeting of several people in a room, the
quantity of information that can be exchanged is somehow limited by what in
computing terms may be called the "bandwith" of our speech processes and
inforrmation processing. For conversations where every person can exchange a
meaningful amount of information whith everyone else, the group is limited to
about 10 to 15 people.
The roman army, for example, had their troops divided into groups of ten, with
a Decurion in charge, who in turn formed part of a group of ten Decurions
coordinated by a Centurion, etc.
In many companies there is a board of around 10 people, and countries are
governed in general by a Cabinet of 10 to 15 Ministers. The Ministries are then
subdivided into working units, perhaps not down to the lowest level, but most
organizations follow this hierarchical model.
In a very simplified analysis, taking 10 people in each level (sort of like the
Roman Army), a General (Manager, Prime minister, etc.) commanding 1,000 troops
is three levels removed from a soldier (ten Centurions, 100 Decurions, 1000
common soldiers). We have in this way 4 levels for a big company with 10,000
employees, and 6 or 7 for countries with populations in the millions. We
therefore have a pyramid of decision making, from tactical problems of detail
in the lower levels to the larger, strategy decisions at the top. In a decision process it is a problem, since the different levels tend to move in restricted circles, as far as meaningful information is concerned. Status and wealth also play an important part, so the problems faced by the common folk are not well understood by the leaders. Of course, the more hierarchical
the organization, the problem of asymmetric decision making and information
sharing becomes worse. The king is not so responsive to the lower levels as the
politician and the General can make decisions even disregarding the lives of his soldiers.
Less meaningful information can be exchanged in larger groups. Assemblies of
Citizens, as in ancient Greek City States or Swiss villages can be of several hundred or even thousands, but again the speakers to the assembly are restricted to a few., and the rest are more passive, until, as is ussually done, the decision is taken by a vote. Most Parliaments or the Houses in Congress follow this model, and in most there are Comitties of around ten to 15 people who discuss the proposals in detail.
The above is related more to decision making than to information exchange, and to face to face communication than to the Web, but the "bandwidth" problem of the human brain and speech (or reading speed) remains. In the sharing of information in our networked computer communication, it is true that direct communication with millions is possible, and a few nodes
act as spreaders of information to thousands or millions of receptors. They can talk, but not
really listen to everyone. The exchange of two-way information is still restricted to smaller groups, although hopefully the best ideas will be spread by more people, and the hierarchy effect will be less important in a loose and not hierarchical organization like the WWW. In any case, some hierarchy remains because some outlets are more followed than others.
Of course the above ideas are basically a cartoon of what happens out there, and as the saying goes "God is in the details" but I thought that drawing attention to these limitations of our communication skills as individuals may be worthwhile.
Thanks again for another thought provoking article, abrazo
Brilliantly explained. Thank you! A few reactions
I cover some of this in the follow-up article:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/society-is-a-brain?r=36xnz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
But you go into a lot of detail in a very interesting and important topic, the microinteractions between neurons. I think about that a lot too.
10 ppl is a max for a free-flowing conversation. I agree. But when you start including mechanisms for improved communication, things can go faster.
For example: the main issue in conversation is that bandwidth is limited to one person talking. How can you increase that bandwidth?
One way is with breakout conversations. 2 convos double the bandwidth. What's discussed can be summarized and then shared with the broader group.
Another one is to extract some common messages and use another channel for them. For example, agreement and disagreement are very common and useful, but if they stop the flow we lose bandwidth, and if they don't get expressed to avoid stopping the flow, then we lose info. One way to solve this is by using a non-verbal message. For example, in all my working groups, I introduce the idea of finger-snapping to convey agreement. You can't imagine how useful this is.
As you mention, internet is yet another realm. But there are some interesting mechanics that can be used.
For example, do you remember how dumb Youtube videos used to be? They were mostly ranked by recency. Now they changed the algorithm, and they're ordered mostly by Likes, and the result is much better.
The key to keep bidirectional communication as one node connects to many more is to select filter the feedback for quality, be it through a simple filter, through composition of several pieces of feedback, through sentiment analysis, or equivalents.
Anyway, super interesting topic.
My guess is you will enjoy a lot Hosftadter's GEB. And probably, also books by his pupil, Melanie Mitchell.
I read it. And I loved it! I discovered Escher—I love him—through GEB. But it's been nearly 15 years. I should prob read it again...
You would definitely be interested in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The central thesis is that the earth and (almost) all life on it, is in fact a giant supercomputer commissioned by hyperintelligent pandimensional beings to finally work out the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life?
The obvious, but unstated paradox is that despite being hyperintelligent and pandimensional, these beings haven't been able to work out the meaning of life themselves! Perhaps a subtle dig at human hubris and self-congratulation.
I clearly need to read it
fascinating images!! Now how do we get the "deplorable neurons" to neutralized themselves? The fish creating a scary sea monster is the best! Thank you Tomas.
Hahaha
I think we're all human and the result of the neurons around us. We just need to restructure how the neurons are hooked up.
On the tenth day of Christmas my truelove gave to me ten pipers piping.
1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=10? Nope. The answer is either twenty-three or minus five depending on whether you like Highland pipe band music or not, so I think maybe an orchestra would be a better example.
The point is that the sum of the individual parts is not equal to the whole. To create something special you need to have good players, but they also need to give up their individuality. A good conductor sees the whole and isn’t just there to co-ordinate but also to add balance, interpretation and expression.
There is always a competitive tension between the individual and the group. What an individual might desire isn’t necessarily what is best for the group. The key is to keep the right balance between individual rights and the rights of others. The end result of creation can be truly awful if the players don’t play nicely together, the conductor doesn’t co-ordinate well or the project was never a good idea in the first place. The bigger the group the harder it is to conduct because the leader can become disconnected from the followers .
Human society is made up of individuals, but people behave differently on their own than they do in groups. In the well described phenomenon of bystander apathy, if one person comes upon someone who needs help, they are more likely to act than if many people are present. This is partly because a group gives us cover to avoid taking responsibility for a problem, but also because humans display some level of herd behaviour and we instinctively look to others for guidance in an uncertain situation.
In the examples of prey animals, the action of one individual can "spook" the whole group into a communal chain reaction. We are not quite as group focused as some of species in the videos, but we are aware of the mood of others and there is such a thing as the social mood. That can be a problem, but also a solution.
Apparently the bystander effect is more a dilution of responsibility, where ppl assume somebody else is in charge and will do something. I thought it was a nice nuance to what you say.
The phenomenon usually refers to a group of strangers, but my guess is that the group dynamics would be different if some or all of the people knew each other.
> What about DAOs—(Distributed Autonomous Organizations)? They try to encode networks more rigidly. Does that reduce emergent complexity?
Good DAOs should encode networks less rigidly than a traditional corporate structure. The point is to increase individual autonomy. Whether that increases or reduces complexity is hard to say.
Yes, DAOs are so new that it's difficult to judge them, but the tradeoff you highlight is probably one of the most important ones to assess. My guess is there needs to be standardization to facilitate bandwidth, but how that standardization is the key. Eg internet and stock markets are standardized protocols that achieve exactly what they need to achieve for high throughput without much cost in terms of flexibility. That's what DAOs must aspire to.
And building a tool that allows to do that for decision-making is my goal.
Intéressant et passionnant, notre cerveau serait une connexion (émetteur et récepteur) avec une conscience supérieure dans notre univers !?
C'est surprennamment logique, n'est-ce pas?
Great article -- it would go over really well at Complexity Weekend -- https://www.complexityweekend.com/
I had never heard about it!
100 billion neurons in the brain. 100 billion stars in a galaxy. What are the odds?
I never made the connection. Hmmm
Tomas, what type of brain are you trying to build on Uncharted Territories?
I had never thought about it. It's a very good question. I should think more about it. Maybe I can start now.
- I'm getting out a lot of pre-processed info over the last few years.
- I'm using it to make myself accountable to do it.
- I want ppl to challenge me in my beliefs and knowledge, to improve.
- I hope to gather a set of very brilliant people that are willing to jump across disciplines with me.
- For the ideas that are most interesting, I hope to have the community spread them to theirs, and have a domino effect.
- I want to crowdsource solutions to some of the biggest problems
- I want to build with the community an alternative brain system that can be applied to the rest of society to improve our efficiency
Do these make sense?
Do they match what you thought?
What would you change?
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! To answer your question, I'd like to take the four network phases you've isolated (speech, writing, broadcast, internet) and tilt the perspective on them slightly.
These have each led to revolutions, but this isn't necessarily because of an increase in network "power" or connectivity. It could be the case that each was novel, and had a relevant use case. This framework allows us to see them as different tools for different situations. I think this is an interesting idea to flesh out more, and leads to some arguments why bigger networks aren't always better a la social physics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics).
In this case however, let's look at substack - the medium through which uncharted territories currently exists. It's a blend of internet and broadcast networks (but mostly broadcast). With your unique perspectives on applied systems thinking, I think this is a fantastic choice. I also believe that you succeed in your goals of gathering cross disciplinary people who can spread ideas to their communities.
I do wonder if there are ways that uncharted territories could transition to a more internet based model. It seems hard, because the internet model seems most effective when many nodes are contributing substantially. This could require other brilliant narrators and full time collaborators - a tall order! For now, this is the maximum amount of time this node can contribute. Until next time!
Oh I agree 100% with you.
This exchange is proof that this is much more bidirectional than traditional broadcast, but in this community I'm way too central a node.
For example, to reduce my centrality, there are some specific issues that I think could be crowdsourced rather than me focusing on them alone. Climate Change is probably a perfect candidate to test it.
One way this could work is I lay the high-level framework and ppl pick up pieces, they are all part of a group, and then emergent complexity can start appearing from there. This is a more traditional "internet-like" behavior that could be relatively easy to do. I still want to do other things before that, but I'd like to try something like that in the coming months.
My eventual goal is to build a much better system altogether though, and I struggle between the intermediate and eventual steps.
Thx for the link! I'll use that terminology
A couple of thoughts on the format.
Now that the volume of information on Uncharted Territories is getting so much greater, I wonder if a search function is possible at some stage.
The other thought is that creativity is partly a function of being able to connect seemingly unrelated information that we already have. Ideally, I would at this point link to Vic F's post about the Free Will article (and my response) rather than having to cut and paste. I think some sort of cross-referencing system within UT would be very useful for developing connnections between ideas.
For search, one idea: on google you write site:unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com and search anything after that and you’ll find what you need.
For cross-referencing, sounds like a roam research.
Thanks, search works pretty well.
I will try some Roaming
This is very interesting! I appreciate your willingness to jump into the comments and discuss with everyone. I hadn't considered the value of growing a network through broadcast style means, then changing the connections to another kind of network... I'll have to think more about this!
The communication methods are only tools: they can be used for good or bad purposes. We are still working out how best to use the internet (or not). Some methods will be more useful in one particular situation but not in others. Networks can be good or bad, it depends on the specifics of the nodes involved that are sending the messages. It also depends on how the information is received by "the brain" i.e. how it is filtered and what info the attention of the conciousness focuses on (or not) Then it depends on how "the brain" processes that information i.e. the software, and what action (or not) it decides to take.
I love that you created UC without fully being conscious of what it was about. Your "software" just told you it felt like the right thing to do. Rule eleven and a half of life is: when we say something, we are often actually talking to ourselves (The problem is often that we don't actually listen to what our own brain is telling us). Writing things down makes them more explicit and not so easily forgotten. See my comments on free will.
That’s funny. Reminds me of that quote about psychologists and the fact that they don’t help you figure out what you should do. You already know that. They help you figure out why you don’t do what you know you need to do.
There is a lot of truth in that. Therapy is partly about raising awareness of things that are getting the way of what we'd like to do. The options from there are the same as always: change those things or learn to accept them as they are (or a combination of the two).
There is competition for the attention of our consciousness from within the brain as well from the outside world, in part between "gut feeling"/emotions and the slower-thinking logical part. It's not always easy to know what to listen to, so bouncing the options off someone else can be helpful.
The brain is already alive, he's simply cultivating ;)
Great popular intro to collective intelligence. Check also "Superminds" by Tom Malone: https://www.amazon.com/Superminds-Surprising-Computers-Thinking-Together/dp/0316349135
You're the 2nd one to recommend this to me this week!
Some more recommendations, then :)
ACM Collective Intelligence Conference: 2021 edition featured a talk by myself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIzdvBeM-Is&t=2s), plus a lot of other really good ones (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9WaAfD3k05G50KwNFkUUOuPQDpJx2D7d)
SFI Collective Intelligence Workshop (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHsUiv04L9hwiO2NmNdp7AprsFt0Btouz), they're also coming out with a new journal
Ah too many links. I did watch the first one. Goal alignment + theory of mind, very interesting.
Bought!
Haha! Imagine my surprise to find that you have written an article about my favorite research subject! Wonderful to have an excellent story-teller such as Tomas Pueyo presenting this topic to his readers. The power of emergent properties, in which patterns and complexity can arise among a population of simple actors following simple rules, is a topic well worth examining. In my tiny corner of the universe, I became fascinated in understanding how a colony of tens of thousands of honeybees organized their colony functions, bringing in the proper balance of nectar (carbohydrate) and pollen (protein) to feed the growing larvae, making complex foraging decisions, and organizing food stores, air-conditioning their hive, as well as locating new nesting sites when swarming. All without any centralized control, without any single individual (even the queen) knowing the overall status of the colony.
Unlike yourself, and possibly most of your readers, I have little interest in humanity and its follies. I simply wanted to understand biological evolution had come up with incredible mechanisms (such as decentralization and networks) to solve the many challenges facing living organisms.
I suppose it could be wonderful if human beings took some "advice" from ants and bees, but I suspect that our arrogance, hubris, and innate over-riding obsession with personal self-interest, prevents us from making a multitude of wise choices. You have given us examples of such folly in the way many countries have poorly managed the COVID pandemic.
If you wish to read a bit more about bees, ants, fireflies and slime molds, check out my book:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691116242/self-organization-in-biological-systems
(This is not an advertisement! Please don't buy the book. It's hardly worth the price!)
Very interesting. I work with MIT’s center for collective intelligence, and published some of my thoughts here - the starting point is similar Www.supermind.design
Oh I was told about it and then forgotten! I keep getting it recommended. I MUST dive into it. Thanks!
Fascinating!
How would you translate these network communication best practices to humans?
My interests tend toward understanding the elegant mechanisms that have evolved through decentralization, rather than trying to apply these mechanism towards best practices for humans. However, my colleague, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, has applied his work on ants in an attempt to optimize transportation and traffic organization in human societies. With the enormous processing power of the human brain, and its ability to manage problems using centralized control, humanity has generally overlooked the advantages of a decentralized network in which decisions are made using simple rules based upon local information. Traffic management is just one example in which decentralized control might contribute to solving difficult human problems.
See https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02345 for a glimpse at the traffic example.
Hey Scott, let me answer here because the thread width was becoming too narrow.
I didn't take your points negatively at all. I couldn't answer swiftly. I truly appreciate the conversation.
I agree with you that things aren't black and white, and that some interventions can definitely help autists. I was not sharing the truth, but rather the shallow understanding I had of the topic. Collating points of view like yours help a lot.
If anything, your response shows how much we still don't know about how to help autists. I would love to know and do much more on the topic. I hope to pick up the topic in the not-too-distant future, and ideally in the meantime I'd keep learning, from sources like you now. So thank for sharing, and if you have specific ideas, I am all ears.
One way you can get in touch with me is by responding to my newsletter. I receive those emails.
Looking forward to more!
Super interesting. Thanks! Very interesting that there's inhibitory systems too.
Tomas, as biologists, we often try to make our basic research relevant to human endeavors, and we sometimes push the issue too far, trying to convince the funding agencies that our work has "real-world" relevance. I am content in this arena to simply marvel at the incredible mechanisms that evolution has come up with. Consider the situation with COVID. It is almost beyond comprehension to see how coronavirus has evolved with such ferocity, with the Delta variant now coursing through the human population..... a simple virus, not even a living pathogen, that has "managed" (with what we metaphorically consider consciousness) to increase its contagiousness with just a few simple amino acid changes on the spike protein (and probably elsewhere in the genome).
Incredible indeed.
Tomas, I also wanted to broach again the topic of real world problems that could benefit from the type of analyses you apply to issues. These two real world problems are the treatment of autism, and the management of opioid addiction using buprenorphine. Both these issues impose an enormous burden on society, on the families affected, and the individuals affected.
I am more than eager to tackle autism, as I am close to some autists. The 1st thing I wanted was a DB of all the "symptoms" / phenotypes / behaviors for clusterization, in order to segment ppl according to prognosis and hence potential support. I have seen nothing here.
I am also open to other approaches here. What do you have in mind?