Max Borders

Shirky's New Book: Here Comes Everybody

Remember Coase's The Nature of the Firm? In it, Coase asks a really important question: why do people organize into firms? In other words, why isn't there a totally "free" market in labor? Why do organizations take on scales that result in higher costs? Coase's answer is "transaction costs". It costs more to coordinate actions among people who have disparate skill sets, live in different locations, have various levels of abilities, need to contract with each other and hammer out details of these agreements, etc.... then get them all together to accomplish something profitable. Simply said, it becomes worth it for people to give and take orders. So up to a certain point, organizations with major components of hierarchy are simply less costly to organize. But this cost structure is changing rapidly due to Web 2.Whatever.

Check out Here Comes Everybody. Yes, Shirky's is another "look how new media are revolutionizing everything" book. But among other things - I'm only on Chapter Three - Shirky has been able to articulate the revolutionary change in the structure of transaction costs when it comes to organizing. If you can organize without organizations at increasingly lower costs, the world is a very different place. The nature of the firm is going to change--perhaps not utterly, but considerably. I take away from this a kind of techno-optimism not only about seismic shifts in the nature of human organization, but in the nature of government and our ability to rein it in. For example, if new media are changing things for firms and orgs, will it also change the logic of collective action a la public choice theory?

Ironically, I've been asked to write a review of Here Comes Everybody for a print journal.

Fire Ants

Sid and I were out walking today. We often come across the fairly large fire ant mounds. I showed my age once when I mentioned that I don't remember seeing them as a child. That's because they weren't here in North Carolina as I was growing up. But they're here now - having come from South America. And they're wicked little beasties (Sid's already had them swarm his foot twice and he's only 2.) So today, Sid and I threw rocks on them for the sake of a crude experiment.

These ants are examples of evolutionary perfection. To those who fully understand evolution, "evolutionary perfection" is a bit oxymoronic. To be alive on this planet here and now is evidence of Darwinian success. But what I mean is: to see these quick, vicious, constructive and highly cooperative ants in action? It sure is a sight to behold. I am simultaneously repulsed by them, of course. Admiration and revulsion all at once is a strange feeling. But at least now I understand E. O. Wilson's lifelong preoccupation. 

Ant colonies are complex systems. That remarkable level of coordination is carried out by chemical signals firing among them rapidly. The chemicals and pheromones are like code and they are like distributed hardware nodes in a network of constructive or destructive behavior--as it benefits their colony. I see lots of good analogies with human organization, but important differences, too (agency). 

In any case, I thought I'd share my reverence for these nasty little creatures with my handful of readers. 

The Metaphors Talk

The Locke foundation has my socio-economic metaphors talk up here. If you prefer to read the whole paper, find that here. 

Singularity Theism: An Athiest's Bathtub Hypothesis

Okay, some Facebook friends and family are interested in some really dorky thoughts I’d had in the tub one night. Those who know me well know I am an atheist. And in one of those offhand Facebook comments, I dropped that I had inched toward agnosticism due to said dorky thoughts. The following is my quick and dirty write-up of the idea. Keep in mind that my fidelity (faithfulness!) to physicalism remains throughout. I rely on what I take to be theoretical possibility within a naturalist worldview and accept no supernaturalism. Anyway, here goes…

1. The Mind and the Brain are intimately connected. Fundamentally, the mind is a physical phenomenon. There are no non-physical, mental phenomena. There is nothing supernatural. All that exists is physical.
2. Artificial intelligence and Artificial consciousness are possible. Anything that instantiates the causal and physical properties of human brains can instantiate minds and intelligence. The properties of mind are the causal-physical properties instantiated by brains (or silicon, or whatever). This is known as functionalism.
3. Computers achieve increased computational power when they are networked.
4. Human brains are sufficiently similar to computers for us, one day, to have neural prostheses and interface with computers and machines. Cyborgs are possible. Brain to brain interfaces are possible. (Yes, there are deep questions about the unity of consciousness and personal identity I will pass over here.)
5. At some future time, brain to brain – and thus mind to mind – networking will be possible. (This is all found in the work of Kurzweil, Vinge and others. The “Singularity” is an extrapolation from Moore’s Law – a theoretical point at which computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence and artificial consciousness emerges. Beyond that point, things become really unpredictable.)
6. Transhumanists like Kurzweil, Vinge and, in particular, Nick Bostrum have postulated Jupiter Brains and Matrioshka Brains. These theoretical entities are super-massive extensions of Number 5, i.e. they are hyper-intelligences capable of harnessing the energy of, say, stars for their computations.
7. Let’s suppose Matrioshka Brains are possible. Suppose these entities can also be networked. Can their computational powers be scaled up even further? How large? Let’s call these brains beyond Matrioshka level “Deus Brains”. These godlike entities require us only to take the logic of networked intelligence, energy consumption and computational power as far as it can go. I am admitting ignorance about any theoretical, physical or mathematical limits to any intelligent computation system—much less limits on to what degree consciousness can be instantiated. (Humans are very limited in this regard and indeed our consciousness is but a small aspect of the unconscious computational process going on in our brains. See various models of the mind and brain function.)
8. So, Deus Brains could have a critical limit for various reasons: One is that Deus Brains, in order to harness the matter and energy of the universe for computation, would have fundamentally to transform the very nature of the universe, say, from a non-thinking expanse of dust, stars, planets and neutrinos, to something capable of instantiating Deus Brain computations (superintelligence). It seems implausible on its face that stars, spacedust and dark matter can serve dual functions as this ordinary stuff AND also be a Deus Brain. The second possible limit to a Deus Brain could be that networked computational power does not allow for unitary experience, or a single consciousness. In other domains of life, like ecosystems and economics, distributed systems seem to be the lot, due to what appears to be a natural limit on centralization. The Deus Brain would therefore be more like a collection of sentient entities sharing information, synchronizing and reorganizing, but never fully becoming one master-consciousness (due to some limit analogous to the limits of human selective attention, or, as we said, centralization).
9. However, suppose the universe has been thus transformed already (i.e. Deus Brain exist.)  These brains might already have achieved the level of computational power – e.g. a species of omniscience – to simulate the causal nexuses leading up to its status as a Deus Brain. In other words, the universe could already be a fundamentally transformed and the networked entity could already understand its prior states as a formerly unintelligent expanse of energized space-dust, much in the same way we understand ourselves as being evolved from a primordial soup—but in a much more sophisticated way. That understanding means it’s able to compute massive instances of cause and effect, sufficient to simulate experience for lesser minds (or nested subsystems with sentience).
10. The sophistication is such that the Deus Brain can comprise lesser, nested minds and run causal/experiential simulations within them. This is a version of the Brains-in-a-Vat/Matrix argument, or perhaps Berkeley’s idealism. In any case, our experience could be simulated for us by a Deus Brain.
11. AND/OR, the Deus Brain has sufficient computational power to manipulate or navigate space-time. The passage of events as we know it is completely different for a Deus Brain, who understands itself and the universe holistically and in multiple dimensions—moving seamlessly in and out of our limited and singular experience of space-time (which is just ordinary 3D plus time—i.e. the passage of events as we experience it). That means the Deus Brains live “outside of” space and time as we know it and we are limited in ways they are not. This means they could exist in a “future” that is also “now,” relativized in ways our brains can’t fathom. (Shit, ask Stephen Hawking)
12. However, the implications are of multiple, networked Deus Brains, or of a super massive God Brain. There are also Eastern (Hindu-Buddhist) style implications for networking human intelligence with the God Brain and becoming “one with it” in a way. So this God Brain, as I hypothesize it, is perhaps limited in ways that the Judeo-Christian God is not. It is also not clear that the God Brain is a moralizer, or has a “telos” for us or the universe. God Brains could be “evil” or neutral with respect to crude human moralisms. At this level of intelligence, morality could be utterly meaningless. Then again, it may be that the nested intelligences within the God Brain, competing for limited energy resources (limits on resources also speculative on my part), would themselves seek peaceful means of coexisting within the larger God Brain corpus.

Anyway, this is the dorky, bathtub thought-process that nudged me towards agnosticism and away from athiesm (but only very, very slightly). There is just so much speculative stuff in here, I admit. But I really appreciate being able to share these nerdy, errant notions with friends and family. You’re all very tolerant, indeed. If you got this far, I owe you a beer and I promise not to mention any of this again. J

Climate Consequences & the Giggle Test

David Friedman has a different type of 'What if They're Right?' argument from mine here, which deals largely with political economy. His is more about the consequences of warming as more or less likely to be catastrophic. (Hell, I've always wondered why it wouldn't be beneficial to humanity and ecology, as in past non-anthropogenic warm periods.) Anyway, here's a good sliver:

But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them.

Human beings, after all, currently live, work, grow food in a much wider range of climates than that. Glancing over a U.S. climate map, it looks as though all of the places I have lived are within an hour or two drive of other places with an average temperature at least two degrees centigrade higher. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of much more than two degrees, it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn't continue to do so, about as easily, if average temperature shifted up by that amount—especially if they had a century to adjust to the change. That observation raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change of that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that any reasonable person could take seriously?

Find the whole post here. (HT: Michael Strong)

Remember that these 100 year, foot and a half sealevel rise predictions are the most extreme conditions made by a body who has strong incentives to bias their work in favor of warming. Indeed, empirical observations over the last ten years have seen no warming and no cooling. IPCC models predicted temperature increases, which simply haven't happened. Why should we trust their models on something even more difficult to predict -- i.e. future consequences of warming? I'd say ecologists like Dan Botkin are more qualified to talk about such consequences to the ecology. Indeed, I'm very sympathetic to Botkin's "non-steady state" view of the climate and ecosystem. 

Rules, Free Zones and Institutions

Typepad is about one more weird glitch away from my ditching it altogether. So, let me try to recreate a post I was working on that disappeared on me:

The long and short of it is this: Paul Romer's TED talk is up. 

Finally, there is someone out there giving a popular talk about the importance of rules, i.e. institutions. James Buchanan and Douglass North have both given us wonderful academic treatments of what is probably the most important lesson humanity will ever learn--institutions matter. But it is exciting to see Romer talk about this fundamental truth using this free-zone approach -- particularly with pragmatism in mind. Some thoughts:

• Special economic zones have worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and social entrepreneurs are working on them elsewhere. 
• Polyarchy - distributed authority and divergent rulesets - give us more opportunities to learn what works, to get the institutions right via iteration, and for people to vote with their feet.
• What can we Americans re-learn from this kind of thinking as we seek rapidly to centralize?

Pay close attention to the concept of rules about rules (or metarules). One primary metarule would be to craft rules with a view to individual freedom and the rule of law, which is what the US Founders did. Anyway, check out the Romer talk. (If all this reads like so much gibberish, read the best primer on institutions extant, by Frederic Sautet.)

Self-organizing Criticality (The Grain of Sand that Caused an Avalanche)

Consider this passage on the ideas of Per Bak, one of the original thinkers on complex systems:

Bak uses a metaphor and the concept of long-term equilibrium to describe how traditional economists model economics. In this metaphor, economic flow and the economic agents are compared with water and reservoirs, respectively. The economic flow then will correspond to water flowing continuously and linearly through the reservoirs in such a manner that all reservoirs obtain the best value they can (with accumulation of water corresponding to economic satisfaction) - achieving some sort of stability equivalent to Nash equilibrium.

He rejects this traditional view, considering it simplistic, and presents his idea that the dynamics of economic flows is more like the dynamics observed in (and in his models of) sand piles, as changes are not linear and continuous but rather non-linear and discrete. The forces which each individual agent (grain) exercises over the others plays and important role in the dynamics of the system. He considers that there is friction in the economic flow and that agents are not perfectly rational. He believes that friction prevents (long-term) equilibrium from being reached and that fluctuations in economics are of a different nature than those notions the traditional economists propose. He refers to empirical data to support his suggestion that economic systems would be better modelled as critically self-organised systems. For example, he discusses results obtained by Benoit Mandelbrot, in which the percentage of monthly variation in the price of cotton versus the number of occurrences of such percentages over several months follows a power law distribution.

Bak also hypothesises that the dynamics of an economic system should be somewhat similar to that shown by the evolution model described above, where agents (consumers, producers, traders, thieves) interact with each other in accordance with the set of options they have, exploiting such options in order to increase their 'happiness'. These ideas depict a co-evolution model where the more successful agents will survive while the least fitted ones will not or will be forced to mutate by changing their strategy.

I'll leave you, Dear Reader, to decide how far non-linear dynamics go in describing the current "crisis," which is used, of course, by politicians to gum up the works and blame markets. If you believe that a point of self-organized criticality can be reached in certain economic phenomena, you might also agree that government can be (and in this case probabiy is) a factor in our recent economic avalanche. The market itself might also be culpable, but due to natural dynamics, not greed (I argue something similar here). The good news is, self-organizing systems tend back toward longer term equilibrium (as opposed to classical equilibrium or steady state). The bad news is the government is filled with dummies and fixers who have no clue about these dynamics.

FLOW and Friction Reduction

Apparently some physicists at Duke and Penn have unified some structural/functional laws of living creatures and inorganic features of our world:

What they believe connects the two worlds is a theory that flow systems - from animal locomotion to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time to balance and minimize imperfections. Flows evolve to reduce friction or other forms of resistance, so that they flow more easily with time. This view has been termed the constructal law, which Bejan first stated 13 years ago.

With the help of Marden, Bejan believes that he has now unified both the biological and geophysical principles of nature's design through the constructal law, which can also be viewed as the physics of evolution.

Read the piece. Now if we could get a unifying theory of human organization and complex systems, which I've been pimpin' on this site for a little while now... I like that this theory has to do with FLOW. I also like the concept of "friction reduction"' for society, as well, which I believe institutions based on non-harm would give rise to (if we could evolve past the linear notions of power and control by governments, towards full voluntary association). Hat tip: Mark Frazier.

Max Borders's Full Paper on Socio-Economic Metaphors

This weekend at the Conference of the American Dream Coalition (fantastic conference on urban planning and transportation), I gave a brief and tidy version of this paper:

Download Society_as_Ecosystem-Paper-ACROBAT

... which I wrote originally for the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders Conference (on Spontaneous Order). Anyone interested in complex systems, economics and needs some bathroom reading, please feel free to download and print.

Richman: The Nirvana Fallacy

A nice little piece countering the "market failure" justification for state intervention in the economy. A sliver:

A common form of the fallacy is rejection of the imperfect free (or freer) market in favor of (presumably) omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent government regulation. A ”flawed” but achievable arrangement is set against an (alleged) ideal, though it is left unestablished whether the ideal can in fact exist. The problem with this form of analysis should be obvious. If the ideal is not available, then the comparison is invalid and yields no practical information. If the rejected arrangement were compared to other achievable—that is, imperfect—alternatives, it might well be judged superior.

Like "Society as Ecosystem," I'd like to see the term "Nirvana Fallacy" go viral.