IdeaFestival

How is Aikido like Economics?

It's probably not a question you were pondering today, but the author of Economics for Dummies hazards a guess in an interview posted at Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics blog:

I think the nearest thing to aikido in economics would have to be things like confirmation bias, hyperbolic discounting, and other perceptual problems that make it difficult for people to adjust optimally to changing circumstances.

Aikido doesn’t so much use people’s energy against them as it adds something new and unexpected to a situation where they are moving — and it does so in a manner to which they are ill equipped to respond.

Good marketing guys can do this with us. We come into any situation as consumers or investors with a set of cognitive biases that make it difficult to respond optimally to a given situation if it evolves in an unexpected way. If they can manipulate the frame, we are carried along without even realizing it — until it’s too late. (Blam!)

This also resembles the dynamic in comedy, which uncovers a whispered truth - our "confirmation biases" - only to use that thought against us by sending it to a new and unexpected place.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Aikido

Need a good book? Emiliano Gandolfi recommends

When asked, Emiliano Gandolfi

, who participated in the moving award of the Curry Stone Prize and sat in on the very well received panel on creativity, recommended "Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions." 


All IdeaFestival speaker-recommended books may be found in the "books" category on the blog.

Wayne

Wikipedia: utopia

Dark matter: How do we know it's there?

Recent observations may have detected an enormous filament of dark matter, along which a group of 14 galaxies are developing.

Dark Matter represents about 22 percent of the total mass of observable universe, yet does not interact with "normal" luminous matter and cannot be seen by human eyes. Dark Energy and Dark matter represent up to 75 percent of the energy-matter in the observable universe. While not seen, both can be inferred by their effect on surrounding matter.

We just don't know exactly what they are.

In a beautiful 2006 image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, above, the blue color is believed to represent the invisible Dark Matter of colliding galaxies. Because is does not interact with the normal luminous matter (pink), it passed through the merging galaxies ahead of the observable matter and is headed in opposite directions in the image. Astronomers detected it by observing how much gravity bends the light from the stars behind the blue area, a technique known as gravitational lensing. More massive objects bend more light.

Wayne

Kentucky to fly spacecraft

Put your glasses down. You read that right. National Public Radio's local affiliate, WEKU, devoted some radio time yesterday to a piece on Kentucky Space. Click here to stream it.

A spacecraft designed and built by a public, private consortium in the commonwealth has been selected for a NASA mission in June, 2009. It will mark the first time the agency has flown university built satellites to orbit.

Wayne

"The Behavioral Revolution"

Referencing Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who recently spoke at the IdeaFestival, columnist David Brooks suggests that the financial crisis could be the coming out party for behavioral economics:

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception.

Wayne

Giving information a social life

Approaches to technology and economic development in the global south are of course informed by the prevailing culture. But culture also matters to technological development in the north, which has inherited some pretty heft concepts of its own.

Using the discoveries of Gödel, Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Polyani, futurist Alex Soojung-Kim Pang makes the point that information isn't something out there, a separate Platonic entity casting shadows on our computational cave, yet somehow discoverable and perfectible by our machines.

This hasn't led to a new appreciation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of computers and people. Instead, for most people it has had the unintended and unfortunate effect of encouraging us to think of "information" strictly as stuff that computers can handle. If it can be poured into a database of best practices, it's information; it if can't, it's not. The problem is that this kind of information is like the visible part of the iceberg. The other seven-eights are underwater and invisible. But that doesn't mean that your ship can't be sunk by it.

The great challenge of the future will be to turn information technologies from things that encourage us to narrow our conception of what knowledge is, to things that can more fully reflect the diverse ways that knowledge is produced and performed. You might say that we have to learn to give information technologies social lives.

While some extraordinary artists have made the point first - Jonah Lehrer's description of Cezanne's insight into how the mind sees is a fantastic example of how art can get the jump on scientific method - neurology has recently confirmed that our wetware interprets and imposes meaning on the sensory data it inherits.

We know more than we can tell. And culture is that knowledge on deposit.

Wayne

Tinkering: We know more than we can tell

Interesting post from futurist Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on tinkering as a way of knowing from a recent conference sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. On tinkering:

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Along with game designer Jane McGonigal, who spoke at the IdeaFestival recently, he works out of the Institute for the Future.

The kind of iterative learning Soojung-Kim Pang references pulls knowledge from our limbs. We know more than we can tell.

Wayne

Business flash: profits related to insight

In a time of sagging economies and shrinking budgets, what business has time to expose itself to random thinking or to explore the links between game development and personal prosperity? There's work to do! Oh wait....

Wayne

Many Worlds? Somewhere I'm being a very bad boy.

Quantum wave collapse is a deeply puzzling phenomenon. The idea that one might measure a particle's velocity or location, but not both with absolute certainty, or that distant particles some how share physical properties seemingly instantaneously and faster than light can travel, raises paradoxes that have yet - and may never - be addressed by science. 

Why should a wave function with a seemingly endless possibility - that particle and a host of others might be anywhere headed in any direction - "collapse" to the single outcomes experienced by human observers?

Rhemote Rhea

Like an abstraction, Saturn's icy Rhea appears here with the planet's rings in sharp relief, edge on.

It's one of the many beautiful pictures returned by Saturn's visitor, Cassini, which is imaging the planet and its moons with unprecedented clarity, as well as hinting at one pretty big idea.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute