'Human Development: Survival & Thrival Skills' on @epistemocrat -- http://trunc.it/3vlxj -- Ancestry & Ancestral Fitness are my two dreams.
about 6 hours ago
Watch Clay Shirky's wonderful TED Talk above: Clay understands tinkering and social scaffolding.
Health is such an important (central) component to our precious lives, yet how to achieve optimal health requires a sophisticated blending of the known (do not smoke) and the unknown ( stand on one leg longer during the day to improve sleep quality, perhaps: *see Seth Roberts' self-experimentation chronicles here ). The barbell diversification strategy (roughly speaking) seems applicable, of course: 80% of our health efforts could be directed toward implementing the known, tried-and-proven health modalities (eating vegetables) while 20% of our energy could be diversified in cheap health options (trying spoonfuls of olive oil followed by balsamic vinegar once a day, as one possibility). The experienced tinkerer respects the 80% piece of this health options portfolio - these options have proven fruitful (be thankful) - yet bounds from this stable health platform and explores the unknowns of human physiology, happiness, and wellness ( *see Yechezkel Zilber's wonderul blog on these topics here, thanks to Navanit Arakeri) through the remaining 20% of this personal investment portfolio. Here is where the diversified cheap options framework steps onto the scene: If, we admit that our healthcare and modern medical efforts face serious limits ( *to verify this reality, please see Jerome Groopman's splendid piece, "Superbugs: The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat," in The New Yorker, thanks to Dave Lull), then experimentation / tinkering safely represents one possible way to stretch the limits of being human by respecting the humble limits of being human.
The molecular revolution was supposed to enable drug discovery to evolve from chance observation into rational design, yet dwindling pipelines threaten the survival of the pharmaceutical industry. What went wrong?
The answer, we suggest, is the mismeasure of uncertainty, as academic researchers underestimated the fragility of their scientific knowledge while pharmaceuticals executives overestimated their ability to domesticate scientific research.
For all the breathless headlines proclaiming breakthrough discoveries, the truth is that we still do not understand what causes most disease. Even when we can identify a responsible gene or implicate an important mutation, we have made only limited progress in turning these results into treatments.
When we open our minds to the cheap real-world options perspective, tinkering rises to the surface as a process that we must investigate, try to poke holes in (as skeptical empiricism and Popperian science demands), and then understand in the context of the searching versus acting paradox. Nassim Taleb's next book is said to be titled Tinkering for a good reason, I suspect.
Amidst a flurry of excellent posts, Navanit Arakeri recently laid out an excellent operational framework for tinkering ( read here ), reaching the following important statement:
To sum up: Tinker (buy exposure) within an execution framework to which you have access. If you don’t have access to one, it may be useful to build one before you start stochastic tinkering.
On a side note, one great execution framework we are all born with is the human body. All it needs is the exposure to the right set of premises and the outcomes will follow without any need to force anything.
Execution frameworks are social scaffolding platforms that capture our tinkering endeavors (our body does this physiologically), allowing us to receive feedback and confront results and then scale up our actions if a positive Black Swan hits. Google, for example, provides Blogger as an execution framework that allows many aspiring essayists like myself to tinker stochastically with their thoughts and ideas, sharing them with the world along the way. The free tools and applications that Google provides to users free of charge ( read Chris Anderson's insights on "Freeconomics" here ) creates a bottom-up, cross-discipline tinkering platform for people from all walks of life across the globe to access. People need access to these types of social scaffolding tinkering platforms that support and enhance our actions, interactions, and discovery efforts (they speed up our "dot connecting" abilities immensely).
Clearly, when it comes to health options - the numerous choices and actions we make about our health; which, from a holistic ecology perspective, calls everything we do into question - we all have our own bodies to tinker with and experiment on, with some caution, of course. Seth Roberts understands self-experimentation and how to collect as many cheap health options as possible. Stochastic tinkering with diet, activity and sleep patterns, exercise habits, and lifestyle represents cheap health options possibilities that we could tinker with everyday to uncover the unknown: tinkering factors for the invisible in this health space, if we admit the limits to our knowledge and discard our top-down explanations (which are often self-limiting) about our health states.
The Medpedia Project is an extraordinary global effort to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on the website Medpedia.com. Physicians, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world that will benefit millions of people every year.
MedPedia is an execution framework. We need execution frameworks; we are humans - be human. This type of collaborative effort (in light of Clay Shirky's thoughts) should, I suspect, benefit from the emergent properties that tinkering within execution frameworks elicits. Social scaffolding platforms of this flavor bolster information exchange by bringing fragmented stochastic knowledge-seeking efforts into contact, creating ripe grounds (and perhaps some sparks as well) for the emergence of novel connections, new insights, and never before imagined interrelationships, angles, and perspectives.
In the context of the searching versus acting paradox, tinkering appears to be "searching in action" - but an asymmetry exists before the unveiling of the unknown. Prior to an emergence from the envelope of serendipity, tinkering favors the searching side of the searching versus acting paradox; then, upon "connecting the dots" associated with a serendipitous discovery, acting on this opportunity shifts tinkering to the action side of the spectrum. Yet, even as you error toward action and move to take advantage of this opportunity, the unknown caverns continue to illuminate and thus the search never ends. Tinkering unites "thinking" and "doing" in this manner to maximize (entropy) exposure to the envelope of serendipity, but tinkering works best when you are "long on options" and "short on obligations" (here is Art DeVany's statement):
Options give you the ability to act on events after they occur, thus you retain your freedom of choice. Obligations, such as a mortgage, give you no choice.
I suspect that NNT gravitates toward tinkering because it lies at the heart of searching for and acting on real-world options in a world that we do not understand - it is the entropy maximizing process (of the Le'vy walk variety) that maximizes the probability of uncovering the unknown unknowns (tinkering maximizes "stumbling" fitness). So, the prescription, in health and in other domains, would be to collect as many cheap options (limited transaction costs, considered OTM by others) as possible to maximize exposure to Nassim Taleb's envelope of serendipity.
However, in practice, transaction costs often limit our ability to engage a widely diversified cheap options portfolio. Diversification is key to OTM options since we do not know a priori which options will pay off - we admit our blindness to the future this way. So, clearly there exists a need for creating effective ways for people to discover cheap options and construct diversified portfolios that enhance the chances of positive Black Swan hits.
More than 40 years ago the fragmentation of scientific knowledge was a problem actively discussed but without much visible progress toward a solution; perhaps people then had the consummate wisdom to know that no problem is so big that you can't run away from it. Three aspects of the context and nature of this fragmentation seem notable:
1. The disparity between the total quantity of recorded knowledge, however it might be measured, and the limited human capacity to assimilate it, is not only enormous now but grows unremittingly. Exactly how the limitations of the human intellect and life span affect the growth of knowledge is unknown. Metaphorically, how can the frontiers of science be pushed forward if, someday, it will take a lifetime just to reach them? Wigner has perceptively explored this question (1950).
2. In response to the information explosion, specialties are somehow spontaneously created, then grow too large and split further into subspecialties without even a declaration of independence. One unintended result is the fragmentation of knowledge owing to inadequate cross-specialty communication. And as knowledge continues to grow, fragmentation will inevitably get worse because it is driven by the human imperative to escape inundation.
3. Of particular interest to me is the possibility that information in one specialty might be of value in another without anyone becoming aware of the fact. Specialized literatures, or other "units" of knowledge, that do not intercommunicate by citing one another may nonetheless have many implicit textual interconnections based on meaning. Indeed the number of unintended or implicit text-based connections within the literature of science may greatly exceed the number that are explicit, because there are far more possible combinations of units (that potentially could be related) than there are units. The connection explosion may be more portentous than the information explosion.
These points speak to what is called " Undiscovered Public Knowledge." I conceptualize social scaffolding platforms like MedPedia, Ancestral Fitness, or Ning as architectural frameworks that assist the "connection explosions" needed to advance our understanding of and our ability to operate within our increasingly complex and recursive world, turning over new leafs and previously undiscovered public knowledge along the way.
In the Google realm, Gmail and Gchat represent two such social scaffolding tools that have assisted my tinkering efforts. For instance, Navanit Arakeri and I have e-mail threads that, I suspect, could be leveraged into a book; a book that illustrates "tinkering about tinkering," utilizing Gmail as our "dot connecting" and searching / questioning / investigating space. Additionally, my latest venture, as hinted at in earlier posts, GoDoGood, emerged from a tinkering conversation in Gchat and represents a truly serendipitous discovery. Here are some snippets from that conversation with Brian Geremia, my good friend and GoDoGood co-founder, picked up midway into our chatting:
10:37 PM
me: blue here as well
i like blue with darker, earthy greens
Brian: yeah thats godo
and its also good
10:38 PM
me: we could make up what godo means; write an essay about it
Brian: yes we could
go do things
godo
god-o
god, infinite, omega
alpha
10:39 PM
me: wow, that is a good start
go do "good" things
godo
that could be our company
Brian: i like it
empowering
direct
me: we do good things for our clients
10:40 PM
Brian: but still somewhat cryptic
me: yes it is
Brian: guess what song just popped up on my iTunes?
Eifel 65 - Blue
i'm blue da bo de
me: k, blue it is
Brian: blue it is
me: lol
same phrase typed at exact same time
Brian: ha, yeah
10:41 PM
good stuff
me: blue it is
and GODO
we are making progress
Brian: go do blue
me: like Duke
Brian: then we have to make up what blue "means"
i love duke
me: Be loving, understanding, and empathetic
Brian: godo is kind of like wojo
we can do an interview with wojo
10:42 PM
me: post it to the website
Brian: yeah
me: GODO: We try to live BLUE and Be Loving, Understanding, and Empathetic
it's our social justice ecology mission
10:43 PM
Brian: copy and paste it somewhere
me: k, emergence is a fantastic thing
tinkering factors for the invisible
GODO is born
Brian: yes it is
its great
me: see what megan thinks
Brian: just go do good things
me: its simple
10:44 PM
yet sophisticated
Brian: yes, and opens itself to lots of good logo options
10:45 PM
me: the sky is the limit
i am going to copy and paste this conversation
keep it for the records
Brian: good call
10:46 PM
me: its the GODO way; just doing good things
lol
Brian: i love it
me: people will pronounce it many ways too
Brian: yes, thats good
me: which gives it spice
Brian: and then we can say...well, we say it this way, but say whatever you want
10:47 PM
me: yeah, they can personalize it
GODO is a platform
Brian: and we can do personal profiles of what people go do
GODOtutoring
GODOwriting
GODOtreeplanting
10:48 PM
me: i like how GODOactivity looks
good marketing there
GODOcommunityservice
GODOyourfavoriteexercises
GODOevolutionaryfitness
10:49 PM
this is tremendous
light at the end of the tunnel, lol
10:59 PM
Brian: almost there
Brian: i wonder how australia's wiki-government is working
havent read anything lately
11:00 PM
me: we can put something on our website about it
track its progress
GODOwikigovernment
Brian: haha, yeah
me: this is great
the capital letters next to lower case type appeals aesthetically
11:01 PM
aesthetics are important
11:04 PM
Brian: GODOfreevoluntaryreading
haha, yeah
11:05 PM
me: nice
GoDo EvolutionaryFitness
Brian: yup...and we can have the little adapted logos that go with everything
11:07 PM
me: yet individualizeable
GoDo = universal
activity = personalize
11:09 PM
me: there ya go
Brian: great company
me: emergence, bottom-up design in action
empower the people to make GODOgoodthings part of their everyday life
GODOgoodthings
that will be a central one
Brian: yes it will
11:10 PM
web-man step #1
hopefully soon
me: i bet people would come up with some pretty neat GODO"enter your personal thing here" statements
11:11 PM
Brian: yah definitely
me: it all starts with the website
Brian: it has to
me: low-cost startup
reach broadest audience
benefit from randomness
Brian: the whole world
me: people stumbling upon the website
GODOstochastictinkeringandexperimenting
11:12 PM
... viatrialanderrorsolutionsearching
Brian: yup...no limit on the activity portion
the GODOgoodthings revolution has emerged
11:29 PM
Brian: we can write an essay about being in the top percentages of two good universities and being unemployed
but having the humility to deal with it, enjoy it, and let it spring into a new business
me: i think people would enjoy reading that one
Brian: yes, especially frustrated young people
11:32 PM
Brian: perfect
alright, i've gotta go work on best man speech
me: sounds good, good luck
11:33 PM
GODOyourbestman'sspeach
Brian: will do
talk to you manana after the idea has marinated
ciap
ciao
me: ciao
12:04 AM
me: see if you can print or save this conversation; i havent figured out how yet
Brian: do all of your chats archive
click the chats link on the left toolbar
12:05 AM
i dont archive mine so dont have it
12:06 AM
me: i have it right here
got it, thanks
we are good to go
Brian: good
12:10 AM
Brian: ok, sleepy time...good creation tonight
later
Without Gchat, GoDoGood would have remained invisible, lost in the darkness of an unknown cavern. With Gchat, GoDoGood emerged out-of-thin air via a simple spelling error: Brian misspelled "good" as "godo," and the rest is history. Gchat captured this spelling error (this is where the platform proves ever-important), and we then tinkered with "godo" conceptually and unveiled a new venture that we believe could add value to some people's lives. Visit www.go-do-good.com or www.go-do-good.blospot.com to get a glimpse of what we are doing (our main Web site is a draft and under construction, however). In the end, fragmented (bottom up) tinkering can be beneficial - we get diversified solution-searchers looking in all directions this way - but social scaffolding platforms with baseline architectural designs that bring these diversified tinkering efforts into contact create rich mediums for human interaction, idea sharing, and collaborative progress. Social scaffolding platforms create connecting points, capture results, and generate environments that support interdisciplinary inquiries. If we accept the humble limits of being human, in the light that Jerome Groopman describes in his essay on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, then I suspect that we could implement more Wiki-type tinkering frameworks (Google Docs, for instance) that enhance our abilities to efficiently and effectively discover novel solutions to the problems that we face as local animals inhabiting an increasingly global world. Human creativity flourishes if nourished in the right ecological manners.
In the meantime, search in your local environments for OTM cheap health options (to tinker with) like Ancestral Fitness that potentially boast high ROIs with limited downside risks. To jump start this process, here is another cheap health option from NNT (thanks to Navanit's lead) that features Nassim discussing interesting points on happiness, stoicism, and little tricks to deal with randomness (remember: be human):
Nassim Taleb and David Shaywitz recently published an insightful essay in Financial Times, "Drug research needs serendipity," (read here, thanks to Dave Lull) that captured the contemporary, humble limits of drug research:
In response to this reality, thinking (meditating / reflecting) about real-world options is a worthwhile endeavor, in general. My heroes and friends Navanit Arakeri, Nassim Taleb, and Art De Vany understand the sterile options and instruments that we discuss in finance - puts and calls (read here), etc. - but these perceptive thinkers' novel and far-reaching insights emerge when they venture into discussion of real-world options via their reflective efforts to better understand (or expose the limits to our understanding of) our world's unique, evolving ecology - trying to understand what makes us happy and achieve optimal performance, for instance (see Navanit's terrific "Arcsine Discounting" essay here).
When we open our minds to the cheap real-world options perspective, tinkering rises to the surface as a process that we must investigate, try to poke holes in (as skeptical empiricism and Popperian science demands), and then understand in the context of the searching versus acting paradox. Nassim Taleb's next book is said to be titled Tinkering for a good reason, I suspect.
Amidst a flurry of excellent posts, Navanit Arakeri recently laid out an excellent operational framework for tinkering ( read here ), reaching the following important statement:
Execution frameworks are social scaffolding platforms that capture our tinkering endeavors (our body does this physiologically), allowing us to receive feedback and confront results and then scale up our actions if a positive Black Swan hits. Google, for example, provides Blogger as an execution framework that allows many aspiring essayists like myself to tinker stochastically with their thoughts and ideas, sharing them with the world along the way. The free tools and applications that Google provides to users free of charge ( read Chris Anderson's insights on "Freeconomics" here ) creates a bottom-up, cross-discipline tinkering platform for people from all walks of life across the globe to access. People need access to these types of social scaffolding tinkering platforms that support and enhance our actions, interactions, and discovery efforts (they speed up our "dot connecting" abilities immensely).
Clearly, when it comes to health options - the numerous choices and actions we make about our health; which, from a holistic ecology perspective, calls everything we do into question - we all have our own bodies to tinker with and experiment on, with some caution, of course. Seth Roberts understands self-experimentation and how to collect as many cheap health options as possible. Stochastic tinkering with diet, activity and sleep patterns, exercise habits, and lifestyle represents cheap health options possibilities that we could tinker with everyday to uncover the unknown: tinkering factors for the invisible in this health space, if we admit the limits to our knowledge and discard our top-down explanations (which are often self-limiting) about our health states.
For example, I see our upcoming book, Ancestral Fitness, which should be available for purchase any day on Amazon.com through www.ancestralfitness.com, as an important public health modality and a cheap health option that people could tinker with to see if this type of experimentation improves their health and wellness levels (the downside is clipped but the upside has much potential, I suspect). In fact, Bryan Appleyard, a stellar journalist, has done just that ( Nassim Taleb turned him onto Art DeVany - read Bryan's profile of NNT here ) and Bryan's empirical results (he is losing weight, looks younger, and feels great) speak for themselves: *Please read Bryan's exemplary profile in Times Online of Art DeVany, "The diet that really works," by clicking here (thanks to Dave Lull). This perspective is developed thoroughly in our book, published by Fractal Press. Minimally, Ancestral Fitness is an Out-of-The-Money (OTM) cheap health option (the price of the book is small, for example) that is worth a shot: who knows, you may just stumble upon health improvements and happiness along the way (I surely have). Daniel Gilbert stresses the importance of stumbling upon happiness, so stumbling within the Ancestral Fitness framework could prove fruitful in unexpectedly positive ways.
Sure, Ancestral Fitness represents one OTM cheap health option, but we need more social scaffolding platforms that equip people with tools and resources to tinker with and within in health domains. The MedPedia project, a recent innovative joint venture between Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, and Harvard appears to be this type of bottom-up, open-source tinkering endeavor:
MedPedia is an execution framework. We need execution frameworks; we are humans - be human. This type of collaborative effort (in light of Clay Shirky's thoughts) should, I suspect, benefit from the emergent properties that tinkering within execution frameworks elicits. Social scaffolding platforms of this flavor bolster information exchange by bringing fragmented stochastic knowledge-seeking efforts into contact, creating ripe grounds (and perhaps some sparks as well) for the emergence of novel connections, new insights, and never before imagined interrelationships, angles, and perspectives.
In the context of the searching versus acting paradox, tinkering appears to be "searching in action" - but an asymmetry exists before the unveiling of the unknown. Prior to an emergence from the envelope of serendipity, tinkering favors the searching side of the searching versus acting paradox; then, upon "connecting the dots" associated with a serendipitous discovery, acting on this opportunity shifts tinkering to the action side of the spectrum. Yet, even as you error toward action and move to take advantage of this opportunity, the unknown caverns continue to illuminate and thus the search never ends. Tinkering unites "thinking" and "doing" in this manner to maximize (entropy) exposure to the envelope of serendipity, but tinkering works best when you are "long on options" and "short on obligations" (here is Art DeVany's statement):
I suspect that NNT gravitates toward tinkering because it lies at the heart of searching for and acting on real-world options in a world that we do not understand - it is the entropy maximizing process (of the Le'vy walk variety) that maximizes the probability of uncovering the unknown unknowns (tinkering maximizes "stumbling" fitness). So, the prescription, in health and in other domains, would be to collect as many cheap options (limited transaction costs, considered OTM by others) as possible to maximize exposure to Nassim Taleb's envelope of serendipity.
However, in practice, transaction costs often limit our ability to engage a widely diversified cheap options portfolio. Diversification is key to OTM options since we do not know a priori which options will pay off - we admit our blindness to the future this way. So, clearly there exists a need for creating effective ways for people to discover cheap options and construct diversified portfolios that enhance the chances of positive Black Swan hits.
Interestingly, Don R. Swanson, an insightful information scientist (he formalized "Literature-based discovery" in biomedicine and beyond) and professor emeritus at University of Chicago, understands this need deeply. In a tremendous award speach, "On the Fragmentation of Knowledge, the Connection Explosion, and Assembling Other People's Ideas," Swanson frames this issue beautifully:
These points speak to what is called " Undiscovered Public Knowledge." I conceptualize social scaffolding platforms like MedPedia, Ancestral Fitness, or Ning as architectural frameworks that assist the "connection explosions" needed to advance our understanding of and our ability to operate within our increasingly complex and recursive world, turning over new leafs and previously undiscovered public knowledge along the way.
In the Google realm, Gmail and Gchat represent two such social scaffolding tools that have assisted my tinkering efforts. For instance, Navanit Arakeri and I have e-mail threads that, I suspect, could be leveraged into a book; a book that illustrates "tinkering about tinkering," utilizing Gmail as our "dot connecting" and searching / questioning / investigating space. Additionally, my latest venture, as hinted at in earlier posts, GoDoGood, emerged from a tinkering conversation in Gchat and represents a truly serendipitous discovery. Here are some snippets from that conversation with Brian Geremia, my good friend and GoDoGood co-founder, picked up midway into our chatting:
Without Gchat, GoDoGood would have remained invisible, lost in the darkness of an unknown cavern. With Gchat, GoDoGood emerged out-of-thin air via a simple spelling error: Brian misspelled "good" as "godo," and the rest is history. Gchat captured this spelling error (this is where the platform proves ever-important), and we then tinkered with "godo" conceptually and unveiled a new venture that we believe could add value to some people's lives. Visit www.go-do-good.com or www.go-do-good.blospot.com to get a glimpse of what we are doing (our main Web site is a draft and under construction, however).
In the end, fragmented (bottom up) tinkering can be beneficial - we get diversified solution-searchers looking in all directions this way - but social scaffolding platforms with baseline architectural designs that bring these diversified tinkering efforts into contact create rich mediums for human interaction, idea sharing, and collaborative progress. Social scaffolding platforms create connecting points, capture results, and generate environments that support interdisciplinary inquiries. If we accept the humble limits of being human, in the light that Jerome Groopman describes in his essay on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, then I suspect that we could implement more Wiki-type tinkering frameworks (Google Docs, for instance) that enhance our abilities to efficiently and effectively discover novel solutions to the problems that we face as local animals inhabiting an increasingly global world. Human creativity flourishes if nourished in the right ecological manners.
In the meantime, search in your local environments for OTM cheap health options (to tinker with) like Ancestral Fitness that potentially boast high ROIs with limited downside risks. To jump start this process, here is another cheap health option from NNT (thanks to Navanit's lead) that features Nassim discussing interesting points on happiness, stoicism, and little tricks to deal with randomness (remember: be human):
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/talebinthecity.htm