Democracy is having a hard time

Since the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021, some Americans have increasingly insisted that their country is not a democracy, but a republic. What’s the difference? Why is democracy having such a hard time at the moment and would randomly picking members of parliament help?



This video comes with a quiz which you can take here:

Did scientists get climate change wrong?

On my recent trip to the UK, I spoke with Tim Palmer about the uncertainty in climate predictions.

Capitalism is good for you

Most economists I know started out as physicists. Being a physicist myself of course means that the sample is biased, but still it serves to demonstrate the closeness of the two subjects.

The emergence of market economies in human society is almost a universal. Because markets are non-centralized, they can, and will, spontaneously arise. As of today, capitalism is the best mechanism we know to optimize the distribution of resources. We use it for one simple reason: It works.

A physicist cannot not see how similar the problem of distributing resources is to optimization problems in many-body systems, to equilibrium processes, to self-organized criticality. I know a lot of people loathe the idea that humans are just nodes in a network, tasked to exchange bits of information. But to first approximation that’s what we are.

I am not a free market enthusiast. Free markets work properly only if both consumers and producers rationally evaluate all available information, for example about the societal and environmental impacts of purchasing a product. This is a cognitive task we simply cannot, in practice, perform.

Therefore, while the theoretically most optimal solution would be that we act perfectly rational and exclusively rely on markets, in reality we use political systems as a shortcuts. Laws and regulations result in market inefficiencies, but they approximately take into account values that our sloppy purchase decisions neglect.

So far, so clear, or at least that’s what I thought. In the past months, however, I have repeatedly come across videos and opinion pieces that claim we must overthrow capitalism to save the world. Some examples:

• Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism.
• Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problem
• Capitalism will eat democracy 

These articles spread some misinformation that I want to briefly sort out. Even if my little blog touches the lives of only a few people each day, a drop in the ocean is still a drop. If you don’t understand how black holes emit radiation, that’s unfortunate, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t understand how capitalism works, that matters a big deal more.

First, the major reason we have problems with capitalism is that it does not work properly.

We know that markets fail under certain circumstances. Monopolies are one of them, and this is certainly a problem we see with social media. That markets do not automatically account for externalities is another reason, and this is the problem we see with environmental protection.

The biggest problem however is what I already mentioned above, that markets only work if consumers know what they are buying. Which brings me to another misunderstanding.

Second, capitalism isn’t about money.

No, really, it is not. Money is just a medium we exchange to reach an optimal configuration. It does not itself define what is optimal.

Markets optimize a quantity called “utility”. What is “utility” you ask? It is whatever is relevant to you. You may, for example, be willing to pay a somewhat higher price for a social media platform that does not spur the demise of democracy. This should, theoretically, give companies feedback about what customers want, leading the company to improve its products.

Why isn’t this working? It’s not working because we currently pay for most online services – think Facebook – by advertisements. The cost of producing the advertisements increases the price of the advertised product. With this arrangement there is no feedback from the consumer of the online service to the service provider itself.

Indeed, I suspect that Facebook prefers financing by ads exactly because this way they do not have to care about what users want. Now add on top that users do not actually know what they are getting into, and it isn’t hard to see why capitalism fails here: The self-correction of the market cannot work if consumers do not know what they get, and producers don’t get financial feedback about how well they meet consumers demand. And that’s leaving aside the monopoly problem.

In a functioning capitalist system, nothing prevents you from preferably buying products of companies that support your non-financial values, thereby letting producers know that that’s what you want. Or, if that’s too much thinking, vote a party that passes laws enforcing these values.

Third, capitalism just shows us who we are.

Have you given all your savings to charity today? You probably haven’t. Children are starving in Africa and birds are choking from plastic, but you are sitting on your savings. A bad, bad, person you are.

Guess what, you’re not alone.

Of course you save money not for the sake of having money, but because it offers safety, freedom, health, entertainment and, yes, also luxury to some extent. You do not donate all your money to charity because, face it, you value your future well-being higher than the lives of children you don’t know.

Economists call this “revealed preferences”. What we spend and do not spend our money on reveals what matters to us. Part of the backlash against capitalism that we now see is people who are inconsistent about their preferences. Or maybe they are just virtue-signalling because it’s fashionable.

Yes, limiting climate change is important, nod-nod. But if that means rising gas prices, then maybe it’s not all that important.

Complaining about capitalism will not resolve this tension. As I said in a recent blogpost, when it comes to climate change there are no simple solutions. It will hurt either way. And maybe the truth is that many of us just do not care all that much about future generations.

Capitalism, of course, cannot fix all our problems, even if it was working perfectly from tomorrow on. That’s because change takes time, and if we don’t have time, the only thing that will get human society to move quickly is a centralization of power.

Climate Change: There are no simple solutions

The Earth is warming. Human carbon-dioxide emissions are one of the major culprits. We have known this for a long time. But in the past two decades, evidence for global warming has become more noticeable on local levels, as with seasonal shifts, extreme weather events, declines in biodiversity and, depending on where you live, droughts. And it will get worse.

I would describe myself as risk-averse, future-oriented, and someone who worries easily. I don’t need to be convinced that we are not doing enough to mitigate the consequences of rising temperatures. Yet, I have become increasingly frustrated about the discussion of climate change in the media, which makes it look like the problem is to convince people that climate change is happening in the first place.

It is not. The problem is that we don’t know what to do about it, and even if we knew, we wouldn’t have the means to actually do it. And nothing whatsoever has changed about this since I learned of climate change in school, some time in the 1980s. Gluing yourself to a train will not create the policies and the institutions we would need to implement them.

A good example for this bizarre problem-denial is Greta Thunberg, here speaking to a crowd of about 10,000 people in Helsinki: “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change.”

Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can “solve the climate crisis”. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change. pic.twitter.com/Twioq1pmfZ

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) October 23, 2018

I do not blame Greta Thunberg for being naïve. She’s a child, and she even admits to being naïve. When I was a teenager, I thought much the same, so who am I to judge her. But adults should know better than that. Yet, here we have Bill Nye who delivers his variant of “all we need to do is wake up”:

Still don’t think we should act on climate change? Ask @BillNye the science guy...pic.twitter.com/KYIvRpvxdC

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) May 14, 2019

But the fact that climate change happens does not tell us what, if anything, to do about it. And scientists really should know better than to mix “is” with “ought.”

As I said, I am future-oriented and risk-averse. These are my personal values. You may not share them. Maybe you don’t give a shit about what’s going to happen 50 years from now, and if that’s your opinion, then that’s your opinion. Maybe you are willing to accept the risk that a steep temperature rise will result in famine, social unrest, and diseases that eradicate some billion people. Or maybe you even think that getting rid of some billion humans, mostly in the developing world, would not be a bad thing. I don’t share these opinions, but there is nothing factually wrong with them.

Economists have a long story to tell about our responsibility to the coming generations. How much we value it depends on what is called the “future discount rate”, which quantifies, basically, the relevance we assign to what will happen in the future. This evaluation usually focuses on measures like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and comes down to the question how much GDP per year we should invest today to prevent declines of GDP in the future. (If you are familiar with the literature, this is the Stern-Nordhaus debate over carbon pricing.)

The are many problems with that kind of argument. For starters, the GDP itself doesn’t tell you all that much about the well-being of people. It’s also somewhat unclear where to get the future discount rate. Economists have devised some methods to extract it from interest rates and the like. That is something you may or may not find reasonable. Also, we don’t know, just by discounting the future, how to factor in uncertainties about what is going to happen. Eg, one line of argument is that really what we should do is not look for a solution that is economically optimal, but one that minimizes the risk of a major ecological instability because then all bets are off.

Then there is the question what policies to pursue and how to implement them. A market-based solution, eg by putting a price on carbon, would be most likely to lead to an economically optimal strategy. The problem is, however, that this would necessitate an equilibrium readjustment of the global market which is unlikely to happen fast enough, even if we could get it going yesterday. And that’s leaving aside that equilibrium theory has its flaws, which is to say that economists aren’t exactly known for making great predictions.

Either way you turn it, resources that we spend today on limiting carbon-dioxide emissions are resources we cannot spend on something else, resources that will not go to education, research, social welfare, infrastructure. Oh, and they will also not go into that next larger particle collider.

 The world has two or maybe three decades of cheap fossil fuels left. Not using those makes our lives harder, regardless of how much we subsidize renewables. That, too, is a fact. Any sincere discussion about climate change should acknowledge it. It’s a difficult situation and there are no simple solutions.

The trouble with Facebook and what it has in common with scientific publishing.

[In case you’d rather read than listen, a full transcript follows below.]

Today, I want to talk about Facebook. Yes, Facebook, the social media website, I’m sure you have heard of them.

Facebook currently gets a lot of media attention. And not in a good way. That’s because not only has Facebook collected and passed on user-information without those user’s consent, it has also provided a platform for the organized spread of political misinformation, aka “fake news”.

I doubt you were surprised by this. It’s hardly a breakthrough insight that an almost monopoly on the filtering of information is bad for democracy. This is, after all, why we have freedom of the press written into the constitution: To prevent an information monopoly. And when it comes to the internet, this is a problem that scientists have written about at least for two decades.

Originally the worry of scientists, however, focused on search engines as news providers. This role, we now know, has been taken over by social media, but it’s the same problem: Some company’s algorithm comes to select what information users do and do not see prominently. And this way of selecting our information can dramatically affect our opinion.

A key paper on this problem is a 2003 article by three political scientists whocoined the term “Googlearchy”. They wrote back then:

“Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […]

We introduce a new term to describe the organizational structure we find: “googlearchy” –  the rule of the most heavily linked. We ultimately conclude that the structure of the Web funnels users to only a few heavily-linked sites in each political category.”

We have now become so used to this “rule of the most heavily linked” that we have stopped even complaining about it, though maybe we should now call it the “rule of the most heavily liked.”

But what these political scientists did not discuss back then, was that of course people would try to exploit these algorithms and then attempt to deliberately misinform others. So really the situation is worse now than they made it sound in 2003.  

Why am I telling you this? Because it occurred to me recently that the problem with Facebook’s omnipotent algorithm is very similar to a problem we see with scientific publishing. In scientific publishing, we also have a widely used technique for filtering information that is causing trouble. In this case, we filter which publications or authors we judge as promising.

For this filtering, it has become common to look at the number of citations that a paper receives. And this does cause problems, because the number of citations may be entirely disconnected from the real world impact of a research direction. The only thing the number of citations really demonstrates is popularity. Citations are a measure that’s as disconnected from scientific relevance as the number of likes is from the truth value of an article on Facebook.

Of course the two situations are different in some ways. For example on social media there is little tradition of quoting sources. This has the effect that a lot of outlets copy news from each other, and that it is extra hard to check the accuracy of a statement. Another difference is that social media has a much faster turnover-rate than scientific publications. This means on social media people don’t have a lot of time to think before they pass on information. But in both cases we have a problem caused by the near monopoly of a single algorithm.

Now, when it comes to scientific publishing, we have an obvious solution. The problem both with the dominance of a few filtering algorithms and with the possibility of gaming comes from users being unable to customize the filtering algorithm. So with scientific publishing, just make it easier for scientists to use other ways to evaluate research works. This is the idea behind our website SciMeter.org.

The major reason that most scientists presently use the number of citations, or the number of publications, or the number of publications in journals with high impact factor, to decide what counts as “good science” is that these numbers are information they can easily access, while other numbers are not. It adds to this that when it comes to measures like the journal impact factor, no one really knows how it’s calculated.

Likewise, the problem with Facebook’s algorithm is that no one knows how it works, and it can’t be customized. If it was possible for users to customize what information they see, gaming would be much less of a problem. Well, needless to say, I am assuming here that the users’ customization would remain private information.

You may object that most users wouldn’t want to deal with the details, but this isn’t really necessary. It is sufficient if a small group of people generates templates that users can then chose from.

Let me give you a concrete example. I use Facebook mostly to share and discuss science news and to stay in touch with people I have on my “Close friends” list. I don’t want political news from Facebook, I am not interested in the social lives of people I don’t know, and if I want entertainment, I look for that elsewhere.

However, other people use Facebook entirely differently. Some spend a lot of time with groups, use it to organize events, look for distraction, or, I don’t know, to share cooking recipes, whatever. But right now, Facebook offers very little options to customize your news feed to suit your personal interests. The best you can do, really, is to sort people onto lists. But this is cumbersome and solves only some aspects of the sorting-problem.

So, I think an easy way to solve at least some of the problems with Facebook would be to allow a third-party plug to sort your news-feed. This would give users more control and also relieve Facebook of some responsibility.

Mark Zuckerberg once declared his motto clearly: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Well, maybe it’s time to break Facebook’s dominance over information filtering.

Update: Now with Italian subtitles. Click on “CC” in the YouTube tool bar to turn on subtitles. Switch language in settings/gear icon.

Dear Mr. President

Two weeks ago, Barak Obama visited Stockholm and spent half an hour or so on the KTH campus. Since Nordita is officially part of KTH, safety regulations went through the employee email list weeks in advance. Luckily I was away the great day. I was told later the Swedes were so successful scaring people off the impending traffic disaster that Stockholm was basically deserted during the President’s visit and elks were seen chewing licorice in front of the royal palace.

I flew back to Stockholm the following day. Lufthansa online check-in suffered an interesting technical glitch and produced a boarding pass for seat 1A business class. Yeah to software bugs. As I was sitting in the business class with leg space I don’t actually need (I’m not socialist, just short), I couldn’t help but wonder what, if I had 15 minutes, would I tell the President. Hell, what would you tell the man?

From the German perspective, the American political system looks strange, which is ironic given the history of Germany’s representative democracy. The strong role of the US President in particular and the focus on individuals rather than programs in general is the most obvious difference. Stranger even is that the political landscape in America is in practice a two party system. This has created a situation where, instead of different parties offering a spectrum of alternatives, the two parties morph to fit their potential clientele, or make it fit. And, needless to say, the wealthy part of the clientele lobbies for their interests, an influence that’s amplified by the almost complete lack of labor unions.

Yes, from a German perspective it seems strange that a country which values democracy so dearly practices it so badly. But then I’m not a political scientist, I just hope I know enough to put my two X in the right places on Sunday.

During the years I spent overseas, Academic America seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of Obama’s Democratic Party. I recall many seminars in which an US American speaker would make jokes or political statements that clearly showed they were confident the majority of the audience would sympathize with their political views. And they were right of course. (Provided the audience was mostly American. These jokes don’t fly in Europe.) But during the last year I sense this support base faltering as the conditions for scientific research gradually worsen under Obama’s watch.

There are many things the man must shoulder and I’m sure they weigh heavily. Among all these weighty boulders, there’s a tiny little pebble that made me lose my faith the USA will overcome its anti-scientific congestion. It came with this headline:

Congress Cuts Political Science Research Grants

“Last month [March 2013], President Obama signed 600 pages of legislation to keep the government from shutting down, while shutting down much of the nation’s [political science] studies. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) secured Democrats’ approval for an amendment to the bill that eliminates the National Science Foundation’s political science studies, except those the NSF director deems relevant to national security or U.S. economic interests.”

By now, the NSF has cancelled the political-science grant cycle.

Dear Mr. President, how could you have let that happen?

Every major problem that this planet presently faces is primarily about organizing human life and negotiating complex problems with uncertain solutions. The existing political, social, and economic systems are insufficient to deal with these problems, and scientific knowledge is insufficiently integrated into decision making procedures. As societies and economies have become more interconnected, political institutions have not kept pace. The technology is there, the knowledge how to use it isn’t. This realization lies behind initiatives like the FuturITC and attempts to predict political unrest. Yes, that’s political science for you.

Today riots are organized on twitter, wars are led on YouTube, and election results predicted on online futures markets. Nobody knows what this means for the future of democracy. Do Facebook and Twitter help spread Democracy and Human Rights? Are the White House Petitions are good idea or do they just create noise? Yes, that’s political science for you. We all have too much information and not the faintest idea how to intelligently aggregate it and use it within our political systems. We need a scientific approach to institutional design. Trial and error is an archaic procedure that takes time that we don’t have, and errors have become too costly.

Just the situation to scrape funding for the political sciences, I see.

I am trying to imagine Angela Merkel suspends all governmental funding for political science. Germany is the land of the poets and thinker, the land of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels and Weber. Besides inventing compound nouns, Germans are also good with solidarity, strikes, and nudity. The Americans made very sure each German receives a solid education about the merits of democracy. I can see the outrage. I see the ‘68 students, now at retirement age, clogging the streets, “academic freedom” scrawled over their flopping breasts. “Censorship!” they shout. “Thoughts are free” they sing. Then the President of the United States calls. “Angie,” he says “Wtf?”

The great advantage of the American political system over the German one is however that the US President can only serve two terms, while the German chancellor can run till he or she drops dead.

Dear Mr President: I hope you tried a handful of the salty licorice that the Swedes chew down by the pound. Because that’d make you as sick as I feel when I read what American scientists must endure these days.

Americans prefer Swedish wealth distribution

I was a little bit depressed about the recent US midterm election. Not so much because of the outcome. I wasn't too convinced of Obama when he was elected. The way his campaign went, I was afraid he'd turn out to be a populist and change his course every time some interest group's wishes made it into the headlines. But I severely underestimated the man. In contrast to most of the commentators on the outcome of the midterm election, he is evidently well aware that halfway through his term he's in a lose-lose situation anyway. Either he keeps his course and is being criticized for not being a miracle healer, or he'd listen to the masses and claim he changed his mind and be criticized for that. Whether one thinks his political agenda is promising or not, in that situation at least he's aiming at doing the right thing in the course of history, rather than doing the right thing to be re-elected. In January, Obama said:

"I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president."

A rare case of a politician with a backbone. Given that, I can't say I was surprised by the election outcome. No, what depressed me was the lacking substance of arguments. The American nation strikes me as similar to a group of overweight people who at their first weight watchers meeting chants "Yes, we can" and cheer upon change. But when change is staring back from the dinner plate, and change on the scale leaves waiting, they realize change doesn't come easy. And the vast majority of them still doesn't know the difference between social democracy and socialism. Clearly, the world would be a better place if everybody would read my blog ;-)

Anyway, to some extend I don't care very much how the Americans organize their society. I think they're not fully using their potential, and find that a shame, but after all it's their decision what they put on their plates and shovel down their throats while I, well, I live in Sweden. And that brings me to one of the most amusing studies I've come across lately:

Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time
By Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, PDF here

Michael Norton, from Harvard Business School, and his colleague Dan Ariely, from Duke University, asked a random sample of US citizens what wealth distribution they think is ideal. In 2005, they surveyed 5,522 people. Asked for their voting pattern in the 2004 election, the sample reproduced well the actual voting result. The survey respondents were given a definition for wealth so there was no ambiguity. Then they were shown three pie charts. Each slice of the pie represents 20% of the population, from the poorest to the wealthiest. The size of the slice is the wealth owned by this group. One pie showed a perfectly equal distribution. The other two pies were unlabeled but showed the distribution of the USA and that of Sweden.

The result: 47% of Americans preferred the Swedish wealth distribution, followed by 43% for the equal distribution, while only 10% found ideal the actual distribution. Just focusing on the Swedish vs the US distribution, 92% of Americans prefer the Swedish one over their own.

[Source: Fig 1 of this paper]
It turns out that these preferences depend only very little on demographic factors like gender or whether they voted for Bush or Kerry in 2004. Considered how convinced Americans tend to be about their own greatness, this result seems somewhat puzzling. However, keep in mind that these pie charts were unlabeled in the questionnaire. The replies makes sense if you come to the next question. In that, survey respondents were asked first to guess the wealth distribution in the USA, and then chose what distribution they would find ideal. It turns out that most Americans severely underestimate the rich-poor gap in their own country, and in addition would prefer a distribution that is even more equal than their erroneous estimate. This is shown in the figure below.

[Source: Fig 3 of this paper]
Again, note how little both the estimate as well as the ideal depends on demographic factors.

This result fits quite well with previous studies which had shown that Americans overestimate the social mobility in their own country. They're still dreaming the American dream, despite its evident conflict with reality.

After I stopped laughing I started wondering what this result really means. The survey respondents are very clearly considering the present wealth distribution as not ideal. However, the wealth distribution is a fairly abstract observable. Would you have been able to accurately estimate it? My own estimate would have been considerably closer to the actual one than the average guess, but that's only because I happen to have seen the relevant numbers before.

Norton and Ariely had a good reason to ask these questions: The philosopher John Rawls proposed that justice should be identified by taking a position behind a "veil of ignorance." For that, you're supposed to imagine that you decide on a particular question - for example the distribution of wealth - and only after you've decided you'll be randomly assigned a position within that society you've just created. I've never been really convinced by that approach. It's much too heady, or call it utopian. As a matter of fact, people don't live behind a veil of ignorance and their own social status does influence their decisions. Also, it isn't only the ideal (size 4!) that's relevant but also the way to get there (diet). In fact, the way is typically the question that's more immediate and thus more prominent on people's mind.

If one just asks people what they think is ideal, you're probing their ideas about what they believe the wealth distribution means, not necessarily what they actually want. To get to the relevant point, one would have to ask for factors that actually affect their life, or are such that they have some basis to judge on. Social mobility for example, the possibilities that are open for them and their children, is a relevant factor, and it is of course related to the wealth distribution. Or, instead of asking for the distribution of wealth, maybe better ask if they think somebody's work is really worth a 1000 times more than somebody else's. Another factor, and the one that bothers me most, is that wealth means power and it means influence. How much influence on your life do you want a small group of people to have? And at which point does this run into conflict with democratic decision making?

Bottomline: This is an interesting study. It explains a lot of things about the US American attitude towards their country's income distribution and the sometimes puzzling disconnect between their wish for change on the one hand and on the other hand their unwillingness to really take the necessary steps: they believe the steps are smaller than they in fact are. However, it's not a result that should have any relevance for policy decisions because the question asked is impractical. One doesn't chose a wealth distribution first and then gets randomly assigned a place in that society. It's not how things work in real life, and it's just replacing one dream with another one. There's always the risk the dream might later turn out to be a nightmare.

Aside: Dan Ariely, one of the authors of the study, writes a blog. He commented on his own paper here.

Oh-oo-oh, you think you're special

I once joked that when my blood pressure is too low I go and buy the Time Magazine. It works better than medication and with less side-effects. Now that I live in Sweden however, the Time Magazine doesn't stare at me on the register in every supermarket. Since Stefan cares about my well-being, he now has a subscription, special offer, EUR 20 for one year. And thus, on our road trip from Frankfurt back to Stockholm I browsed through one of the recent issues. So I can now offer you a particularly nice example for American arrogance self-confidence.

In the March 11 issue, Andres Martinez suggests one of "the most important trends of the new decade" in his article

The Next American Century

The "important trend" is, in a nutshell, that the world will become a Global America:

"The fact that the rest of the world is becoming more like us — in ways good and bad — underscores the extent to which we are living in an American century, even as it erodes, by definition, the notion of American exceptionalism."

He derives this development towards The Global America from a thought experiment:

"If you bring together teenagers from Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Argentina — to pick a random foursome — what binds these kids together in some kind of community is ..."

Let's see, what could it be that binds these teenagers together? They like Pizza? They have skin problems? They think their parents are embarrassing? No, it's actually...

"... American culture: the music, the Hollywood fare, the electronic games, Google, American consumer brands."

Well, to be honest I don't know very much about the Nigerian music scene, but I'm not sure what this is supposed to say except that some countries can't really afford to invest millions in "producing" stars. So let's for a better comparison have a look at this week's German top 10 single charts. The singer's nationalities are in order from 1 to 10: German, German, Belgian, German, American, British, French, American, Virgin Island (I guess that's still British?), American. 3 out of 10 is not bad, but maybe Martinez should take a trip to Germany or France and turn on a radio to get a realistic perspective on the international music scene.

Sure, I am willing to admit that he is right to a large extend, American music and movies are wide spread. And yes, we all use Google and it's an American company. But that's the past. How is that predictive for what the next century will look like?

Well, Martinez isn't done with his insightful analysis. He further lets the reader know:

"As anyone raised in a different country will tell you, two of the strongest impressions someone has on arriving in the U.S. are 1) what a great country this seems to be, and 2) what a mess it must be, judging by the tenor of news coverage and political discourse."

rotfl, the strongest impression that I had after moving to the USA was 1) what a mess this country is and 2) how ridiculous it is that the news coverage desperately tries to protect the American "exceptionalism." Martinez' article is an excellent example of 2).

As you can guess I know a lot of people who are European (mostly German) who spent a postdoc in the USA. They generally share my impression. Let's face it: American food either sucks or is overpriced. American highways are countrywide in a pity state. Americans seem to have no clue how to do a decent plumbing work or how to achieve a functioning canalization. They will instead always tell you there's something specifically weird with their weather. For example, it might rain. Or the sun might shine. Windows in America either don't open or, if you managed to open them, they won't close. Since the windows and doors don't really close, naturally there always has to be a heating or air conditioning running. And let's not even start with issues like education, poverty or health insurance. I think you get the point. The only thing that's really exceptional about Americans is how they still manage to believe they are exceptional.

But you know what? This lifestyle based on low quality standards and constant maintenance has one big advantage: it increases the GDP that Martinez is so proud about. Yes, that's right, every time you wreck a wheel in a pothole, every time your child gets sick, every time you call the plumber, every time you call customer service, every time something breaks and has to be fixed, every time something can't be fixed and has to be replaced, the GDP goes up.

Luckily, unlike what Martinez writes, Europe is not turning into a second America. We actually have working public transportation over here. According to the World Economic Forum the most tech-friendly country is Sweden. Past 2001 the "Top Intelligent Community" has not been in the USA (and in 2001 it was NYC, hardly representative for the nation). If you go to the dentist next time, look at the label of the instruments because chances are the equipment is made in Germany. In the biggest part of Europe same-sex-partnerships are legal. In Germany, prostitution is legal, so is abortion. How long will it take for Americans to crawl out of the 20th century? And Shania Twain, who wrote the line that is the title to this blogpost, well, she's Canadian.

Okay. Now that I'm done with Martinez' ridiculous essay let me get this straight. I'm not a nationalist. There are indeed many things about America that I like very much. Ahead of all, there's the entrepreneurial spirit which is taken on in the, infinitely better, article "In Defense of Failure" by Megan McArdle in the same issue of Time Magazine. If you have a start-up idea, if you want to try something new, if you want to be crazy: America is the place to go, not Europe. There are many things Europe could learn from America, ahead of all maybe how to establish a proper "union," and there are things America could learn from Europe, ahead of all maybe how to build proper highways. The same probably holds for other parts of the world. We can all learn from each other, and this exchange is not a one-way process.

I don't think we'll globally converge on the same values and tastes any time soon, and I don't think this would be desirable either. There are some issues we have to converge on in an increasingly interconnected planet, and we have to work on that. But it is extremely unlikely that the outcome will be The Global America.

"You're Tarzan!
Captain Kirk maybe.
John Wayne.
Whatever!
That don't impress me much!"

~Shania Twain, That don't impress me much

She figures there's way to go

The European Commission just published "She Figures 2009" (download PDF here), a summary of data covering aspects of gender inequality in the European Union. The statistics used in this publication are drawn from Eurostat, the European Commission services’ official data source and correspondents in various member countries.

I didn't read the full 160 pages, but here's two interesting figures. The below shows the percentage of men (yellow) and women (purple) in different stages of scientific career in science and engineering. From the left to the right the career level increases. The figure summarizes data from 2002 and 2006. While at the entry level there's 31% women (up from 30% in 2002), and at the PhD level the percentage has increased to 36% (up from 33% in 2002), at the level of tenured faculty there's only 11% left (up from 8% in 2002).



[Click to enlarge]

The other interesting figure is the composition of boards that are responsible for making decisions for scientific research directions such as scientific commissions, R&D commissions, councils, committees and foundations, academy assemblies etc (they are listed in the report in detail). The figure below shows the percentage of woman in these boards by country. From left (highest percentage) to right (lowest) we have Sweden, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Denmark, Bulgaria, Iceland, Italy, Slovenia, France. The last five are the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Israel, Poland, Luxembourg. The dark pink bars are the average values for several groups of countries in the EU.



[Click to enlarge]

Overall I got the impression the situation is improving, but very hesitantly so. Way to go Europe, way to go.

The Nature of Laws

It occurred to me I haven't bothered you with my random thoughts for a while, so here's a topic that keeps coming back to me: The consistency of laws. In mathematics it's the whole point, in physics it's a guiding principle, but when it comes to our societies' legal system, the consistency of laws is considerably more murky.

As a teenager, I had a period when I was convinced that direct democracy would be the answer to all flaws in our democratic system. I also thought that the reason why we do not have a direct democracies is that it was in practice unfeasible. After all, Germany has some more inhabitants than Switzerland. With the advent of the internet, so I thought, direct democracy should eventually become practicable - globally! - and lead to flourishing of democracy.

I was really excited about that prospect for some while, until it occurred to me that there are other good reasons why a representative democracy is preferable, reasons that our, your, and their funding fathers thought about, and that a teenager needed some time to figure. It is ironic that a decade later I found the excitement about direct democracy echoing back at me from the internet, lacking exactly the awareness of the merits of representation that I had been lacking.

One of these merits of a representative democracy is what Jaron Lanier referred to very aptly as “low-pass filtering.” Opinions are easily influenced by all kinds of events and peripheral news, and in times when hypes pass around the globe in next-to-no time these opinions are in addition strongly amplified. One couldn't base any decent policy on such a constantly changing background of opinions.

Another problem that is that even without the high-frequency noise, people's opinions are inconsistent. He was a strong defender of freedom of speech, untill that blogpost proclaimed his product is a big piece of shit. Nuclear power plants are great, unless they are in your backyard. And abortion is evil until your teenage daughter dies in labor.

These are several variations of inconsistencies between laws on different level. The constitution (basic law!) is on the most fundamental level. It's what defines your nation. These laws are, for good reasons, very hard to modify. But they are also very general and with that quite vague when it comes to concrete applications. In other cases they are just outdated and require new interpretations; a good example is property rights in times of file sharing. But the point is that all laws more concrete for specific situations should be in agreement, read: consistent with, the fundamental laws.

If law was maths, one could derive everything from the basic axioms, but of course that's not strictly possible. One of the main reasons is that eventually our legal system is based on words that lack precise definitions and interpretations that change with time and context. But still, measures have to be taken to make sure no laws exist that are in conflict with each other, and that means in particular no newly passed law should be in conflict with the agreed-upon basic laws. Otherwise the legal system is inconsistent.

One problem of that sort that has made a lot of headlines in the last years is gay marriage in the USA. If your country grants equal rights to all its citizens they better be all allowed to marry their partners. It's not a question of public opinion, it a question of consistency with the constitution and a case for the constitutional court. As we've seen, the public opinion is indeed, sadly enough, inconsistent. But that's only my opinion of course, and I'm not the constitutional court.

Another problem of that sort, the one that triggered this post, is Switzerland's ban on the building of minarets in a recent referendum. Yes, that is correct. Nevermind religious freedom. But hey, the Swiss Justice Minister says the decision is “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.” No? Then what is it? Let's see:

“Supporters of a ban claimed that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.”

The catholic church is of course a great example for democracy. But more importantly, banning minarets cures the symptoms, not the disease. It's a pointless, stupid, ineffective and constitutionally doubtful decision that should never have been allowed as referendum to begin with. If you have problems with certain practices a religion exercises, it's them that you should ban, not their architecture. I'm glad Switzerland is not in the European Union.

Now that I've voiced my outrage, let me say the underlying question is of course a tricky one. What questions is it that you can pose to a group (crowd, electorate) and get a useful answer? James Surowiecki in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” has summarized many research results that have targeted this question. But many questions still remain open and, what is worse, none of these results seem yet to have made it into application.

Knowing which questions one can pose to a group under which circumstances and expect a useful answer is important for our lives on many levels. Just take the question whether a group of successful scientists is able to select the most promising young researchers. It's not that I actually doubt it, what bothers me more is that we don't know. We are still operating by trial and error, and this is one of the reasons why I say we need to finish the scientific revolution.

Since I'm afraid these thoughts have been a little too random and I've lost the one or the other or the other or the other reader, let me wrap up: Direct democracy is not always the best option, and inappropriate use can result in inconsistencies. If you want intelligent decision making - in a referendum, in your committee, in your company - you better first figure out under which circumstances which way of aggregating opinions has proved to be successful.

“Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”

~Oscar Wilde

The Future of Rationality

It occurred to me I haven't bothered you with my random thoughts for a while. Not that I had lack thereof, they just possibly were a little too random to make it into written word.

I wrote this sentence with my toes, just to amuse you.

So here's a thought I've been pushing around for a while. Are we on the path towards more or less rationality? The last several hundred years were marked by increased rationality: the rise and success of the scientific method, the Age of Enlightenment, the decline of religion and superstition, and so on. But you look around these days it seems that increasingly more people seem to be scared by the prospect. If you extrapolate that trend where will it lead us? Maybe there are just things we don't want to know. (See also The Right Not to Know).

It seems to me there's a sentiment in the air that we need more "spirituality," more "magic," more "wonders" in our increasingly technological world based on mechanical engineering and computer algorithms. Some people want to "reinvent the sacred," others emphazise "emotional intelligence" or "the power of thinking without thinking." Blink.

While I think some of these arguments aren't very insightful, there are two aspects I'm sympathetic to.

For one, I think there is at any one time a limit to what humans can possibly know, possibly even a limit to what we can ever know and we should be more aware of that. That means for example instead of being scared by gaps in our knowledge it or discarding them as a failure of scientists we should recognize the relevance of acknowledging and dealing with uncertainty, incomplete knowledge and 'unknown unknowns,' as well as be vary of The Illusion of Knowledge.

But besides that putting an emphasis on rationality neglects other cognitive abilities we have. For example, many of us have on some occasion met somebody who, through their experience, have developed a strong intuition for what might or might not work. Even though they might not be able to come up with any precise "rational" argument, they have a feeling for what seems right or doesn't. Granted, they might be mistaken, but more often then not you'll benefit from listening to them. One of the most important gifts, so I believe, of the human mind is to make what Plato called on some occasion at this blog an 'intuitive leap' into the unknown. Without such leaps our space of discoveries would be strongly limited. Rationality isn't always the path towards progress. (While not many insightful points were raised in the aftermath of the publication of Lee's book, I found it very interesting what Joe Polchinski had to say on the role of rigor in physics.)

Now let me step away from the human brain and consider instead of a system of neurons the systems that govern our every day lives, like for example our political systems. They have some "rational" processes to deal with input and to decide on actions. They also have some emergency shortcuts resembling unconscious reactions. If somebody throws a pillow at you, you'll raise your arms and close your eyes without a long deliberation of whether or not that's a good thing to do. If somebody throws a bomb on your territory you don't want to get stuck in endless discussions about what to do.

But what about intuitions and emotions? Where is the space for them?

Let us take as an example the credit crisis. It was not that people who were actively involved in building up the problem were completely unconcerned. They just had no way to channel their uncanny feelings. From a transcript of a radio broadcast "This American Life" (audio, pdf transcript, via):

mortgage broker: ...it was unbelievable... my boss was in the business for 25 years. He hated those loans. He hated them and used to rant and say, “It makes me sick to my stomach the kind of loans that we do.”

Wall St. banker: ...No income no asset loans. That's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us. We're hoping you don't lie. Tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we won't verify? We’re setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back when and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened ... we did it because everyone else was doing it.

Italics added. My favourite part though was this

Mike Garner: Yeah, and loan officers would have an accountant they could call up and say “Can you write a statement saying a truck driver can make this much money?” Then the next one, came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse.

Alex Blumberg: Actually that pulse thing. Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Well, so much about rationality. The point is it's not that people didn't feel there was something wrong. It was just that the system itself had no way to address that feeling. The negative feedback it could have provided went nowhere. 

Or take the academic system, one of my pet topics as you know. It's not that people think it's all well and great. In fact, they can tell you all kinds of things that don't work well and some can complain seeming endlessly. But the system itself has no way to address these concerns. The only way to improve it is external intervention, which however usually only takes place once things go really wrong.

It's like you go out with a guy and even though you don't know exactly what's wrong, he makes you feel really awkward. But instead of just stop dating him you'd go see a shrink who looks up in a book what you're supposed to do. That's about what's wrong with our political systems.

So what's the future of rationality? I think we'll need to find its proper place.

Aside: I believe that many of the arguments we have about rationality are based on a lacking definition. For example if I intend to buy a new gadget I will typically look at the first few offers and pick the one I like best, finito. Sure, if I had looked a little harder or a little longer I might have saved some bucks. But frankly I'd rather pay more than spending an infinite amount of time with customer reviews. I think this is perfectly rational. Others might disagree. (And now encode that in your utility function.) That is to exemplify that rationality might not easily be objectively quantifiable.

Book review: "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama

In case anybody recalls, there was a presidential election going on last year. One couldn't open a newspaper, switch on the radio, go for a coffee without hearing "Obamaobamaobamabama." The absolutely last thing I wanted was to read a book by this person. But then it hunted me down in form a Christmas gift from my mother, "The Audacity of Hope," in my mailbox.

Okay, so I read it. After all, the guy is now president and he smiles friendly from the cover. What is there to say? It's an entirely flawless book. Neatly organized into 9 chapters -- Republicans and Democrats, Values, Our Constitution, Politics, Opportunity, Faith, Race, The World Beyond our Borders, Family -- covering every sector a politician should have an opinion on, sprinkled with anecdotes, personal stories and reflections, it is an easy read, entertaining and interesting. The book is so good it is disgusting. One has to hate it. It feels as if one thousand PR agents went over it and sanded out all edges. Doesn't the guy have any vices, doesn't he have any regrets, didn't he make any mistakes, doesn't he have anything provocative to say at all? Can somebody be so smoothly intellectual and considerate and indeed be real?

Here is the only upsetting sentence I could find: "[T]here will be times when we must again play the role of the world's reluctant sheriff." Unfortunately, this sentence is only outrageous when quoted out of context since the rest of the chapter provides a perfectly reasonably 21st century view on foreign politics. The guy is neither a dumb pacifist nor eager to convert the rest of the world to Americanism.

What I liked best about the book has however nothing do to with it largely overlapping with my political views. No, it is that it communicates that politics is done by humans for humans, that arguments can be approached from an intellectual rather than a personal point of view, and that one can disagree with somebody without declaring that person an enemy. And it describes how the media by and large grossly distorts this process, amplifying and exaggerating differences to everybody's disadvantage.

Though the book is generally optimistic (well, what did you expect?) it is cautious about the status of our democracies, especially the influence of wealth and the functionality of the political system itself. You shouldn't be surprised I pick out these two points, readers of this blog know they are among my pet topics. Obama writes:

"[T]oday's constitutional arguments can't be separated from politics. But there's more than just outcomes at stake in our current debates about the Constitution and the proper role of the courts. We're also arguing about how to argue -- the means, in a big, crowded, noisy democracy, of settling our disputes peacefully. We want to get our way, but most of us also recognize the need for consistency, predictability, and coherence. We want the rules governing our democracy to be fair."

Which nicely highlights the necessity to ensure our political systems work optimally. One could call that meta-politics. It is unfortunately a topic that doesn't receive enough attention though one should think the need to occasionally update procedures that are centuries old would be apparent. He further points out:

"[W]e must test our ideals, visions, and values against the realities of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded or replaced by new ideals, sharper vision, deeper values."

If I translate that into my usual, considerably less eloquent, style: We must ensure our systems allow not only for variation, but also evaluation and following adaption so we remain able to learn and improve. The world is changing and we have to change with it.

About the devastating backlash it can have on our democracies when influence is weighted by wealth, Obama writes "[T]hose who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify [...] subvert the very idea of democracy." Well said. Unfortunately, he remains vague on what to do about it.

A general criticism is that with his elaborations on all these topics he doesn't set any priorities. It is all well and fine to have high goals and visions about everything, but where to start? What is it that he finds most important? If you were president, what were the first thing you'd do? Also, the chapter about religion strikes me as somewhat odd, but then it seems to be a big deal in the USA. And one issue I found completely missing is what appears funny about American elections to most outside observers: it is essentially a two party system. I don't think this is a good status and a point that would have merited a sentence or two.

Altogether, I guess the book is as good as a book from a politician can get. I find it neither particularly inspiring nor insightful, but I learned something about American history and politics. If this was an Amazon review I'd give four stars. One lacking because of leaving me nothing to complain about.

PS: Thanks, mom :-)

Political Ideologies

I just came across these interesting survey results on “The State of American Political Ideology, 2009,” which documents the findings of a study by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress about political values and beliefs in America.

According to their tastefully red-white-blue website decorated with stars and stripes, the Center for American Progress is “a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.” They have hijacked the words “progress” and “innovation” and explain their “work builds upon progressive ideals put forth by such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King,” and “draw from the great social movements of the 20th century—from labor rights and worker safety, to civil rights and women's suffrage” to “translate those values into new ideas and action firmly rooted in the economic and political realities of the 21st century.” That's just so you know what page we are on.

The results in the report are based on 1,400 interviews with adults 18 years or older. They have put political ideologies on a sliding scale from 0 to 400 with 0 being the most conservative position on the continuum and 400 being the most progressive (according to their report “an innovative categorization of ideology”), and calculated the score from responses to 40 statements about government and society.

They find a mean ideological score of 209.5. Interestingly, Americans are apparently most progressive about the role of government and least progressive on cultural and social values. Ideas about economics and international affairs fall in-between. Less surprisingly for what is essentially a two-party system in which every party is trying to adapt to the popular opinion of the day, they find there really is no “far right” or “far left,” but rather “far center-right” and “far center-left.” Do I need to add that a one-dimensional sliding scale with a pre-chosen notion of “progressive” for political, economical as well as social questions doesn't quite accommodate plurality either?

As a PS to my recent post on The American Dream, let me quote these replies in regard to the present economic situation

“The economic recession is clearly affecting many Americans. A full two-thirds of Americans (67%) report that their family’s income is falling behind the cost of living, with 23% saying their income is staying even and only 6% saying it is going up faster than the cost of living. The belief that family income is failing to keep pace with rising costs is uniformly held across ideological, partisan, race, and income lines.

Despite the harsh climate, many Americans continue to believe that they have achieved or will achieve their own understanding of the American Dream in their lifetime. More than one-third of Americans (34 %) say they have already achieved the American Dream and another 41 %believe that they will achieve it in their lifetime. Roughly one-fifth of Americans (18 %) say they will not achieve the American Dream in their lifetime.”

You can read the full report here, and find out your own score here. Readers of this blog won't be surprised that apparently I'm “extremely progressive”




Humor me and leave your score in the comments.

Change You Can Believe In

“We will restore science to its rightful place.”

~Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

I have a complaint.

It is impossible these days to live in North America and not be optimistic about the changes the new President of the United States will hopefully initiate, especially for science. These are not easy times for somebody who has pessimism as substantial ingredients in her bloodstream. Psychologists call it “preventive pessimism.” It's essential for my survival. And every time somebody mocks me about it I point out the world needs pessimists. There's too few of us. And we're constantly afraid we'll die out.

Currently your local blogging pessimist is wondering what the heck “restoring science to its rightful place” means. Where is the “rightful place” of science? Who decides that? And how is science supposed to get there? Most people seem to assume the statement is an announcement of financial support towards governmental funding bodies. The optimist is excited. The pessimist points out money alone isn't sufficient, it also matters how it is used. And there are problems one just can't solve with money.

The Academic System

I have written many times on the problems with the present academic system, for example here and here. The central point is, as far as the internal organization is concerned, that the individual incentive structure of the academic system does not presently result in a desirable macro behavior - that would be an efficient use of time, human and financial resources. Instead, the present system rewards behavior that does not necessarily have anything to do with good scientific research. The reasons for this are most importantly:

• The use of simplified measures for scientific success that, once institutionalized, turn into goals researchers pursue for their own sake (like a high number of publications or citations).


• Career obstacles for those who want to change their field of research which creates incentives to stick with a topic even if returns diminish and other areas lack personnel.


• Neglecting to pay attention to sociological effects in large and growing communities which can result in severe misjudgement of promises, hypes, fashion trends, and bubbles of nothing.

This is how far the internal organization is concerned.

Being a scientist is not an easy task. It requires ignoring personal preferences, likes and dislikes and to just focus on the evidence. It is a process that can very easily be skewed by any sort of external pressure, may that be financial pressure, peer pressure or time pressure. Regarding the external organization one further has to worry that public pressure negatively affects researchers objectivity.

The academic “ivory tower” allowed research to flourish in an environment free from such pressures. This protection has now mostly crumbled away, which goes on the expenses of scientific integrity. This is what needs to be restored. It's not that researchers are not aware their interests are being affected, and they don't notice they have to waste time with playing silly games to remain in the market. It's that the problem is a system failure that disables its own repair because spending time on that repair also would be against the individual interest.

Restoring Science

“We will increase support for high-risk, high-payoff research portfolios at our science agencies.”

~Barack Obama, Sciencedebate 2008

Sounds good, doesn't it? (Or at least it did before we learned that some high-risk, high-payoff folks wrecked our financial system.) But what does that mean? Who decides how much risk is good for science? Will we get central planning? Will somebody compute it?

I think all such prescriptions are temporary fixes, and will eventually cause new problems. Today you might call for more risk-taking, tomorrow you'll be complaining about too much risk-taking. The only way to address these questions is to allow the system to self-optimize. That means in particular, give scientists enough freedom to chose which path they think leads to progress - within the constraints given by the overall direction the society set. Just trust these scientists. Their individual goal is knowledge discovery, and if you just let them follow these goals that will get you exactly what you want - progress.

In more detail:

1. Scientific progress is a long-term project. Running it with people on short-term contracts creates an internal disagreement between individual interest and the long-term goals, especially when combined with high competitive pressure. Scientists will be forced to focus on projects that fit into a short time frame, and they will have to watch out for letters of recommendation necessary for their next job search.
   
   To solve the problem, create decent middle-class-jobs for scientists. These don't have to be high-profile jobs, but they shouldn't be crappy short-term contracts either. People who chose academia aren't there because they want to become rich. They are there because they love science. Just give them a sensible job, one in which they can continue if they do well, one in which they can pursue long-term projects and don't have to be concerned about shifts in the public opinion or the approval of their peers.
   
   In short: stop the trend of exporting more and more research to postdocs on 2 year contracts.



2. Avoid that researchers can get stuck in a field and make sure they can change into a different one without too large personal drawbacks. Unless one makes sure this is the case one will create groups of people who self-support their own work and colleagues working on similar projects to increase their own career chances.
   
   To solve the problem, don't require extensive prior experience in a very narrow field of expertise to obtain funding. Instead, look at the applicant's ability to carry out research projects in general. Further, support people who want to learn the basics of a new field, and give them a grace period in which they will likely not be highly productive.



3. Appropriately reward community services - they keep science healthy. That might be eg peer review, public outreach or writing review articles - even if no original research. All these are activities we need, but they are currently underappreciated.



4. Restore autonomy of researchers and research institutions. Reduce financial dependence and personal dependence of researchers. That means in particular, don't require researchers to get in grants to obtain tenure - it exports power to funding agencies. Don't assign researchers to supervisors or specific topics unless absolutely necessary. Instead, promote independence to support originality.



5. Especially in basic research, don't require scientists to plan ahead for several years, this is completely off reality. A five year plan for a research project can become redundant within the first month. A common practice is thus to file in proposals about projects that are already finished or almost finished because then one can write what funding agencies like to hear: lots of details already with results. That's one of the games people have learned to play.
   
   How to solve the problem: orient proposal requirements on the reality of the research field, and fund researchers who have demonstrated the ability to carry out research projects without asking for detailed plans. Have a little faith and don't overplan.

The balance between high-risk and conservative research, and between specialization and interdisciplinarity will vary from field to field, and from one decade to the next. Just make sure the system is able to accommodate these changing needs and can achieve a dynamical balance.

Bottomline

“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”

~Stewart Brand

If you want change you can believe in, free scientific research from the constraints of an outdated academic system.

Socialism and Social Democracy

For no particular reason I just want to clarify a confusion that I have encountered fairly often, that's what the difference is between Socialism and Social Democracy. Socialism aims to achieve a more just society by putting the means of production in the hands of the government, it is against privatization (though not necessarily for common ownership, that's communism). That has a priori nothing to do with planned economy in case you wonder.

Social Democracy means you acknowledge that the free market fails to automatically take into account certain goals your society might value, that are most often those based on solidarity and long-term plans. For example environmental protection, help for medical emergencies, social help etc. An unregulated free market is merciless on the sick, the old, the poor, or the unlucky, simply everybody who fails to contribute directly to economic growth for whatever reason, e.g. by having too many kids. Social democracy includes the human wish not to see your neighbors starve the moment they can no longer be productive, and recognizes that one day you might be in that same situation.

The way it is typically done is to take away money from those who have plenty, e.g. by taxes, and give it to those who need it to survive. Yes, that means redistribution of wealth. You do that backed up by a democratic system to ensure this redistribution is considered just by the majority of people and not in conflict with more fundamental laws. Needless to say, the people who have the big money will complain about it. Keep in mind they made their money in a system that is considered unjust by the majority of people living around them. The outcome is a social market economy, that is, one that combines a capitalist mode of production with the belief that society should protect all its members from economic and social need.

Justice is however something that is perceived very different depending on what culture one has grown up in. I for example find it quite amusing that Americans like to talk about Germany as a 'social welfare' state as if that was something undesirable. As far as I am concerned, I am very relieved that if I am in Germany I know all my neighbors do have a health insurance, I know all my friends have an unemployment insurance, and I know they can live from social help should it be necessary. Of course there's parties in Germany who are more left or right leaning, more or less liberal, more or less conservative, but overall the idea of a social market economy is more generally accepted.

Choose what you want. That's what democracy is good for.

The Lightcone Institute

After you have stared at the link to the Lightcone Institute in my sidebar for a year or so, I think the time has come to tell you what it is about. It's what I spend my time on that is not occupied by physics - which is typically not much, and presently not any, but has added up over the last decade to make this a more concrete project which managed to attract a moderate but existent amount of interest. It's my way to make constructive use of my desperation about the state of the world, and an antidote to the nagging feeling that what I work on isn't particularly useful for the vast majority of people on this planet.

Sure, I can give you a long speech about the purpose and importance of fundamental research and how it is interesting for the broader public, not to mention that it is where my personal interests are. But it remains a fact that investing into fundamental research is a luxury of societies at a very advanced level. And if I open a newspaper after a day sitting through seminars it tells me the world really has other problems than axion-dilaton coset SL(2,R)/SO(2) 7-branes or similar fun. Sometimes more, sometimes less so. Presently more so.

But hey, as I told you previously, to me science is more than a profession, to me science is a worldview. And thus my interpretation of the problems we are currently facing on a global scale is a lack of scientific method, which has resulted in an erosion of trust in the systems that govern our lives. We are failing to update these systems and their institutions so they be able to deal with our increasingly complex global problems.

Finishing the Scientific Revolution

Science is as old as mankind. We analyze the world we observe to better understand it, and to make our lives more pleasant. The scientific method has proven to be extremely useful to achieve this; this method being nothing but inventing a model for the world based on previous knowledge, and testing how well it works. If it works well or at least better than available models, we call that progress and use it for further examinations. If not, we discard it and look for something better. At least that's the idea. A lot can be said about how this so straight-forwardly sounding manner has worked out during our history in less straight-forward ways, but to say the very least, it has worked tremendously well for the natural sciences.

Science in its organized form has taken off in the 16th and 17th century, and has changed our world dramatically. This period in our history during which we saw a tremendous amount of progress in the fields astronomy, physics, biology, medicine and chemistry is often called the “Scientific Revolution” - a revolution of thought rather than a revolution of governance that kick-started the development of technologies and established scientific research as one of the most important drivers of progress in our societies. We find during this period the names of great thinkers like Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Franklin and Descartes, to only mention a few.

Today we study as sophisticated areas as neuroscience, nanotechnics, immunology, microbiology or endocrinology. Don't worry if you don't know the latter, I didn't know it either, I Googled it and found it's the study of the glands and hormones of the body. And then there are of course the computer sciences, which are possibly the most impressive outcome of the technological developments altogether and the advancements of computing power itself has had a large impact on the possibilities in scientific research.

I'm not a historian and this isn't an essay about the history of science. I'm just telling you that because this revolution doesn't include the social sciences. Most notably, academic research in the fields that we would today call sociology, politics and economy are still waiting to obtain the attention they deserve. In these areas, the dark middle ages of trial and error in applications have lasted some more centuries, with the situation only slowly changing today. The reason for this is not hard to find. Understanding political or social systems is much more complicated than understanding the motion of planets, since the latter is a system that can very easily be simplified to a model that is computable even by hand. In the political and social sciences, arguments are lead mostly in the narrative, and have for long been detached from what actually was happening in politics. Neither did much of these studies reach the broad public for most of it is not part of the standard school education, as is physics, biology and chemistry.

It is only now, in the 21st century, that the advances have gotten far enough so we begin to understand some aspects of systems as complex as for example our global economy. In fact, the economical system is probably the best investigated case that falls into this category, for there is money to make there. The political system lags behind. This lag is is crucial because it is needed to deal with the progress driven by the natural sciences. What we are running into is a dangerous imbalance in which new technologies change our societies faster than the governing institutions can deal with these changes.

Results from the natural sciences are today very well integrated into our daily lives. Think about architecture, engineering, drug tests, health checks, and numerous investigations behind every single consume item, from your car to canned food.

In the last decades one also finds increasingly more examples for a similar integration of the social sciences. Think about architecture again, but take into account the question what group of people the building will host and what amount of interactivity you want to create. A lot of thought has been put into this for example with PI's building. Or think about city planning in general. Economic modeling too has become quite common, though it is tainted by ideological believes and lacks scientific rigor. And then there are the cases where governments commission models to better understand the outcome of planned regulations, like various forms of carbon taxes. These are all cases where one sees some first glimpse of a development I am sure will speed up rapidly in the coming years: an increasing application of insights from the social sciences to our daily lives, in a more organized manner.

And after four centuries, it is really about time to finish the scientific revolution.

Reestablish Trust

And why is this necessary? It is necessary because we simply are no longer able to deal with the problems we are facing. Just look at the present economic crisis. If you stop for a moment trying to find somebody to blame, then the problem comes down to:

1. Lack of understanding how the system works, i.e. studies that would have been necessary are missing.


2. Paying more attention to ideology than to scientific argumentation, i.e. failure acknowledge the importance of objectivity.


3. Failure of our political system to incorporate knowledge in a timely manner.

You can say the same with regard to the question why climate change is so slow to be addressed. You can say the same about lots of other outstanding problems, may that be the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, water shortages, or even your country's inability to come to any conclusion of how to address coming energy scarcity. These are processes that happen, but they happen excruciatingly slow and are hindered by unnecessary rhetoric and psychological games.

Is it really surprising then that many people have lost trust in what politicians say? Is it really surprising that we are now facing several years of aftermath of a economic crisis because of lacking faith in this system?

The conclusion that I draw from this is that the most important thing we need is a solid basis for arguments, and a way to integrate won insights. We need to improve the systems we are operating in, the systems that are meant to allow us to live together with a minimum amount of friction and a maximum amount of progress.

I neither believe that human behaviour is predictable, nor do I think the goal can be to replace human decisions with 'scientifically correct' decisions - this is plain nonsense. What I think however is possible, and necessary, is to make sure decisions can be reached and incorporated fast and easily. One should make a clear distinction here between opinion and the process to reach and implement a decision from opinions. What I am talking about is to set up the system, based on scientific insights, to provide a better environment for those living within it to pursue individual goals without being hindered by outdated institutions.

Or, in short, make sure the system can correct its own mistakes.

The Lightcone Institute

So that's what the institute is about. It is about bridging the gap between the natural, the social, and the computer sciences to initiate this change. And since it is a change in which the scientific community plays a pivotal role, one can't do it without addressing the problems of the academic system itself. The problems of the academic system are in many ways reflections of the larger problems we see in our societies: We have a system that is hindering progress, and knowledge about this dysfunctionality is not incorporated. The system is outdated and unable to correct itself.

You see the above discussed points reflected in the four pillars of the Institute's research. There is the interdisciplinary research to make these connections between the different areas of science, there is the basic research to provide the fundamental pieces that might be missing, there is researching research to address the role of the scientific community. And then there is the essential public outreach to get the hopefully won insights to where they needs to be. The latter point is meant to include communication to the public, as well as to private, academic, and governmental institutions.

You will find that on the website the areas of research are populated with some possible research topics that fall into these categories, like Social-Ecological Systems, Network Science, or the Future of Scientific Publishing.

As to the operation of the Institute, it is a directed research in that the Institute has a clearly defined mission that studies should be dedicated to. Here are the mission statements:

• The Institute's research is to be beneficial and relevant for society.


• The research is focused on interdisciplinary work between the natural and social sciences, fundamental research, and the sociology of science.


• The Institute aims to strengthen the public outreach of the scientific enterprise and actively communicate its research endeavors.


• The Institute will collaborate closely with political institutions, businesses and academia.

All that's missing is money and people.

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance to keep pace with the times.”

~Thomas Jefferson

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