Robert Paterson's Weblog

Are the Crowds really wise? No! Do good ideas emerge bottom up? No!

I am noting an emerging new dogma and it plays out like this:

" The best ideas emerge on their own from the Bottom UP" I think that this is utter rubbish.

I have just finished Bill Bryson's masterpiece - "A Short History of Nearly Everything" a history of our understanding of how the universe and life works. One thing leaped from the page.

Every truly novel and true idea of how life and the universe works emerged from the mind of ONE person - Without exception.

Thank you Hugh

Far from Bottom up, the masses would attack it. The Masses and the Establishment seem to have an alliance. The Church and the People loved the idea that the world was flat. The medical establishment of the 19th century and the people were certain that disease spread via smells. The education system and most people think that a degree is the best start in life. Governments, medicine and most of us think that more access to healthcare will keep us healthy. Employers and most people think that a job is the best way to be paid to do work.

What truly novel idea has emerged from the bottom up? I cannot find one - can you?

So how do really novel ideas emerge? And how do they become accepted? In many cases the established view was not giving the results. There was a weakness that meant that a novel idea might have a chance. So there is often an environment of weakness of the mainstream view. Such as today, most people know that the established view of how the economy works is not delivering for most people. They don't know what is better but there is an opening.

In some cases new tools allow for a new perspective. Galileo has a telescope that enables him to see what was hidden before. Pasteur uses a microscope to do the same. Pierre Mandlebrot uses a PC to see iteration and so patterns that could not be seen.

In some cases it was just an open mind. Florence Nightingale and Ignatz Semmelweiss noted that less people died if the hospital was clean. They knew nothing about germs. Semmelweiss ironically died of septicemia when he nicked himself with his scalpel!

Some like Newton and Einstein could see the new in their own mind. They could imagine the universe.

Others like Darwin allow ideas to gestate for decades.

Some like Madame Curie are brave and persistent. Her clothes and notebooks are too radioactive to handle now. 

All are single minded and all face huge push back. No Wisdom of Crowds here. No Bottom Up at all.

But there is a "crowd" of sorts. And I think it is the tiny crowd of early adopters. It was not until the 1860's that the masses immigrated to America. The people who went there in 1650 were a very different lot. The people out in the west in 1820 were not your average immigrant looking to have a farm. They are surely the real Pioneers. Only when they have made the new safe can the larger crowd come along. Only when they make it cheap enough too.

The "Big Crowd" are the allies of the establishment. They are both threatened by the new - especially if the new works! 

So are the Pioneers "Bottom Up"? I don't think so - for they too are laughed at. Yes you all are Social Media Gurus now - but I recall the odd looks back in 2001/2 from nearly everyone. No the Crowd was laughing at us. 

Do ideas emerge? Yes they do. But not from Crowds and not easily. It's evolution out there. The new ideas have to take on the power of the establishment and the crowd to win. I think they do this not by adding more and more research papers but by how their application affects people. It helps if the established idea is seen not to work very well. Is medicine stopping the rise in type 2 diabetes?

Navigators in the age of discovery found that Galileo's universe could help them navigate whereas the old system could not. Clean water in London saved millions of lives enabling London to grow and dominate the world. My friends are finding that cutting out grains is making them healthy. Their friends see them and at first laugh. But when they see the difference over time, they might stop laughing and try it. Once America had won independence and established a base of social rules etc, it started to attract attention.

I am finding that so long as the new remains only an idea, the power of the establishment and the crowd is enough to kill it. It seems that the application of the new idea is the key. It is when we see that real opportunities open up with its use that it has a chance.

So, for me, emergence is when the idea is here and when a start has been made to apply it and there is evidence that it works and offers something much better. For that to happen requires that pragmatic pioneers take up the torch and act upon the idea.

Nothing Bottom Up here at all. Revolutionaries yes. Small - Yes. But really Infection is the better model.

Really novel ideas also have to be proved in action to be fully understood as well. The very definition of complexity demands trial and error as things that are truly novel cannot be fully revealed by thought alone.

So why this post? It is time to do. Time to grow the new.

Evolution and Science - What is wrong with America?

Source: 

GOP Candidates seem to be in competition to out do each other in denying science. They are not stupid, they are appealing to a large demographic.

My America is made up of what I would label as "normal" people who can think and do think. So I am in the dark as to why so many Americans don't, are proud of their ignorance and who hate to be reminded about how the world really works. 

Help me understand - please

The re-birth of the rural? It's all about the Network!

Back in 1964 Arthur C Clarke made the prediction that cities in the future would not be like the Jetsons but be not needed anymore. Not needed because communication will have superseded their value as a social concentration of opportunity. Here is the video of him making this point. 

There is no doubt that since industrialization the city has been the magnet. And that our struggles to bring our kids home have been fruitless in the face of so much more opportunity in the city.

This is also why it is so gard to attract business to PEI. To be here on PEI as a major business means that you have to give up the essential concentration of key others in your world. Why would you do that?

Well you can of course if new forms of communication mean that there is no distance in effect.

What is also happening is that cities are starting to peak in terms of ROI. The costs of housing, school, child care, commuting are crushing now. AND the high paying secure job that pays for all of this will pay less and be less secure.

100 years ago 85% of people lived in rural settings. Now most of us live in intense urban settings. The reason for the shift was a shift in how the economy worked. If we can put together an intense local network, we can bring our kids home and a lot of other kids too.

So what kind of opportunity?

More on that later - but In short - giving the small and artisanal power by connecting them.

Irene - Fibonacci - The Geometry Of Nature

Source - Many people are now thankfully talking about "Self Organization" as our future. But underneath much of the clamour is a bias to an image of self organization that has not structure other than somehow we are all connected.

But Nature keeps reminding us that what appears the most chaotic on the surface ALWAYS has deep structure. Here we see this again withy Irene. On the ground, chaos. But see it from another perspective and we see the key math behind Natural Systems - the Fibonacci Sequence.

Sods Law - My Daughter + kids off to vacation in Maine this weekend

Rim vs Apple - Product vs Ecosystem - Lesson for Hurricanes too

Rim is doomed. Can you see why? A focus on a product and engineering cannot compete with an ecosystem.

The industrial era is also failing because it makes it focus on a specific product or service and then keeps engineering away to make it cost less while at the same time making the structural investment so high as to be impossible to exit. So we kill the newsroom and keep the paper. We have to milk the product until there is nothing left - HP and the PC.

What Steve Jobs and the team at Apple have done is to assemble an ecosystem. Much of the resources come freely to Apple and us the users from people who are attracted into playing in Steve's place. This is why Apple can trash a quite new product and so keep on the leading edge. They don't have to milk it until it is dead.

HP and Rim have only a spent business and nowhere to go now. But they also have all the costs that they added on to run those products.

The Ford Model (The 1903 Logo) was the winner for 100 years. It scaled vertically based on a product.

 

Apple and others who use the Ecosystem as the model, scale as a network and so can learn and adapt faster and with less risk. For to change the machine is to break it!

It's not just business but everything. We have made efficiency the key. So our schools get bigger and do worse. Government gets bigger and does less. Our striving for efficiency makes us more vulnerable. We rely on vulnerable food and energy systems in particular. Your community has no more than 3 days of food on hand. What if you lost power for 2 weeks? Think it can't happen?

As Hurricane Irene arrives on the East Coast, our entire approach to life will be tested. Machine models of high efficiency can fail when only a small part is taken down. We lost power here this week for 12 hours. Once again, we realized that every part of our lives depends on the system working. Everything came to a stop.

Time to question the model. 

In 1905, when Ford perfected his model, he created a a system that was applied to all parts of life. Is that our problem deep down> Is it time to look to the better alternative?

Hurricane Irene - going to be "Interesting!!"

Martyred SEAL's dog refuses to leave his side in final journey

 

Slain SEAL Tumilson's Labrador Hawkeye lies down next to the casket. Photo: The Daily Mail

An incredibly emotional scene has unfolded at the funeral of a US Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan earlier this month.

A photograph from Petty Officer Jon Tumilson’s ceremony shows how his dog refused to leave his master’s side even in his final journey.

Hawkeye, Tumilson’s Labrador retriever, is seen lying alongside the soldier’s casket in the Iowa ceremony that saw over 1500 people paying their respect to the fallen hero.

The former San Diego resident was killed when a Chinook helicopter with 29 other American service members on board crashed in Afghanistan on August 6. Read: The attack that killed the Navy SEALs

The photograph was taken by Tumilson’s cousin Lisa Pembleton who wanted to share the moment with the family and friends who could not attend the ceremony or were outside the hall.

via au.news.yahoo.com

No words

Steve Jobs and Jack Layton - Life and Death - An example

Millions are touched by the death of a politician and the impending death of a CEO. Why such feelings?

Is it because they have been so successful? Maybe. Is it how hard they fought for life? Maybe. But don't we all fight to live?

I think what stands out is that they have also accepted their death and used this certain knowledge to energise the life left to them. This is unusal for our culture. We are death deniers.

Many of us submit totally to the medical model and their hopes that we will get better. In so doing, we give up our own power and we give in to denial. We and those close to us cling to false hope and so falsehood becomes our epitaph.

We lose the chance to have the kind of real and authentic communication with those that are close to us. In our death we live a lie. We so deny ourselves and others the clarity of truth that can come from a death that is accepted. 

Jack Layton could not have been well in the last triumphant election. He made the choice to work for his country. Almost his last day, he was still working on what was best for his country. He used the threat and then the knowledge of his death as a source of energy. Energy for himself and for those around him. Now his death is a powerful energetic lingering resource for his party and for all of us who long and hope for a more just society. By living like this, he lives on in truth and so power.

Steve Jobs is still with us. But if we can see it, so can he. Charon attends closely. And what has he been doing this last 4 years? Making sure that the best possible succession would be in place. For me this is a sign of acceptance. A lesser man might have fallen into false hope and felt that somehow he would pull through and so not need to set up Apple so that his death would not be such a blow. We can only imagine what has been said in private and how Tim Cook and the senior team must themselves feel.

Steve Jobs has always been a truth speaker. In the last few years, his truth must have been like a sword. The Sword is the mythic icon for Truth. All vanity gone, the driving impulse to make his life man the most.

Surely we can all learn from this? By taking back our death as the motivator, we can take back our lives. By accepting no escape, we see the ups and downs in life in a better perspective. By working toward our end, we give our lives a shape and meaning and we give our true selves to those close to us.

There can surely be no greater gift. Here is a poem by Stephen Spender - who I think sums up the lives of Jobs and Layton so well:

I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. What is precious is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields See how these names are feted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

 

Twitter study casts doubts on ministers' post-riots plan

Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest.

A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.

Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger.

The unique database contains tweets about the riots sent throughout the disorder, which began in Tottenham, north London, on 6 August. It also reveals how extensively Twitter was used to co-ordinate a movement by citizens to clean the streets after the disorder. More than 206,000 tweets – 8% of the total – related to attempts to clean up the debris left by four nights of rioting and looting.

The home secretary, Theresa May, will meet representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Research in Motion, the Canada-based BlackBerry maker, on Thursday. The companies said they would warn ministers against introducing emergency measures that could usher in a new form of online censorship.

Amid a growing censorship row, government sources said the home secretary did not expect to discuss closing social networks, but wanted to explore what measures the companies could take to help contain future disorder, including how law enforcement agencies can use the sites more effectively.

David Cameron had previously indicated he would contemplate more restrictive measures. The day after the riots subsided, the prime minister told parliament the government was looking at banning people from using sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they were thought to be plotting criminal activity. Cameron said the government would do "whatever it takes" to restore order, adding that a review was under way to establish whether it would be right to attempt to prevent rioters from using social networks. He said he had also asked police if they needed new powers.

The Metropolitan police later revealed it had considered switching off social networks during the disorder in London, but had decided not to on legal advice.

The Guardian database, which contains riot-related tweets sent between midnight on 6 August – the day riots began in Tottenham – and 8pm on 17 August, will be subject to more advanced analysis in the coming weeks as part of an ongoing investigation into the riots.

via guardian.co.uk

THEY want control. THEY will use any reason to get it. Riots - Child Porn whatever - it's a ruse. Be careful