Just imagine what the number of synthetic pheromone users worldwide must have done in the years since 2001… and clearly when it comes to discovery there is some kind of Metcalfe’s effect at work. Value of the user base goes up according to n(n-1)? You can see it in the forum…
Yes.. now we have YouPorn… metcalfian pornography servers that are putting the New Adult business out of business which had previously put the Old Adult business out of business… here’s the twist though… factual knowledge and related betterments are going exponential or hyper-exponential… while emotional, cultural, self evolutionary processes are degrading on many fronts… will the one in possession of extrordinary social skills have a “minority asset” that gives a distinct competitive advantage over the merely technical ?
I like Tyler Cowen’s thoughts on this. Although tech/globalisation creates potential for shared more uniform mcculture, it also allows individuals to participate in geographically far-removed cultures.
So is this forum and some others like it (in different domains) an indication of reorganisation of paths to emotional, cultural and self evolutionary growth, rather than their deterioration? True, you can’t develop better body consciousness by reading about it on the internet - but you can learn of such a concept and use that knowledge to organise your life differently/better in meatspace.
These virtual communities have a lot in common with the 18th century coffee houses where much of the modern world was hatched over sumptuous quantities of caffeine…
Here’s a tangential thought… the Old World had endemic water borne diseases (cholera, typhoid fever, etc..) that could be defeated by alcohol… thus the rise of beer culture… people who drank high proof ales, lagers, and other swills were less prone to early death… so some have surmised that the euro/anglo world prior to the mid 19th century was basically one of perpetual drunkenness… which well could have put a cognitive skew on society as a whole…
The late 18th century showed a fascinating pharmacological transformation in what people ingested… in a word, mankind discovered alkaloids… and quickly learned how to concentrate them…
Think of the shopping list of previously rare or exotic alkaloids that moved into common obtainability:
caffeine
quinine
opioids
nicotine (not sure if nicotine is technically an alkaloid, think it is)
theophylline/theobromine (from cacao or xocolotl if you’re mesoamerican)and a few other oddities… hasish, atropine (belladonna), reserpine, etc…
Wow! In a flash, thanks to improved trade and nascent chemistry new social enclaves came into being, caffeine culture was the first amped up, status indifferent, “internet cafe” sort of place where ideas would be energetically exchanged.. it must have been a shocking, incomprehensible change from the prior generations drunk-and-drunker social norms…
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You Can’t Predict Who Will Change The World
Nassim Nicholas Taleb 10.15.07, 6:00 PM ET Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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http://images.forbes.com/media/2007/10/future/indexPic.gif The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be Crowdsourcing Prediction Coalition of the Clueless Paid To Predict Can’t Predict A Black Swan The History of the Future Great Books About The Future Billionaire Science Projects Where’s My Video Phone? Fiction: Michael Bagnulo | Max Barry | Cory Doctorow | Warren Ellis | Lowell Yaeger Video:Futurist James Canton Interviews: David Brin | Stewart Brand | Esther Dyson | Nicholas Negroponte | Paul Saffo | Stephen Wolfram Quiz:Can You Predict The Future?
Before the discovery of Australia, Europeans thought that all swans were white, and it would have been considered completely unreasonable to imagine swans of any other color. The first sighting of a black swan in Australia, where black swans are, in fact, rather common, shattered that notion. The moral of this story is that there are exceptions out there, hidden away from our eyes and imagination, waiting to be discovered by complete accident. What I call a “Black Swan” is an exceptional unpredictable event that, unlike the bird, carries a huge impact.
It’s impossible to predict who will change the world, because major changes are Black Swans, the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society’s winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans, to be exposed to them, to recognize them when they show up and to rigorously exploit them.
Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for.
It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design.
If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things “by accident,” outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research. What academia seems more masterful at is public relations and fund-raising.
This is good news–for some. Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor and consider the following puzzle. Whenever you hear a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “unintellectual,” “uneducated” and “poor in math,” because, unlike European schooling, American education is not based on equation drills and memorization.
Yet the person making these statements will likely be addicted to his iPod, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and using Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his Intel-based PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. If old enough, he might also be using Viagra.
America’s primary export, it appears, is trial and error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. Trial and error has error in it; and most top-down traditional rational and academic environments do not like the fallibility of “error” and the embarrassment of not quite knowing where they’re going. The U.S. fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam-takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie.
The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge. This environment also attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners like this author.
Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas–that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people’s ideas.
Let us go one step further. It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don’t know it. We truly live under the illusion of order, believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past–but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.
The current discourse in economics, for example, is antiquated. American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows us to capture the randomness of the environment–the cheap Black Swans. This works not just because of competition, and even less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style cause-and-effect, and cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another.
Nor can they swallow the argument that it is not necessarily the better technology that wins, but rather, the luckiest one. And, sadly, even those who accept this fundamental uncertainty often fail to see that it is a good thing.
Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it–thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.
We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an applied statistician and derivatives trader-turned-philosopher, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.