The Social Landscape

“The mind may be compared to a pan of water. If you place the pan on a level and do not jar it, then the heavy sediment will settle to the bottom and the clear water will collect on top, so that you can see your beard and eyebrows in it and examine the lines of your face.“ - Xunxi

In Freud's letter to Einstein in 1932, he said that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, and those that destroy and kill. The well known Love and Hate, attraction and repulsion. But he was quick to add that they are not good and evil, as "each is as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition." He went on: "If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent... All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote... All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society." 

I'm reflecting on these polar tendencies in the context of computational social science, the result of the work of people like Alan Turing, Judea Pearl, Alex Pentland, Molly Crocket, and Radhika Nagpal (to name but a few). Pentland, for example, focused on social networks in his paper on promoting cooperation. One might say that these researchers are trying to map out the "social landscape" (to contrast with Harris' book The Moral Landscape). In our society today, despite the current social media services available, there are many people with few meaningful connections to others, people who replace social ties with unhealthy addictions, and those who find the thrill of tearing down more appealing than the work of building up. 

In a society with many broken parts, we need to chart a clearer course toward healthy relationships. Freud made contributions in this direction (arguably some better than others). And researchers like Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that it takes a LOT of documentation from history and ethnography, not just formal models. Now, combining detailed data with new analytic tools has created the potential today to extend that effort still further. For example, Iyad Rahwan described an algorithmic social contract. 

In "Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History" author Thomas Rid devotes a chapter to one of the interesting and less well known results of the social upheaval that occurred in the '60s and '70s. The psychedelic counterculture incorporated cybernetic ideas, which profoundly affected people like Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) and influenced many who later became Silicon Valley innovators. Is there any similarity between John Lennon's idealistic lyrics in "Imagine" and a hypothetical algorithm for world peace, or as Freud said in his letter, "a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war?" They all draw their influences from the same cultural trends.

Cultural Genesis and Evolution

Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology states: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." I propose a parallel law: "Culture is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." There isn't perfect symmetry here though, since culture includes all of technology but technology doesn't include all of culture. The relationship between the two is very strong nonetheless, and will only increase. Technology has a growing influence on society, some aspects of which are obvious, others are nearly imperceptible, but all contribute to shaping our choices and actions. This much is generally well recognized. The implication is that if you control these influences, you can steer the future course of events in the direction of your choosing. This fact isn't as well appreciated, but the potential for direct and often invisible influence at the level of entire societies isn't new. Religious and political propaganda has been around for a very long time, directing cultural evolution into new directions. It was new technology that enabled the first revolution in agriculture about 12,500 years ago, directly precipitating large demographic and cultural shifts. What cultural changes will our new cognitive tools precipitate?

We need to reopen the conversation about what it means to create our culture. Who shapes it? Who benefits from it? Why? How could this change? As Noah Yuval Harari identified in his book Homo Deus, our accelerating ability to shape our environment, ourselves, and our societies brings with it a responsibility to do so intelligently. We are cultural engineers, whether we like it or not. We debate this today in the religious and political arenas, but there's more to it.

Cultural evolution is open-ended. Where could it go? If we wanted to take it somewhere, how would we do that? We know there are many wrong ways to intervene. The more interesting question is then: Is there a right way to intervene, to take our culture in the direction that leads toward human flourishing? It would have to be transparent, democratic, and meet the ethical standards society agrees upon. If such intervention is possible, what forms might it take? This is the exercise in generating scenarios. We've done that. The things we haven't done: 1) generate all the possible scenarios, 2) generate any single scenario in the fine-grained detail needed to show how it would impact the daily activities of any given individual. For example, if I wanted to ask "How would your scenario for a sustainable future impact my life?" Would I get a broad brush response, or would I get the details I'm most interested in? Would it reflect a new culture, and would I be receptive to making any changes if I knew what they were? For example, what are the socially sanctioned "default behaviors" when confronted by stress? What options does our culture first suggest? Find a distraction, consume food or entertainment, or respond constructively? A change in default behavior patterns that reflects a more constructive approach to stress and problem solving would require a society configured around supporting and encouraging these changes, not just in it's media and public discourse, but the social and material culture as well.

While it is true that many possible scenarios may lead to further entrenchment of bad policies, there remain open avenues to a more prosperous future. A lot of this comes down to communication and information availability, and so far, persuasion tactics based on the truth haven't been nearly as successful as those based on fictions. People need information that communicates the reality of their situation, and we haven't always succeeded there. From a social epidemiologist's point of view, many people are living in unhealthy conditions, in the broadest sense of that term. We need to move beyond the standard measurements of social outcomes and into measuring individual outcomes. The first question any voter asks is "How will this affect me?" That being the case, we should be able to tell them, and in as much detail as they want. If we can do that, then maybe we can also tell them how it will affect their community, region, state, international relations, and planetary health (within certain confidence levels). That's the direction in which we are headed. This is the potential of fine-grained data paired with counterfactual thinking to connect the dots in a new way, to reveal a more attractive future than the current local policies, operating procedures, and cultural context is able to permit.

A Beautiful Landscape: "taking no action contrary to nature," or "why wu wei?" (life, culture, aesthetics)

“Broad ways are extremely even, but people are fond of bypaths.” - TTC 53

Peter Corning said that "life is a process with a purpose" (teleonomy), and that purpose is our collective survival enterprise. Does our aesthetic sense mediate our relationship to that purpose? If Barry Lord was right that the kind of art you make and value reflects your culture, then will our culture reflect the kind of art we make and value? Seigen Ishin implied there are two kinds of people who see "mountains as mountains, and waters as waters," the naïve and the wise. And Karl Schroeder said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." All of this, taken together, would seem to reinforce the view that we should take nature as our inspiration.

It is interesting to note that, in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nagarjuna uses the theory of "dependent arising" (pratitya-samutpada) to demonstrate the futility of metaphysical speculations, that things are neither empty nor not empty. Contrast this with the concept of non-action (wu wei), which is used to demonstrate that one should act without undue effort and let nature take it's course. This illustrates the characteristic difference in emphasis between early philosophical thought in India and China, the first focusing on the nature of reality and knowledge, and the second concerning the nature of embodied processes and subjective awareness. As we consider our unfolding cultural evolution, indirectly influencing factors such as these will play a role. The aesthetic qualities rooted in our early past can help guide our future course toward a culture that prioritizes health and adaptability.

Natural, Artifactual, Coevolutionary: Algorithmic art, a narrow application of natural aesthetics to factors influencing our social landscape and evolution

“Die jetzt aufgezeigte Handlung ist thetisch, antithetisch und synthetisch zugleich." - Johann Fichte

Architecture is considered a form of art. Why? After all, a building needs to provide some kind of shelter from the elements, but it doesn't need to be especially beautiful. Yet we all admit that some buildings are better looking than others. In like manner, I want to suggest we should view the coding for computer algorithms like architecture. In their basic design, they are just a functional scaffolding, but because of the social settings in which they perform their function, and the end result, there are several examples of algorithms that I believe can be considered genuinely beautiful.

The first example is Origamizer, an algorithm created by Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi that can tell you how to fold a 2 dimensional sheet of paper into any 3 dimensional origami polyhedron. You read that right, ANY polyhedron. Want a paper rabbit? No problem. And now this algorithm is freely available as computer software.

The second example is Impartial Automatic Redistricting, an algorithm created by Brian Olson, a software engineer in Massachusetts, that can create "optimally compact" congressional districts in each state. Algorithm-based districts make so much intuitive sense that there are now many ways to generate them, like Wendy Cho's algorithm, which can do more or less the same thing.

Both of these examples may not be as iconic as the Taj Mahal in India or Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, but I think they qualify as the computer code equivalent of beautiful architecture. And they deserve wider recognition. Perhaps some day we'll have a phylogeny of algorithms, which will be displayed in museum collections or the equivalent of zoological gardens. Or maybe, in some sense (per Noah Harari) we already do.

Digital alter egos and the interpersonal utility comparison problem

"Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A digital alter ego exists for each one of us, and these are engaged in countless virtual evaluations, product pairings, and scenarios to optimize our engagement with other people, service providers, etc. These digital models can also aid in confronting global issues. Here's how they can help us realize our values and aesthetic sense. Also referred to as a "digital double," they explore many "what if" scenarios that we are prevented from investigating in full due to limited time and resources. Often only one of these scenarios can ever become real. The overwhelming majority of them are destined to become unrealized counterfactual possibilities. Think of them as the latent potential that we only have fleeting glimpses of in the normal course of our lives. Some of this potential is the ability to realize, more fully than we do today, an environmentally and ethically responsible way of life that conforms to our aesthetic aspirations.

At this point I hear several objections. "Since we already have an understanding of our goals for social and environmental health, why do we need a digital alter ego to suggest scenarios we already want? And furthermore, if our so-called "leader/decision-makers" can't hear the smartest among us (scientists) why would they listen to digital doubles?" Because, as Pedro Domingos and other AI researchers suggest, a digital double would know you better than anyone else. At the upper limit, it would know you better than you know yourself. Consequently, if it can’t persuade you, nobody can. By comparison, a scientist is hardly persuasive to those who are opposed, on ideological or tribalistic grounds, to the basic assumptions or conclusions offered. This is the big obstacle to effective science communication: bridging the empathy gap, solving the interpersonal utility comparison problem. A digital double could be the perfect device for finding a common language to unite groups at opposing ends of the political divide. By exploring all counterfactual possibilities, a better consensus can be reached, and in less time. With further iterations, these benefits become multiplicative. Here's Domingos describing this future trend that we are already witnessing:

"The next decade is going to be one of accelerating change. Today each company has a little model of you based on just the sliver of your data that it has access to. Netflix has a model to predict your movie tastes based on your movie ratings. Amazon has a model to predict what you're going to buy based on what you've done on their site and so on. But all these little models are quickly coalescing into bigger and bigger ones and soon you'll have a complete 360 degree model of you that learns from all your data and assists you with everything that you're doing in your life, from buying things and making appointments to finding a job or a mate. Our "digital alter egos" will be even more indispensable to us than our smartphones, and the world economy will revolve around them. 

"Our society will become a society of models. Everyone's models will be continually collaborating, competing, and negotiating in cyberspace to determine what happens in the real world. You click on the "find me a job" button on LinkedIn and your model instantly interviews for all the open positions that match your specs at the same time. Another copy of your model can be looking for a car for you, exhaustively researching all the options and haggling with the car dealer so you don't have to. If you're looking for a date your model will go on millions of dates with thousands of other people's models and select the most promising ones to try out in the real world. 

"But your data, and your model, have to be under your control, not owned by some third party that may have a conflict of interest. Sergey Brin says that Google wants to be the third half of your brain, but do you really want part of your brain constantly trying to show you ads? Probably not. We need something different, maybe something like data banks that store your data and use it on your behalf in the same way that regular banks store and invest your money, or maybe we need data unions to even the balance of power between us and large companies in the same way that labor unions even the balance of power between workers and their bosses. And you need to be able to interact with your model, setting its goals, asking it to justify suggestions, telling it where it went wrong and why. All very different from the black boxes that we have today. And finally, as a society we're going to have to decide what kind of society of models we want to have. What's allowed, what's not, how do we make sure that everyone benefits, how do we smooth the transition? There is lots to figure out. If we do there's a bright future where our lives will be happier and more productive. If we don't it'll be a huge missed opportunity. It's in our hands."

Our digital models, imitating our individual lives as they do, will reflect both the good and less desirable aspects of our human nature. But just as when we see our faces in a mirror we have the ability to style our appearance to our liking, when we see our behaviors reflected in these computational models, we will have the ability to reinforce those behaviors that promote our common good, and exert greater restraint over those that detract from it.

Partial list of terms:  
無常 (Japanese: mujō, Pali: anicca) meaning: transience, impermanence.
物の哀れ (Japanese: mononoaware) meaning: the pathos of things, an awareness of ephemerality. (Compare with lacrimae rerum, weltschmerz)
侘寂 (Japanese: wabisabi) meaning: traditional Japanese aesthetics - beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete."
無為 (Chinese: wúwéi, Japanese: mui) meaning: non-action
無為而無不為 or 无为而无不为 (Chinese: wúwéi ér wúbù wéi) meaning: "No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone." Tao Te Ching, chapter 37 and 48.
無用の用 (Japanese: muyonoyo) meaning: “without use's use." Zhuangzi's short parables about the use of the useless (Carpenter Shih, Crippled Shu)
もったいない (Japanese: mottainai) meaning: "Do not destroy (or lay waste to) that which is worthy."
道 (Chinese: tao) meaning: As a way of life, it denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and non-action (wúwéi). “Reversion is the action of Tao.”

Additional reading:
Semi-artificial Photosynthesis
Get Ready for your Digital Model by Pedro Domingos

Causality, Counterfactuals, and Possible Worlds

Source: xkcd

“A Causal Revolution has spread like a chain of firecrackers from one discipline to the next: epidemiology, psychology, genetics, ecology, climate science, and so on... With every passing year I see a greater and greater willingness among scientists to speak and write about causes and effects, not with apologies and downcast eyes but with confidence and assertiveness.”
- Judea Pearl, "The Book of Why" (2018)

"Philosophy begins in wonder."
- Socrates

The pursuit of a better future for ourselves and our children begins with asking "Can we do better?" and furthermore, "Could we have done better, had we acted differently?" To both these questions, we must answer in the affirmative. That being the case, I believe we cannot avoid following up with "Why?" According to Judea Pearl, the prototypical "Why?" question is actually a counterfactual question in disguise.

People often imagine how things might have turned out differently "if only." But can counterfactual claims be true? Neil Sinhababu said this question about "possible worlds" is one of the hardest problems in philosophy. Nonetheless, "counterfacutal history," not to be confused with "alternative history" or "historical revisionism" (which has separate popular and academic meanings) can yeild important insights. For example, consider that following the election of President Trump, a lot of people who were disappointed in this outcome were asking "Why?" If Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 presidential primary, would Trump have been elected? If James Comey had not announced his investigation into Hillary's emails just 11 days before the election, would Trump still have won? Of course, we all know that such counterfactual scenarios did not occur, but it's hard not to wonder how things might have turned out differently.

Or consider that in the course of WWII, Alan Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements. Counterfactual history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.

A useful analogy is that counterfactual research in history is like chess. Each new move opens up the possibility for roughly thirty-eight times as many positions in the branching tree of analysis. We can ask: What are the most promising "moves?" How might the interaction of these counterfactuals and existing context play out? What is the logic connecting antecedent and consequent and the assumptions on which chains of causation are based? Supercomputers are routinely used to conduct counterfactual simulations in the sciences, where there can be multiple interactions at every move, and the chains set in motion interact with one another simultaneously and continually. (Richard Ned Lebow, "Counterfactual thought experiments: A necessary teaching tool")

Isaiah Berlin (Virtual History by Niall Ferguson)

Another great opportunity to ask some important "what if?" questions is suggested by Hanna Rosin, the author of "The End of Men: And The Rise of Women," where she chronicles the economic and cultural shifts that are upending male dominance. In a recent interview she said "Every time you have forward motion economically, any kind of progress for women, it's accompanied by a giant tidal wave of cultural backlash. And that's exactly the moment we're in right now." So let's ask: What if male dominance is upended? Ensuring women can enjoy the same rights and privileges as men is essential to our future. And yes, that will affect many cultural institutions, including marriage and child-rearing practices. Can we find a healthier response to this forward motion than the socially damaging cultural backlash we see now?

Would a better understanding of social physics and especially cause-and-effect relationships lead to the development of a Fair Society (as outlined in Peter Corning's book of the same name)? Consequentialist ethical theories posit that the consequences of actions should be the primary focus, so it would seem obvious that a clearer view of how cause and effect operates, at both very small and very large scales of space and time, could have significant ethical implications. If Judea Pearl is right when he claims a "causal revolution" has begun, this knowledge may force us to choose whether we will squarely face the ethical dilemmas that confront us, or renege on our responsibility to act given what we know. If we choose the later, our inaction will be rationalized away using the psychological acrobatics of self deception. But if we choose confrontation, it will be because our cumulative cultural evolution is open-ended and able to advance in spite of our individual limitations.

Visions of a better future, whether utopian or merely incremental, always address social problems, and, after the start of the Industrial Revolution these invariably include environmental problems as well. In so doing, we assume the ability to diagnosis our problems and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment. This descriptive/prescriptive dynamic is either explicit or implied. In this light, the fear of an apocalyptic dystopia is just as often the fear of human incompetence in diagnosis and treatment, as often as it is the fear of truly malign forces at work. This should serve to underscore the importance of understanding causal processes.

Our ability to gather information about the world around us, inquire how causal relationships change, and to intervene so we can change our behavior patterns, is critical. None of the answers to a question contain the possibility of asking the question in the first place, as my former philosophy professor, Dr. Benesch, was fond of saying. Scenarios that consider "what if?" questions are useful for both the possibilities and the insights they suggest, but they cannot simply suggest themselves. This is why the ability to ask the "what if?" and "why?" questions is so important. We need more counterfactual thinking today more than at any time in our past. The causal revolution hasn't arrived a moment too late.

Postscript:

Sewall Wright

The possibility of asking questions seems to assume subjective awareness, which seems to assume time asymmetry and therefore causality. If our subjective experience of time was symmetrical (no arrow of time) then the explanatory tool of causation, and the concepts of free will, agency, and intervention would likely be incomprehensible. But because we cannot see the future, the concept of causation is our primary tool to help bring it into focus. Causality is therefore the means, and understanding is the goal. Hence, if some procedure other than causality were discovered that could provide a greater means for understanding the interaction among variable factors across spatial and temporal scales, then that would be used in its place. As Newtonian physics is to general relativity, perhaps causation is to this as yet undiscovered means.

A few unresolved problems remain for me: 1) in the presence of synergistic effects, it may be impossible to perform meaningful causal analysis, and 2) depending on deterministic factors, we may need to reconceptualize our notion of how change occurs - intervention may only be described completely as a property of an entire system, not any single agent within that system.

"Causal inference may be superfluous in some idealised, superhuman version of physics, but if you actually want to find out how the Universe works, it is vital. ...But this doesn’t mean we must believe in a richly metaphysical idea of causal powers, ‘producing’ or ‘bringing about’ causal regularities like muscular enforcers of the laws of nature. We still see only the patterns, the constant conjunctions of different sorts of event."
- Mathias Frisch

But I can't neglect to mention the relationship between causality and feedback (cybernetics), and how that in turn relates to social networks and Alex Pentland's hope to have a transformative impact on our understanding of the dynamics of human society and our ability to plan for the future. And after all, causality and teleonomy may both be inherent biological qualities:

"Cognition is heavily grounded in space. As animals that move in space, we travel both physically and mentally in space and time, reliving past events, imagining future ones, and even constructing imaginary scenarios that play out in stories. Mental exploration of space is extraordinarily flexible, allowing us to zoom, adopt different vantage points, mentally rotate, and attach objects and sense impressions to create events, whether remembered, planned, or simply invented."
- Michael Corballis, "Space, time, and language"

My former history professor, Dr. Cole, identified the importance of looking to the future without being held in the past, a specific reference to The Pattern Problem. “In one sense, I feel sorry for younger people today because they’re trapped by the inability to reinvent themselves, free of the burdens of the past. People who know the past are stuck in it because they love repeating it,” Cole said. “This may sound odd to you, coming from a history professor, but I think history is a trap for many people.” ...You can escape that trap with counterfactual thinking.

Sourced quotes: 

"The ability to reflect on one's past actions and envision alternative scenarios is the basis of free will and social responsibility. Counterfactuals are at the core of the cognitive advances that made us human and the imaginative abilities that have made science possible. ...The rewards of having a causal model that can answer counterfactual questions are immense. Finding out why a blunder occurred allows us to take the right corrective measures in the future. ...The advantage we gained from imagining counterfactuals was the same then as it is today: flexibility, the ability to reflect on and improve upon past actions and, perhaps even more significant, our willingness to take responsibility for past and current actions."
- Judea Pearl, "The Book of Why" (2018)

"The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages. The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up. ...If he can trace a cause for some weakness he can probably think of the kind of mutation which will improve it."
- Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”(1950)

"We may define a cause to be... if the first object had not been, the second never had existed."
- David Hume (1748)

"Evolutionary events weren't destined to occur in the way that they did..."
- Stephen Jay Gould (1989)