I’ve been think­ing, this morn­ing. Always a dan­ger­ous proposition.

I’d like to revisit dis­cus­sions of infor­ma­tion over­load and our cul­tural responses to it again, but this time in a much more quirky, wan­der­ing way.

Which is salient.

Fore­warned is forearmed.

My wife and I have been post­ing arti­cles and essays and some poetry gleaned from the local news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines of a cen­tury ago, start­ing… well, start­ing in 1996, but we’ve recently picked up the pace because of this lovely con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem we now have at our fin­ger­tips. It’s a pleas­ant hobby, though look­ing at the web server log files, I’m not sure many folks get why.

Hav­ing only yes­ter­day heard Bar­bara mut­ter­ing “fas­ci­nat­ing…” to her­self as she re-​​typeset an old news­pa­per adver­tise­ment for some­thing or other, I’m cer­tain that her plea­sure is much as mine — suf­fi­cient plea­sure, in my case, that I dubbed our lit­tle whistling-​​in-​​the-​​dark hobby with the self-​​important label “nanohistory.”

I think the best way to describe the feel­ing of delight is: the thrill of dis­cov­ery in the web of impli­ca­tion.

We don’t hike so much these days (and even when we did it was gen­er­ally along well-​​trodden paths fre­quented by the most mun­dane of tourists), and we have never camped or spent time in remote parts of the world, so we don’t get to explore wilder­ness of that kind. Nei­ther do we have much chance to do archae­o­log­i­cal work, nor mad science-​​scale invent­ing, nor dis­cov­er­ing new species in drops of water in our back yards. But we make do.

Instead, this is the trace of one of our recent for­ays into the nano-​​scale his­tor­i­cal net­work: When we were liv­ing in Hanover, PA, we learned the plea­sure of going to estate auc­tions. One estate auc­tion we par­tic­u­larly enjoyed was that of an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at York Col­lege. One of the car-​​load of books we bought there (for $100 or so, total) was Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, which belonged to his wife (or mother?) Clara Moul. This exotic-​​sounding and beautifully-​​bound vol­ume entered our col­lec­tion, unread, where it sat unre­marked for sev­eral years. In 1997 or so I came across a num­ber of arti­cles in the micro­films of a local news­pa­per, all enti­tled “Lalla Rookh”. Not read­ing them too closely, I printed them and bagged them with the rest for future tran­scrip­tion. This week, Bar­bara is tran­scrib­ing them, and it turns out (as I fol­low her account) that they are announce­ments of a Pyrotech­nic Extrav­a­ganza cel­e­brat­ing the com­ple­tion of The Detroit Rail­way —- pyrotech­nics hav­ing some­thing (per­haps an ori­en­tale theme) to do with the best-​​selling book Lalla Rookh. The Pyrotech­nics (pro­vided my a Mr. Pain) were to be held at Boule­vard Park in Detroit. Boule­vard Park is gone, per­haps replaced or over-​​paved by Tigers Sta­dium. Oddly enough, when we were dri­ving (on a lark) to the casino Thurs­day, we passed a local deliv­ery truck labeled “Pain”, and from the park­ing struc­ture at the Motor City Casino one has a good view of the dev­as­tated ground and lost neigh­bor­hoods sur­round­ing Com­er­ica Park, where Tigers Sta­dium used to sit….

I could move on from there, of course, but you get the pic­ture. I have not men­tioned the side-​​branches which lead from The Detroit Rail­way to the Elec­tric Road which used to pass from Ann Arbor to Detroit one block from our house, to the days of ubiq­ui­tous trol­leys, to the after­noon we vis­ited the local his­to­rian and dis­cov­ered that a block away in another direc­tion is a pair of devel­op­ments built between 1890 and 1900 (to cash in on the Elec­tric Road as mod­ern devel­op­ers in Chelsea cash in on the pres­ence of the Inter­states?), to the SLUCE Project at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan… and onwards. Or the other path that leads in the direc­tion of the Pain fam­ily, among whom one would imag­ine a pyrotech­ni­cian wor­thy of cel­e­brat­ing a railroad’s com­ple­tion with an ornate ori­en­tal flair could be easy to spot.

You will learn noth­ing of this by Googling. Well, until now, that is.

This is not His­tory, as it is taught at least. Nor is it even micro­his­tory, which is an approach used by pro­fes­sional vet­ted His­to­ri­ans to seek insights in the his­tor­i­cal dynam­ics of a place or fam­ily or vil­lage. No, this nanohis­tory is the mean­der­ing flow of ephemeral impli­ca­tion and asso­ci­a­tion that makes up our per­sonal and fam­ily his­to­ries. Not even the things that one would hear in sto­ries told at fam­ily reunions or in inter­views for “oral his­tory projects”, but rather the stuff the respon­dent knows so periph­er­ally that they would have to be reminded of it.

And for the most part it’s gone. The phys­i­cal rem­nants exist, but the asso­ci­a­tions and tacit knowl­edge and mem­o­ries that linked them are gone. Meta­data. I sup­pose what I’m talk­ing about is metadata.

The next time some­body hands you a photo album, or makes you sit and watch a slide show (whether it’s on a wall or a mon­i­tor, fam­ily pho­tographs or a research paper), imag­ine what a viewer might make of it in a cen­tury, when the peo­ple are dead, and the peo­ple telling you what the pic­tures rep­re­sent are dead, and the words refer to things that no longer exist. I sell pho­tographs of peo­ple who died before 1880, which were removed from the fam­ily albums and were never labeled. Who will ever know the names of the peo­ple they por­tray? We can see the cloth­ing and man­ner, can guess the town in which they lived (for exam­ple if the pho­tog­ra­pher adver­tised on the reverse), can opine about the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy in the 19^th Cen­tury, but the links between these par­tic­u­lar phys­i­cal arti­facts and the peo­ple and their per­sonal cul­tures are gone forever.

Con­sider the shad­ows that might be cast by the for­est of fam­ily trees, just five or six gen­er­a­tions back, on the peo­ple you now know. Many of them are your rel­a­tives — do you know which? The peo­ple exist, but the links between them are very effec­tively lost.

Find a mag­a­zine of the 1940s, open it to the back sec­tion with the ads, and think about how many of those items being sold are still fea­si­ble com­po­nents of our mate­r­ial cul­ture, let alone desir­able or note­wor­thy. A garter belt? A mag­netic heal­ing bracelet? The Rosi­cru­cians? All the things exist still today, but how they were used and per­ceived and why they were impor­tant has changed utterly.

Is this mas­sive loss of con­text a bad thing?

No, of course not. It might be said that we learn by for­get­ting, by fil­ter­ing, by psy­chic (and phys­i­cal) apop­to­sis. Surely we would be inun­dated not merely by facts and arti­facts if we didn’t lose them out­right, but the com­bi­na­to­r­ial explo­sion would be ter­ri­fy­ing if we also kept a record of what every­thing meant. Things mean some­thing in the con­text of a per­sonal and cul­tural expe­ri­ence, and in rela­tion to other things. Semi­otic wiring would be lay­ing around every­where in tan­gles; we’d be trip­ping over it all the time….

But it can be fun. And enlightening.

The writ­ten works of Peter Ack­royd (espe­cially in Albion and Lon­don: The Biog­ra­phy) and Nichol­son Baker come to mind as good exam­ples of the power of this approach. Chares Fort, of course. There are oth­ers. Many.

I’m not too sure how many. Let’s think about that a minute.

In con­text

Here we live, in a world arguably inun­dated by “too much infor­ma­tion”. What is often implied is “too much new to learn”. Yet very few of us attend to the mount­ing pile of rub­bish left behind — to fam­i­lies, neigh­bor­hoods, lost cul­tures and lan­guages, the pop­u­lar cul­ture of for­eign coun­tries in dis­tant times, the his­tory of 19^th-​​century itin­er­ant pho­tog­ra­phers in Iowa. All that stuff still counts as infor­ma­tion, immensely over-​​weighing the new stuff in the infor­ma­tion over­load tally.

But nobody com­plains about that, do they? If they com­plain about need­ing to know stuff about the past, it’s inevitably the big stuff — his­tory stuff. Wars and pres­i­dents and the Party Line on Progress, and all that. Noth­ing about Pain the Pyrotech­ni­cian, nor mem­o­riz­ing Lalla Rookh, nor read­ing the Book of the Month Club vol­umes from 1950, nor iden­ti­fy­ing peo­ple men­tioned in pass­ing in old news­pa­per arti­cles.

Yup, anx­i­ety about infor­ma­tion over­load seems to be extremely forward-​​looking. Nobody seems to be anx­ious about the past.

A word on sci­ence and collecting

The deep and warm­ing delight I expe­ri­ence in trac­ing these minis­cule courses of impli­ca­tion is exactly the feel­ing I get when I’m work­ing (suc­cess­fully) on sci­en­tific research — espe­cially com­plex sys­tems, prob­a­bil­ity the­ory and graph the­ory, which I specif­i­cally love because they can give me this feel­ing. And when I read a par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing pro­gram­ming lan­guage man­ual, and see what I can do, where I can go with it. And when I dis­cover a new addi­tion to the few things I actu­ally col­lect (as opposed to the many items I tend to accu­mu­late). It is not the sense of plea­sure when one achieves other goals, at least in my expe­ri­ence. It’s not a sense of dom­i­na­tion or power; cer­tainly not one of relief, since impli­ca­tion leads to impli­ca­tion for­ever. Per­haps it’s the thrill of the explorer, or the the­olo­gian, or the earnest sci­ence fic­tion fan — but I wouldn’t know that. Alas, I come to believe it is a per­sonal thing, a you had to be there thing.

That may even be part of the plea­sure. Would it be so delight­ful if I had pub­lished a book of detailed his­tory and extra­or­di­nary schol­ar­ship in an eso­teric domain? As one of the few hun­dred peo­ple who per­son­ally own that book (and as some­body who broke into a immensely self-​​satisfied grin when I found it in an estate sale last sum­mer), I am thank­ful to the author for his trou­bles… but on reflec­tion I’m not sure I’m that dri­ven. Mys­te­ri­ously pleased as I am to own it, I wouldn’t write such a thing. What a thank­less job that would be.

Hmmm… inter­est­ing that I say I’m not “dri­ven”. A word oft used to describe these obses­sive ency­clo­pe­dists (Fort, Baker, Ack­royd again; not nec­es­sar­ily the for­mal ones like Diderot and the oth­ers, who rather than hoard­ing, threw away), spe­cial­ists (sci­en­tific and his­tor­i­cal researchers), math­e­mati­cians, and even earnest col­lec­tors. What on odd coin­ci­dence that must seem to be. Dri­ven by what? What moti­vates all these weirdos explor­ing and writ­ing and pro­duc­ing new arti­facts about obscure crap that nobody else cares about? And in pub­lic, on the Web, too.

Yup, def­i­nitely we’re over­loaded with information.

Two kinds of people

Are there? Two kinds of people?

Here I’m think­ing about peo­ple who enjoy tra­vers­ing the web of impli­ca­tions vs. those who don’t. I think Laura and I and Bar­bara and Ack­royd and Fort and Shal­izi and a num­ber of other folks are in the first group.

Surely the peo­ple who com­plain about infor­ma­tion over­load are in the sec­ond. The peo­ple who are both­ered when their TV Guide lists a hun­dred chan­nels, who balk when they see music flow­ing between mak­ers and cus­tomers unen­cum­bered by the phys­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem, who don’t respond to peo­ple who send them emails. The peo­ple who feel Intel­li­gent Design will be taught in the schools of the future, who feel pornog­ra­phy could be con­trolled, who have revived the notion of Man­i­fest Destiny.

After all, if they weren’t in the sec­ond group… well, they’d see the impli­ca­tions of the impli­ca­tions, wouldn’t they? They’d get that now we are all swim­ming in a library, inspired by the peo­ple they’d equate with the Lords of Chaos (Borges and Fort and Ack­royd and their ilk), not the Lords of Law (Tay­lor? Diderot?). They still imag­ine it’s pos­si­ble to cat­e­go­rize and for­mal­ize human endeavor and knowl­edge. Per­haps they don’t go the next step and say that they want to con­trol it, but they’re will­ing to say that it should be the same as it’s always been. Alas, as over-​​simplifiers who ignore all that messy impli­ca­tion in favor of the Big Sim­ple ones, these are the peo­ple least suited to under­stand­ing how life and cul­ture have actu­ally been. Ever.

Amus­ingly enough, what “infor­ma­tion over­load” has taught me this morn­ing is that the peo­ple in the sec­ond group — the Ashcrofts and RIAAs and Else­viers, Al Qaeda and the Vat­i­can, many of your school­teach­ers and politi­cians, reac­tionar­ies and fun­da­men­tal­ists — are con­strained by their own deci­sions to mov­ing only along the old fixed net­work of knowl­edge and belief and law and order. The other folks… well, they’re able to make their own paths through the back­wa­ters of impli­ca­tion. Roundabout.

Some­thing like this lit­tle mean­der­ing essay has turned out.

The only thing the chaos folk must remem­ber is that they must attend not just to trivia, but to the seri­ous work of the world as well. Impli­ca­tions exist on all scales. Those who focus too much on a few large-​​scale links lack any sense of the com­plex­ity of the real world; those who focus too much on the small­est scales miss trends and cul­tural shifts and pub­lic life, and as a result are more eas­ily divided and con­trolled by their foes.

Hmmm. I won­der if this has any­thing to do with pol­i­tics in this country.

Here’s to Pain.

Over at Apt. 11D, in an April 8 post Laura describes her strate­gies for cop­ing with infor­ma­tion over­load, and quotes Paglia and oth­ers on “kids these days.” Her inspi­ra­tion, in turn, comes from an inter­view with David Shenk, author of Data Smog (visit Ama­zon via her associate’s link, please). Shenk’s book is just one of the cur­rent crop of works in many media regard­ing Infor­ma­tion Over­load as a neg­a­tive thing.

As I’ve men­tioned before, I’m a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of the “infor­ma­tion over­load” trope of mod­ern com­men­tary. On a cou­ple of fronts.

First, this sense of inun­da­tion seems always to be cast as an intrin­sic change in us (whether it’s our indi­vid­ual psy­ches or the cul­ture or what is unclear). In any case, as a biol­o­gist and ama­teur anthro­pol­ogy geek, I have to doubt (a) that we are wit­ness­ing unprece­dented large-​​scale changes now, and in fact that (b) peo­ple or cul­tures can so fun­da­men­tally change at all. Note that I’m not say­ing that change doesn’t hap­pen — just that I don’t think the direc­tion of change is towards more knowl­edge. I’ll tell you where I think it’s headed in a bit.

I can’t bring myself to believe that our fore­fa­thers were stu­pider or had less capac­ity, or that they failed to use what capac­ity they had to know and learn and remem­ber stuff. I sus­pect my great-​​grandmother knew a lot more than I do about the peo­ple who lived in her neigh­bor­hood (a Slo­vak moun­tain vil­lage or a Welsh min­ing town, depend­ing on the great-​​grandmother involved), about the local geog­ra­phy and peo­ple and folk­lore and reli­gion, and so forth. Far more than I know about my neigh­bors. Heck, after seven years of liv­ing here, I just learned the sur­name of my neigh­bor across the street for the first time yesterday.

Instead, I know a num­ber of peo­ple out­side my vil­lage and val­ley, and reg­u­larly cor­re­spond with folks scat­tered over five con­ti­nents. Know a lot more about biol­ogy and mol­e­c­u­lar engi­neer­ing and Java pro­gram­ming and such, and far less about bug­gies and milk­ing a cow and which local gen­try to watch out for in a dark alley.

I have an odd feel­ing that the same com­plaints of “not hav­ing enough time or energy to keep up” arose when this whole writ­ing thing began, and when books stopped being chained to shelves in libraries, and when the reading-​​silently-​​to-​​yourself thing became pop­u­lar, and when news­pa­pers and tele­phony spread, and so forth. In other words, some­body has felt the right to com­plain that “there’s too much to know these days” more or less steadily through­out history.

The Paglia para­graph Laura invokes strikes me as very sim­i­lar (styl­is­ti­cally and in terms of atti­tude) to a para­graph I read in an essay in the Unpop­u­lar Review of 1914 (per­haps Cosma, who now owns the book, can con­firm this). Or per­haps it was in an 1896 Harpers or Scrib­n­ers from the late 19^th Century.

It’s so hard to keep track of what they’re writ­ing in the mag­a­zines these days. Well, what they were writ­ing back in those days.

My point is: the sense of dis­rup­tion does not arise from a mat­ter of increas­ing quan­tity. While Laura (and I) have cho­sen for per­sonal rea­sons of pref­er­ence not to pay atten­tion to con­tem­po­rary pop­u­lar things like Amer­i­can Idol and Fou­cault (and much of Paglia, in my case), the cul­ture as a whole has also led us to give short shrift to bug­gies and black­smiths and how to eke out a liv­ing from a kitchen gar­den patch and mid­wifery &c &c

The inter­est­ing thing, to me, is that the main dif­fer­ence caused by tech­nol­ogy — books, mag­a­zines and such in addi­tion to blogs and email — is a realign­ment of geo­graph­i­cal and tem­po­ral bound­aries to per­sonal knowl­edge. Laura writes that on one day when she did her com­pre­hen­sive exams, she had her head full of the works of Marx. But he’s a dead fel­low, who lived an insur­mount­able dis­tance away. Later today I will have to put aside my head full of aim­less social con­jec­ture and restock with a load of machine learn­ing tech­niques and the R pro­gram­ming lan­guage for sta­tis­tics. Later on, I’ll prob­a­bly have to work out how to cook a chunk of pork roast given the sparse selec­tion of stuff in our pantry, and per­haps in the evening will spend a few more pleas­ant hours lis­ten­ing to Jim Dale read­ing Harry Pot­ter and the Order of the Phoenix, which will require my mind to focus on what it recalls about the demen­tors, the impli­ca­tions of Albus Dumbledore’s brother, and that froggy lady (we’re not very far into the book yet, but hear­ing it read skill­fully aloud is the only way to go).

That’s a lot of stuff regard­ing peo­ple I never met, writ­ten by peo­ple I never will meet, in places I will never visit, con­cern­ing things — espe­cially in the case of machine learn­ing algo­rithms and demen­tors — that I will never actu­ally expe­ri­ence in my phys­i­cal sen­so­rium. Well, OK, the pork is here, some­where. But the herbs are from that big com­pany in Bal­ti­more, and the gar­lic is not gar­lic I grew myself, and I sure don’t know how to light my stove — it just does it.

All this shuf­fling around will cause me lit­tle or no pain, as it turns out. Indeed, for me it can be a heady experience.

The incor­rect thought I’m try­ing to cor­rect is this: The dif­fi­culty and incon­ve­nience and pres­sure peo­ple per­ceive about “mod­ern life” does not come from increas­ing demands on their men­tal capac­ity. They’re not “get­ting full.” Their dis­com­fort comes from lack of preparedness.

Think about it. I know gen­er­ally that I’m headed for a wild ride through the world. I’ve braced myself. While I argue that every­body liv­ing in every cul­ture has more or less the same sized stock­pile of infor­ma­tion in their heads, in my head there is a body of knowl­edge that acts as a suit­able buffer or fil­ter or “padding” to the tran­si­tions I make. In the head of, say, my Mom — who was born in the Depres­sion era and enjoys tele­vi­sion and reads a book or two a day — there is no infra­struc­ture for cop­ing with “inter­ac­tive media”, and so inter­ac­tion with the worlds of mod­ern gam­ing, email or the Web leaves her feel­ing stressed.

My Mom’s stress is not from pres­sure of need­ing to know more than she can, it’s from acquir­ing knowl­edge out­side her men­tal schema. Not “cul­ture” or “future shock” as such, but the sub­tler rel­a­tive of that feel­ing we all expe­ri­ence every day. Laura feels it when she is exposed to Amer­i­can Idol (as do I and Bar­bara and Cosma and many of my friends and col­leagues), but I cope with that stress by hid­ing the tele­vi­sion in a back room, and not hav­ing a full cable sub­scrip­tion. My immi­grant Slo­vak grand­par­ents prob­a­bly felt a good deal of it when they took the long boat ride, but they coped by liv­ing in com­mu­ni­ties of their friends and rel­a­tives when they arrived in Cleve­land. My fun­da­men­tal­ist rel­a­tives prob­a­bly feel a good deal of it when they hear what hap­pens on Angel, but they cope by going out of their way to avoid such “worldly” things.

But while there are per­sonal and cul­tural defenses against the dis­com­fort we feel at out-​​of-​​schema expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge, there are also per­sonal and cul­tural dri­ves which lead folks to seek out these jar­ring expe­ri­ences — things like travel, heresy, amuse­ment parks, libraries, folk art. And some others.

If we feel over­whelmed by all this “new infor­ma­tion”, why is it that we keep cre­at­ing it?

[Updated a cou­ple of cross-​​links and trans­ferred from archives, 4÷22÷07]

Some time back I was engaged in a rather wide-​​ranging discussion/​argument on Tran­shu­man­ism and the Sin­gu­lar­ity (“rap­ture for nerds”). One of the tropes through which we danced was the idea that big changes in life—societal and biological—are some­how syn­chro­nized. Some­where along the way I used the phrase “the ragged edge of the future,” and it stuck with me.

I’m think­ing about it, still. Or rather per­co­lat­ing on it.

Six unre­lated faces of this high-​​dimensional thought-​​doodad seem to be:

• Who says the future hap­pens to every­body? Oddly enough — and con­trary to many folks’ under­stand­ing of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion — the ori­gins of new species are not gen­er­ally accom­pa­nied by the replace­ment of ances­tors. Yet the anal­ogy often drawn between large-​​scale evo­lu­tion­ary dynam­ics and social dynam­ics often seems to depend on this assump­tion of “suc­ces­sion”, of replace­ment of infe­ri­ors by supe­ri­ors. Note, though, that there are still bac­te­ria, amoe­bae, and other “prim­i­tive” organ­isms that sup­pos­edly are “infe­rior” to “higher” ones. The fact that they’re still here, chug­ging along, and out­num­ber “higher” organ­isms by many orders of mag­ni­tude should be kept in mind. Does your typ­i­cal Extropian futur­ist under­stand that there might still be peas­ants and mill-​​workers, farm­ers and politi­cians, doc­tors and rocket sci­en­tists still, even after their fuzzy never-​​ending “sin­gu­lar­ity”? I dunno.
• Sloppy punc­tu­a­tion: oft-​​misunderstood facts about punc­tu­ated equi­lib­rium, rev­o­lu­tions and the like. Gen­er­ally, I’m think­ing here about how the lay under­stand­ing of Gould and Eldredge’s notion of punc­tu­ated equlib­ria seems to be mis­shapen by some assump­tions that aren’t in the orig­i­nal fram­ing. Folks—especially those who invoke it as a metaphor for social trans­for­ma­tion and other sorts of gen­eral large-​​scale transformations—seem to think the Burgess Shale was a kindof flash-​​illuminated snap­shot, hap­pen­ing instan­ta­neously and uni­ver­sally. That is, that all of a sud­den every­thing changed overnight, every­where. It’s often dan­ger­ous when a strict sci­en­tific notion with a spe­cific mean­ing is used as a loose metaphor, as with the fool­ish equa­tion of “punc­tu­ated equi­lib­rium” with “rev­o­lu­tion”, and sad and stu­pid when it’s done wrong. A list of some of the fre­quent errors and mis­un­der­stand­ings regard­ing PE are avail­able at talk.origins.
• The irre­versible “arrow of com­plex­ity” There is appar­ently a trend in increas­ing com­plex­ity in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory. This is another metaphor oft bandied about regard­ing the com­ing time of extra­or­di­nary change: we’re about to leap to a new level of com­plex social life, it’s said, caused by all this new tech­nol­ogy we have. My hes­i­ta­tion about this opti­mistic take on life is, frankly, the over­whelm­ingly intense fla­vor of hubris it carries.

  First, the inher­ence of the “arrow” of com­plex­ity should be treated with some cau­tion and skep­ti­cism. Try a lit­tle thought exper­i­ment: Col­o­nize Mars, tak­ing humans and any ten other species you like. If they remain com­pletely iso­lated from Earth, what do you think will hap­pen to the “com­plex­ity” of the colonists’ post-​​human descen­dants over the next few mil­lion years? You think the inher­ent drive towards greater com­plex­ity will lead these humans to evolve into some post-​​human god­like intel­li­gence? I sus­pect rather that they and their ten other com­pan­ion species will diver­sify to com­pete for the eco­log­i­cal niches avail­able, which is to say, most of them. So if I were you, I’d worry about count­ing on any kind of “com­plex­ity momen­tum” in near-​​future social evolution.

  Might it be, rather, that what dri­ves increas­ing com­plex­ity is that eco­log­i­cal niches at “lower” lev­els are filled up and locked tight by the extra­or­di­nary suc­cess of the organ­isms that inhabit them, and that a sud­den increase in organ­is­mal com­plex­ity is some sort of last-​​ditch effort to re-​​write the play­ing field? Note again that less-​​complex species seem to be per­fectly fit, in that they hang around, seem­ingly for­ever. (Dan McShea’s done some work on this, which I hope to revisit; I’ve lost track of it since when we were both at SFI together.)

  Sec­ond, you should be skep­ti­cal about the ben­e­fits of what is per­ceived as increased com­plex­ity. What exactly is inher­ently bet­ter about being a socia­ble, Internet-​​using human being than, say a bristle­cone pine? I dunno. What’s inher­ently bet­ter about being an mod­ern Amer­i­can, Internet-​​using guy than, say a Tro­briand Islander in the 1400s? Here it seems clearer: den­tistry and cars and gro­cery stores, and a lack of most epi­demics, stone-​​axe wield­ing ene­mies, and so forth. Well… and yet: on the atomic war, hec­tic teach­ing sched­ules, bank­ruptcy, and ubiquitous-​​estrogen-​​mimicking-​​hormones-​​messing-​​up-​​your-​​body fronts? I dunno.

  To me, this is just a Great Chain of Being argument—the same sort of reli­gious or pseudore­li­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion that sets human­ity apart from the rest of the world as a spe­cial cre­ation of some sort, and sets “mod­ern West­ern civ” apart from every­body else. Do we sit atop the heap? Are you sure? I dunno.

  I’m not a PoMo rel­a­tivist, mind you. That would be silly. But some­body has to ask: Does it mat­ter to your model of the world if you inte­grate your­self into it, instead of stand­ing apart?

• What do you call it when there’s always a rev­o­lu­tion? This is more an abstract ques­tion, really. Sup­pose there are big changes that rev­o­lu­tion­ize life. Social or bio­log­i­cal — you pick. Take it as a given. But also sup­pose that there are many small changes for each big­ger one, and that they’re all going con­cur­rently, all the time. How many really small ‘rev­o­lu­tions” does it take to equal the extent of a big one? How many does it take to coun­ter­act or mask the effects of the big one? I dunno.
• How effi­cient we are at infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing? Much is made of the fact that there’s “too much infor­ma­tion these days”. Too much for what? First, economies work on the basis of boundedly-​​rational agents, not the ratio­nal all-​​knowing spir­its invoked by tra­di­tional econ­o­mists. Sec­ond, peo­ple use sim­ple heuris­tics to man­age their daily lives and make deci­sions, not ratio­nal con­tem­pla­tion of all the facts. Third, most peo­ple don’t ever even read most news, email, watch most tele­vi­sion, or any of the other media stuff we’re “inun­dated” with — nor need they to make their way in life. We’re awash in infor­ma­tion all the time these days, but we don’t pay any more atten­tion than we used to. So what’s the prob­lem? I dunno.

  That said, I’m still won­der­ing what makes peo­ple believe that humans process more infor­ma­tion than an equiv­a­lent pile of any other organ­ism. Aside from stat­ing “that’s not what we mean when we say ‘infor­ma­tion’”, nobody’s explained the assump­tion. I dunno.

• …like the back of your hand? Do we know more than peo­ple did long ago? I don’t think so, some­how. What does seem to be different—and interesting—is that peo­ple in my great-grandfather’s gen­er­a­tion would have known far more about their local geo­graph­i­cal region and things done by peo­ple closely related to them than I do, whereas I know a lot more about things done far away by peo­ple unlike me. Why is this inter­est­ing? Does it show a note­wor­thy trend in cul­tural his­tory? I dunno.

I’d like to tie these together; they’re def­i­nitely related and inter­con­nected. But I’m mulling and acquir­ing, still. Thus, I would wel­come point­ers to schol­arly work on these subjects.

[Updated links and retrieved from archives, 4÷22÷07]

I was a tad disin­gen­u­ous in an ear­lier post: in the back of my mind, I have always been plan­ning some­thing spe­cific to do with the reverted wilder­ness acreage we’re buy­ing in the country.

Vic­to­rian ama­teur sci­en­tists have always fas­ci­nated me. I imag­ine fondly that some­day in the next few months you will find me ensconced at a portable table out in “the back”, wear­ing my sun hat and glasses, with my WANned iBook and cheap USB micro­scope, live-​​blogging pic­tures of my very own algae, rotifers, seed cap­sules and such­like. Bet­ter by far, in my technophilic opin­ion, than a moul­der­ing leather-​​bound per­sonal jour­nal filed with water­col­ors of toad­stools and cal­li­graphic noodling.

See, I often pine for the days when not just landed gen­try but reg­u­lar folks had micro­scopes and tele­scopes and fossil-​​collecting hand­books and ter­raria and bred doves and lilies and oth­er­wise learned some­thing first-​​hand about the real world in their own gar­dens and town audi­to­ria. The social norm of pub­lic sci­en­tific inquiry faded long ago, of course, but now I prac­ti­cally despair over it. For exam­ple, home-​​schooling par­ents are prob­a­bly the biggest pur­chasers of micro­scopes and sci­ence train­ing stuff for their kids, but the demo­graph­ics (and gen­eral anti-​​intellectualism) of the major­ity of home-​​school par­ents don’t encour­age me that bio­log­i­cal learn­ing is being thor­oughly elu­ci­dated in these efforts. Most “nature stuff” peo­ple do these days pays atten­tion only to the sort of big dra­matic cheetah-​​kills-​​antelope stuff they’re exposed to on TV: whale-​​watching, hik­ing, hunt­ing, bird­ing and the like. They tramp miles through equally inter­est­ing but ignored life to go and see the ani­mals, and then tramp back home and sit back down in front of the TV, their boots cov­ered in fas­ci­nat­ing stuff on the mat by the door.

Some small part of the rea­son peo­ple don’t “do sci­ence” is the cost of equip­ment and sup­plies. Yes, a nice gas chro­mato­graph is still rather pricey, and a use­ful tele­scope will set you back a few grand. But I spent $30 on my 200x plas­tic USB micro­scope (it’s a dis­con­tin­ued toy), and I have this com­puter just sortof sit­ting around warm­ing my lap up all the time any­way. So I’m not entirely cer­tain that it’s rea­son enough ever. Except maybe nuclear physics, and maybe radio astronomy.

Some other part of the rea­son is sup­posed to be the dif­fi­culty of get­ting your head around today’s super-​​specialized sci­en­tific knowl­edge. Peo­ple (kids) are not trained in sci­ence, there­fore not qual­i­fied to do it. They need some­body to train them in the meth­ods, and show them what they’re sup­posed to be look­ing for, and what it means in con­text. This indi­cates to many peo­ple that sci­ence teach­ers are required, and par­ents there­fore off the hook. But take it from me: I taught botany to wannabe sci­ence teach­ers for three years; you would be fright­ened or very very sad if you really under­stood how bad they were at think­ing or under­stand­ing, let alone teach­ing about science.

But I think the biggest rea­son hob­by­ists don’t do sci­ence is that they just don’t know they can. All you really need to do is think and under­stand the process to be qual­i­fied to do it.

By what will be seen to be a very direct path, buy­ing muck and dream­ing of sit­ting in the shade with a micro­scope and putting it all right here on the Web has reminded me of one of the other projects I’m gear­ing up for.

A huge and very impor­tant chunk of com­plex sys­tems research con­sists, in a reduced sense, of think­ing about how sys­tems are put together of agents fol­low­ing sim­ple rules. Writ­ing lit­tle sto­ries, in other words: “What would hap­pen if peo­ple in a mar­ket sim­ply traded accord­ing to ran­dom rules?” and “What would hap­pen if pro­teins were com­posed of two types of sub­unit (hydrophilic and hydropho­bic) on a chain con­strained to a pla­nar lat­tice, and you let them wig­gle around and ‘fold’? What would you see if you did that? Does it suf­fice to explain some of what really hap­pens in pro­tein fold­ing?” Of course, before they’re pub­lished these what-​​if ques­tions are pret­tied up and pre­sented as if the researcher knew all along that they were doing a ratio­nal exper­i­ment, but because you’re a dili­gent and faith­ful reader to have worked your way along this far already, I’m let­ting you know the Big Secret of Pro­fes­sional Sci­ence: we really mostly just try stuff and see what happens.

The sci­ence part of com­plex sys­tems hap­pens in at least three stages. Two of these are: (1) analy­sis and refram­ing of stuff that really exists in terms that let you talk about it rea­son­ably using con­cepts that eas­ily become sim­ple mod­els, and (3) in inter­pret­ing the com­puter sim­u­la­tions you build accord­ing to those mod­els to see what they tell you about the real world. The bit in the mid­dle, the (2) that dif­fer­en­ti­ates a lot of com­plex sys­tems research, is what I refer to as build­ing anal­o­gous sys­tems — arti­fi­cial worlds in which your model of the real world is lit­er­ally true. So for exam­ple, the pre­vi­ous notion about “peo­ple in a mar­ket trad­ing using ran­dom strate­gies” is in a sense a prospec­tive model of real-​​world mar­ket traders using bounded ratio­nal­ity other weird non-​​rational stuff we see all the time. The anal­o­gous sys­tem you can build is the actual run­ning com­puter pro­gram in which lit­tle agents rep­re­sent­ing peo­ple trade some tokens rep­re­sent­ing real mar­ket goods and cur­rency accord­ing to rules you code as “ran­dom” accord­ing to your inter­pre­ta­tion of the term. The result­ing pro­gram is not the model: your model is your analy­sis of the real world, sum­ma­rized as “per­haps it’s like this” (or hid­den in “what if it were like this?”)

The third part, mainly obser­va­tional but informed by your orig­i­nal mod­el­ing effort, basi­cally lies in col­lect­ing data in the anal­o­gous world and see­ing how that may explain or apply to the real one. For exam­ple, in col­lect­ing a mil­lion dif­fer­ent protein-​​folding results in a sim­u­la­tion based on your two-​​component model of pro­teins, and then see­ing how the sta­tis­ti­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion of the results might match that seen in nature.

I’m wordy because I’m excited and writing-​​to-​​think. All I’m try­ing to say is this, really: Much of com­plex sys­tems research is just:

1. Look at what’s around you and frame a model that sum­ma­rizes what you think you see
2. Write and run a lit­tle com­puter pro­gram (an “anal­o­gous sys­tem”) in which the model is lit­er­ally true
3. See if the behav­ior of the anal­o­gous sys­tem gibes with what you observe.

That’s it.

Point: Com­plex sys­tems research is easy.

See, the inter­est­ing thing about com­plex sys­tems research—simultaneously the thing that makes the sys­tems inter­est­ing, and the field—is that even the anal­o­gous sys­tems we build are capa­ble of unex­pected and often nigh inex­plic­a­ble emer­gent behav­ior. That’s the point: the model is not tractable by tra­di­tional math approaches, so for exam­ple a tra­di­tional econ­o­mist would sim­plify away the stuff that’s emer­gent because the equa­tions are too hard to solve. But you — you cun­ning com­plex­ol­o­gist you — build a sim­u­la­tion based on the model and work around the hard math bit. Yes, maybe even the com­puter imple­men­ta­tion is wild and does weird stuff, but it’s much faster than the real world and so you try it 100,000 times and see what happens.

I har­bor secret desires. Many of those I will choose not reveal here, but among the oth­ers are: I would like peo­ple who are not cre­den­tialed union card-​​holding ivory tower sci­en­tists to be able to under­take sci­en­tific explo­ration and inves­ti­ga­tion per­son­ally, col­lect and man­age the obser­va­tions that will arise, and pub­lish the results in valid peer-​​reviewed sci­en­tific jour­nals (that they can afford).

I think some­thing like the Open Source approach to soft­ware devel­op­ment would work, and for exactly the same rea­sons. I will write about that here in a bit.

In the mean­time: almost any­body who knows what it is (and can write code) has writ­ten a Game of Life pro­gram. Almost every­body who knows what it is (and can write code) has writ­ten a Man­del­brot set gen­er­a­tor pro­gram. The same goes for genetic algo­rithms, Markov text gen­er­a­tors, and innu­mer­able other canon­i­cal “chaos and com­plex­ity” sim­u­la­tions and algo­rithms which have been pop­u­lar­ized through the years. Yet, recre­ational or not, these sim­ple pro­grams are exactly the sort of thing that makes com­plex sys­tems research go.

I’ll bet that at least a dozen of the thou­sands of peo­ple who wrote their own Game of Life (at least those who played with the para­me­ters) encoun­tered phe­nom­ena that would have war­ranted pub­li­ca­tion in a peer-​​reviewed jour­nal. And at the same time, I bet that most of the thou­sands of other peo­ple (if only they had been exposed to the work in the con­text of a com­mu­nity of like-​​minded col­lab­o­ra­tors and back­ground infor­ma­tion) might have moved on beyond screen-​​saver did­dling and addressed real and seri­ous unan­swered sci­en­tific questions.

But as ama­teurs, these folks worked alone and were thus hemmed in by a lim­ited social cap­i­tal and intel­lec­tual con­text. Their results are for­ever rel­e­gated to recre­ational sta­tus in the “umbra” of sci­ence, never pub­lished and thus doomed to obliv­ion. No mat­ter how many inter­est­ing “what would hap­pen if…?” and “what does it mean that…?” ques­tions they asked, the answers were for the most part unat­tain­able or unshared.

That’s sad. It’s just as if they lived in the coun­try, went out occa­sion­ally and poked around a bit, caught a few but­ter­flies nobody had ever seen before, and not know­ing what they had let them go, got bored, and went back in to watch TV.

Work­ing alone, these folks (which I would num­ber in the thou­sands) remain hob­by­ists re-​​creating sim­ple toys. Work­ing together, I think they might become a potent dis­trib­uted sci­en­tific work­force, as pow­er­ful and effec­tive as more tra­di­tional labs and war­ranted scientists.

By my argu­ment, you need three tools to do valid com­plex sys­tems work your­self: One is what you are sit­ting in front of right now. Another is the mess of meat perched up there at the top of your neck. And the third? Access to other peo­ple work­ing on the same thing.

And that’s one thing you can do with muck and the Web that you can’t do with just muck: begin to disintermediate—or enhance and expand—the tra­di­tional sci­en­tific establishment.

We’ve gone and done it now.

Our lat­est offer for a house on three acres just north of Chelsea Michi­gan is likely to be accepted. It’s a nice house, big enough for the fam­ily (includ­ing my Mom, who’s mov­ing in with us) and some of our stuff. The three acres include the bog-​​standard devel­op­ment grade-​​and-​​grass crap on the front third, but over­looks a hun­dred acres or so of beau­ti­ful low, flat wet­land meadow to the south in back.

Of which we are buy­ing two acres.

Bar­bara has brought her fero­ciously thor­ough research atten­tion to bear on this project, and thus we not only have the sale prices of all the other houses in the devel­op­ment, the names and occu­pa­tions of at least half of the own­ers, detailed aer­ial pho­tographs from four sources cov­er­ing the last five years show­ing the trans­for­ma­tion of the land from work­ing farm into exur­ban devel­op­ment, a num­ber of gov­ern­ment and non­profit groups’ opin­ions of the degree of pro­tec­tion and devel­op­ment the place can take, notes on util­ity cov­er­age, advice from the County on “how to live in the coun­try”, line-​​of-​​sight bear­ings to the wire­less inter­net provider in the area (I did that), and cost-​​benefit analy­ses of the var­i­ous unfin­ished bits (dri­ve­way, deck­ing, water soft­ener), and what the farmer grew on the var­i­ous bits we’re buy­ing (pota­toes and corn). And how much the devel­oper paid for the land and is charg­ing for the con­struc­tion on it.

We also have a soil map.

See, the lay of the land is what makes it so beau­ti­ful and hard to describe, and also a big fac­tor in our deci­sion to pay what is frankly a scary amount for the place. The prospect to the south is (in win­ter) some­thing like being perched on the shores of a large, dry lake. Of plants. The flats stretch off to the hori­zon, and the oppo­site “shore” is occu­pied only by one timber-​​framed and dis­tant house. In between, the many maps show some drainage ditches (one of which we’re buy­ing in toto, appar­ently), and a sin­u­ous line of tele­phone poles (which oddly also remind me of past vis­its to water­side towns like Port Clin­ton or Tampa).

But, as should be obvi­ous from my eli­sion, that’s not water there. As the soil map makes clear, that’s Houghton muck down there in the flat pic­turesque bits.

Of course, we will like all our neigh­bors pre­serve and enhance the nat­ural beauty yadda yadda &c &c. It’s to look at, not do some­thing with; I know that. It’s not like I’m allowed to, say, build a lit­tle hob­bit house in the back out of straw­bale and cob as a studio/​office/​eccentricity — nei­ther by the deed restric­tions nor my wife. But you know, now and then the earnest and dili­gent exurb con­ser­va­tion­ist will want to knock down the taller weed­ier stuff with a rid­ing mower.

And not sink.

Or put a cou­ple of sub­tle but use­ful benches out there, whence one can watch the red-​​tailed hawks and sand­hill cranes and white-​​tailed deer and blue­birds and such doing their thing.

With­out sinking.

So now I find I must learn about muck. This, I con­fess, is not what I expected.