Comparison of Medicine and Economics, Both Open, Evolving, Complex Systems.

We in the world of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering know quite a lot about control systems. We have a lot of serious theory and, having produced control systems for everything from airliners and Alaskan Pipelines to internet toasters, a lot of practical experience and understanding.

We know what kind of entities we can produce Control Systems for, and Alaskan Pipelines and airliners and driverless cars are up at the top end of that complexity, but they are all mechanisms, definitely not the open, evolving, complex systems we live within.

To remind everyone :
    'open' == subject to influences from outside of the system itself,
    'evolving' == changes in the internal state of the system cause changes
        in the state transition tables themselves (or the equations defining
        the state transitions),
    'complex system' implying emergent properties, e.g. the market has
        properties that do not exist in individual trades.

This short essay compares the most complex system that human minds have partially mastered to the economy, which human minds have definitely not mastered.

That system is the human body. It is open, affected by everything from sunlight through food, drugs, bears and bullets. It is evolving, as it ages at the gross level and at levels clear down to the DNA. It is certainly a complex system, containing a couple of hundred different cell types in its subsytems, none of whose properties contain the slightest humanness.

I said above this kind of system can't be controlled, yet MDs routinely prescribe drugs that fix problems. So there is a contradiction.

The explanation is that :
    A) The human body has evolved a property called 'homeostasis' which
    allows more predictability than systems without this property.
    Homeostasis describes the control systems of physiology which
    act to keep blood pressure. temperature, blood ions, blood sugar,
    ...concentrations with a range. Teasing out these control mechanisms
    and their interactions is not complete.
    B) The human body is part of an evolved eco-system, and most of the
    external threats to human health have evolved in concert with humans
    and their predecessors.
    C) There are a 7B replicas of human physiologies and many animals
    are excellent models of subsets of the human systems. Thus we have
    a lot of different examples of problems with human physiologies that
    we can categorize and study and also we can do experiments, which isn't
    possible with most open, evolving, complex systems.

These are huge advantages, but it has nevertheless taken 100 years to reach current Medical expertise. The beginning of 'scientific medicine' was about the same time that Progressive ideology was borrowing the prestige of science, the 1920s. For medicine, that was the combination of statistics and the accumulating physiological knowledge, the serious study of which began in the mid 1800s.

Further, medical expertise, the ability to diagnose and predict, is not nearly as far along as we might think. Patients who are scheduled for heart transplants too often fail to die when they don't ever match a
donor heart. Every 25 years or so, one of the major teaching hospitals here in the US does autopsies on 1000 successive deaths. Routinely, 25% of patients have died of undiagnosed causes.

Now compare that to our economy. Obviously economics would be ecstatic with a 75% correct prediction rate. The reason it doesn't have predictive ability is that there is no possibility of doing experiments on an economy. Experiments require holding all factors constant except
the independent variable, and recording the values of dependent variables as the independent variable's value is changed. There are 1000s of 1000s of possible independent variables in the economy. There

is no possibility of holding anything constant enough to do that kind of measurements.

Also, we only have one economy, connected throughout the world, not 7B+ animal models to experiment with.

Further, I don't believe that the economics profession has begun an age of 'scientific economics'. It uses statistics, lots of math, but there is no foundation science that it rests upon, no body of theoretical knowledge external to itself that it can draw upon.

Economics produces the same kind of information as does history, facts about the past. One may discern patterns that may or may not apply to the present to predict the future, but that doesn't produce accuracy in predicting either the event or the timing of the event.

Economics, in fact, doesn't predict much.

If you can't predict any future, how can you guide yourself to a desired

future?

Beginnings : My Basic Understandings

!!! Warning : this is mid-thought, come back in a week or so and I might have it right.

This begins a list of topics and my initial positions.  Each of these will be expanded in other posts which will be the first stage of the process of melding the understandings conveyed by comments.

0)  We live within open, evolving, complex systems.
1)  System stability must be the major design goal for governments.
2)  There are no perfect systems, natural or designed by humans.
3)  Humans are far from perfect in many dimensions, and these imperfections limit the kinds of governments that can be stable.
4)  The fundamental problem facing any civilization is finding more-optimal futures.
5)  Those more-optimal futures may produce system instability.

'Process'

!!! Warning : this is mid-thought, come back in a week or so and I might have it right.

Melding the input from many people into a coherent unit that can instruct our next sets of Founding Fathers as they write Constitutions and implement governments is a non-trivial effort.  I believe it is very important, as we can accelerate civilization's process by better understandings.

I don't know how to do that, will have to learn on the job.

Suggestions are welcome in this as in everything else associated with this project.

Until a better approach is suggested, found, presented, I will  keep updating posts presenting everyone's best understandings, best citations, best explanations.  At intervals, these will become new posts with the associated new set of comments.  They may also be split as topics become too large for focused discussion, and perhaps moved to a wiki with editors for each section.

However accomplished, we will iterate until we have agreed that each represents the best understandings that we are capable of, but new comments can always continue.

Some people may disagree about this process or the rules.  If any aspect of this blog becomes too uncomfortable for anyone, please feel free to begin a blog on the same or any subset of topics.  Our civilization needs this effort, and there cannot be too many minds applied to it.  Feel free to incorporate ideas from this blog and its comments, we will do likewise.

Rules

Any cooperative venture, which I hope to make this blog, needs some structure.

Structure determines function, at least partially.  The goals of this cooperative venture are open-ended, so we want the minimum structure consistent with progress.

There may well be a good set of rules that someone can bring to our attention, so we want these to be sufficiently malleable to incorporate improvements or a complete replacement.

This is an attempt to bring the precision of thinking in science and engineering to the problem of government.  Thus, we will apply the best scientific and engineering analysis criteria.

We judge the worth of comments by their accuracy and depth of citations, by the quality of their fundamental data and the kinds of inferences that can be made from that data, by their logic and adherence to rules of evidence for scientific, technological and historical disciplines.

Similar to other Open Source projects, I am writer, editor, benevolent dictator.  Until I find cooperators and learn to trust them, I do the merges from email and comments into posts in this blog.  I will endeavor to be as open in this as I can be, but will fail at that, please remind me.

I will not tolerate ideology of any kind.  Ideology == 'ideas and words before reality'.  This is the antithesis of everything that has produced our very wonderful civilization : we have not achieved progress in any of the areas that make our lives so wonderful by better sermons or speeches in the senate or even lectures by our best philosophers.  These are not, from the historical record, much improved over the last 200 years, yet improvements in individual lives have been dramatic in many ways.

We achieved our civilization by accumulating information about that very large and very complex reality that we all share, which we call knowledge.

We achieved our civilization by intellectual progress in comprehending and systematizing knowledge, which we call science, and by learning to apply those systematic understandings to better ourselves.  This is applied science in its many manifestations : medicine, engineering, management of organizations, military arts, government arts, advertising, ...

We achieved our modern life by disciplining our thinking and actions so that we better control the large-scale and further-distant future, which we call wisdom.  As individuals and organizations, we both choose and achieve our goals more wisely in our current civilization.

Very importantly, we achieved our civilization in the face of the huge limitation that we each can only understand a very small portion of humanity's accumulated knowledge, understanding and wisdom.  Thus, our civilization and its progress depend on coordinating individuals, and the scale of the interactions and the flows of information between entities that create and process information is both the challenge for the next stage of progress and the opportunity for new dimensions of civilization and new progress on all fronts.

Civility is useful, but we assume that all of us are flawed humans and sometimes are not as kind to others as we would desire them to be to us.  We all know that intellectual passion is a requirement for progress in understanding, and that all kinds of talents are unevenly distributed, and so we must expect that some major contributors to this effort will be ranging from moderate to extreme.  We forgive them in advance.

Youtube, books, movies -- a very rich life

I watched "The Sorrow and The Pity" this week. Long documentary about the occupation of France. Interviews with every part of the political spectrum, and also the German Captain of the Wehrmacht who ran the occupying force.

Very powerful. First, the camera work and the interviewer are very good. People can't lie very well, the camera reveals every twitch of their mental squirming. Second, I don't see how a Jew can stand to learn French. France was the only nation in all of Europe that collaborated with the Nazis as a government. Cooperated enthusiastically in the case of rounding up the Jews for deportation to slave camps and gas chambers.

Finished "The Bridge At Remagen" by Ken Hechler. Presidio War Classics for WWII. Very good at explaining what a huge handicap a dictator of a totalitarian government is when it comes to fighting a war. Good story of how US Army allowed lower levels to have the initiative and how higher command backed it up to the extent of changing the grand strategy for the invasion of Germany. Very good discussion of problems the Germany army was having managing the retreat and attempt to regroup in the face of Hitler's orders to fight to the last man.

About 25 years ago I worked for a company in Palo Alto that was headed by a Ph.D. EE. The guy had worked for military/industrial group doing proof of concept prototypes for weapons electronics. In one of the conversations over lunch, he commented that it was very difficult to understand how Germany could have lost, given that it had all of the advantages of a Dictatorship. Some school in his life should be deeply ashamed. The company was bought by Murdoch's News Corp, and Stan ascended to corporate executive-dom. No doubt he learned a lot.

Finished "New Drugs -- An Insider's Guide to the FDA's New Drug Approval Process" by Lawrence T. Friedhoff. He is a consultant helping companies through the approval process. I "Inside the FDA" by Fran Hawthorne a couple of months ago.

Friedhoff has a vested interest in the FDA and its elaborate process. He has no particular criticism of it. Hawthorne is generally approving, discusses the evolution of the FDA, differences in approach between the various divisions, etc. Neither tackle the very difficult question of "what is the real cost of this regulation?" In fact, the cost of a new drug is $500B to $1000B. When I took drug development courses 10 years ago (the 2001 recession), the first thing the instructor said was that no drug could be considered unless it had probable sales of $1B per year. It would require twice that now.

There are relatively few diseases with a market that large. Thus, no drugs are developed to cure them. For example, the drug companies are forced to develop broad-spectrum antibiotics. As bacteria now become resistant to those within 3-5 years, it no longer pays to develop antibiotics.

We now die of no drugs or no profitable drugs, rather than unsafe drugs. Examples abound : The reovirus, and about 10 other viruses, kill 2/3rds of all cancers due to an inherent metabolic defect in the cancer cell. The reovirus itself, when injected IV, might make you feel under the weather for a week or so. However, there is no way a drug company can make a profit on a natural herb or virus, so clinical trials are small and slow. Smoking has been known to cause disease since about 1950. For all that time, the FDA has prevented sales of other ways of delivering nicotine. As nicotine has effects on the rain similar to ritalin, and is extremely important for some people to work, smoking has declined very slowly. The FDA is responsible for the 50% of all deaths that are related to smoking. There are many, many other examples. DCA, artimisinin, ...

As a large part of the world's drug research is done in the USA, the FDA is a leading cause of death around the world. Quite a perverse result, but a normal outcome for attempts of government to regulate.

I watched a lot of Youtube over the last few weeks : David Angus A New Strategy in the War on Cancer Cancer treatment hasn't improved the statistics very well. This is one of the rare people from inside the profession that is critical of the situation. Dealing with my mother-in-law's MDs, I see a lot of specialists who have deep knowledge, can't see over the edges of the rut they are in. The treatments are much more sophisticated, much more expensive, and the MDs make much more money. Perhaps they don't want to see the big picture, it would be too dismal.

Patients Like Me
Jamie Heywood The Big Idea My Brother Inspired
This is a complete replacement for the FDA. It only requires MDs and patients put their records into this analytical system. I am sure this could be done anonymously.

Some might object that this abandons the scientific method, exemplified by the FDA's double-blind clinical trials. Before the 1960s, drugs that had been tested in-vitro and using animal models were first tried on the sickest patients. These people bore the most risk because they had the most to gain. As cures were observed, the drug was given to less-sick, etc. Medicine progressed quite far using this model, even without much quantitative analysis. Given the new tools, it is hard to see what is gained by double-blind trials, and easy to see that the delays cost lives.

Eric Dishman Take Health Care Off The Mainframe Nice discussion of low-tech alternatives to hospital-centric medicine, and how much more quantitative info can be collected. This is the kind of thing that the whole gov-funded and gov-regulated system of medicine prevents. Nobody is really concerned with costs, the system operates with the same rules as cost-plus contracts.

Was reading a far-beyond-my-ken math paper just to see what I could understand. Good quote : "A good mathematician sees analogies between proofs, but a great mathematician sees analogies between analogies." Atiyeh

Sam Harris Science Can Show What Is Right
Very nice discussion of science providing moral values. He takes on the Moslem religion because that is easy (Moslem fundamentalists have retained barbaric customs and legal remedies longer than the other major religions) and popular. However, the argument applies to religions in general, and I think his audience gets that. This talk makes a better impression than I got from his book.

I had heard, and marveled at, the various Youtube videos of 'Canon Rock'. Finally learned the history: Wikipedai Canon Rock
NYTimes list of URLs

These people are immortalized to the same extent as Beethoven, I think. Once something gets N-million views, it becomes a permanent meme just because others will want to watch something that has N-million views, now become N-million + 1 views.

'Canon Rock' is also a great example of how culture builds, mixes, re-aggregates. The composer was Japanese. FunTwo, the kid who did a better version and gained a NYTimes article at about 10 million views, but now has 71 million, is Korean. The meme spread around the world very quickly, and there are now dozens of versions on all sorts of instruments.

I was also involved in a long thread on one of the political groups I follow. An apparently sincere fundamentalist Christian asked how to reconcile his very conservative social beliefs with a libertarian stance. A net-friend did a very good reply, was immediately attacked by 2 rabidly anti-gay posters. I was one of half-dozen who dealt with that. We were quite polite, given the substance and style of their arguments.

Toward the end, I re-read Lysander Spooner's "Vices Are Not Crimes - A Vindication Of Moral Liberty”, important for any high schooler. I realized that educated people could not have had the debate about whether to pass laws controlling moral behavior 100 years ago. In Spooner's time, the intellectual life of the nation was mostly handled by theologians. The brightest minds therefore became preachers and theologians. Now, the brightest minds go to science and technology, theology is a backwater. Our ideas of religion and God have devolved. Karen Armstrong has written about this.

I made 3 arguments I like. “Anti-gay bigots are sinning within their own belief system. Christians have gay children at the same rate as the rest of us. Many Christian gay children kill themselves as a direct result of the hostile environment they are raised within. For me, it is a sin to consciously make the world a worse place for anyone.” “Believe what you like, but you can't think what you like. Thinking and thinking about thinking have a very long history and have achieved great sophistication. Our entire civilization rests on that foundation. You may not invent new facts, new logic or new rules of evidence to support your point of view, as you will weaken that foundation.” “We are opposing you because you are promoting an anti-human agenda, not because you are Christian. You want to confuse those two issues.” Also, of course, the standard “this is an issue of human rights, and no entity has the standing to reduce anyone's human rights for any reason”. Not quite true, that, as there are diminished-capacity exceptions.

I have been doing a lot of research and thinking about education, which will be put into another post.

David Drake : “The Military Dimension”. Short stories, mostly good, mostly with a Vietnamese War thread. The VN references and slang probably make it unsuitable for my 13-year-old.

E.L.Doctorow's “Ragtime”. Very impressive writing I thought, and now find it is rated as one of the 100-best American novels by Time magazine. That counts against it, IMHO. Lots of real historical figures, so good for A. He will need to do a little research to figure out who is real and who isn't.

Charles Stross's “Iron Sunrise” and “Accelerando”. Both excellent. Accelerando is probably best. Both fairly advanced SciFi, “Accelerando” is a must-read.

Stephen Coonts' “Fortunes of War” and “Saucer”. “Saucer” is a boys coming-of-age book, A. likes it a lot. “Fortunes of War” is outdated in its future, interesting view of the technology of fighter jets.

Several other TED talks seemed important :
Neil Gershenfeld Ted Talk
This describes MIT's FabLab. They have a good web page, description of the software and hardware tools they use. I wonder if there is a business in running such a lab, charge $N / hour for use of the machines. Connections with schools ? I think they don't have funds these days.

Explorations of the net, books

I spent a lot of time on Youtube for the last couple of weeks. EDU channel is amazing : that and all of the other on-line sources of educational material remove that from the teacher's tasks. So, more of a teaching assistant role : labs, discussions, grading assignments, ... No wonder home schooling is a trend.

Will and Maeva dancing Boogie Woogie style are amazing. Went through a lot of boogie woogie piano, lots of duets are very good. Again, there are many mixes with other genres happening.

I normally read slashdot.com every day : only a few of the articles are normally interesting, but I scan them all. Ditto news.google.com and digg.com. Al Jazeera and Haaretz every few days. Al Jazeera English is far more honest / unbiased than almost any US media, at least I don't know of better. Haaretz has a lot of opinion pieces which are ditto. Anti-semitic, I guess 8).

I want to go through all of the biggest online info sources .

A.C. Clarke's and S. Baxter's "Sunstorm". Book 2 of "A Time Odyssey". Interesting info on the Sun's behavior. OK story, not a must read.

Robert J. Sawyer's "Calculating God". Very good, a must read. SciFi is a literature of ideas, this exemplifies that.

Jerry Pournelle's "Exile to Glory". OK, not a must read. Kid's story, tho. Standard future dystopia, Pournelle off on his tirades about the trends to a socialist/collectivist future, escape to space. Saved by super-wealthy, etc.

David Drake "The Sharp End". Good story, but you have to read other of the "Hammer's Slammers" series to grok this one. The armaments and tactics based on that technology are interesting in these stories, but I can do without so much violence in my reading. He anticipated the violence-porn that is common in the video games. Deficiency of his early stories is that the shock outweighs the story and the characters are not developed, tho "The Sharp End" is a bit better.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer". Very good, nearly a must-read. Good for teenage boys, at least. Post-apocalypse society trying to rebuild. I had a hard time believing that a nuclear power plant could sustain itself without constant deliveries of critical parts, but otherwise didn't have to suspend dis-belief dozens of times as I do with every single Hollywood movie.

Gregory Benford's "COSM", ...

I just this moment finished Benford's "COSM". A most excellent story, fictional (but ever so real) physical phenomena driving a story of academic science in a high-energy physics environment. Lots of wonderful quotes. I don't know that academic environment, but it fits with my (probably biased and stereotypical of people who hold some { meta, }-libertarian position) understanding of that world.

I spent a couple of days this week pursuing YouTube music. Russian opera singers via G., and via searches for opera sopranos, ... I noticed that Emma Kirkby wasn't listed, my favorite soprano of all times. (Second soprano in Hogwood's Society for Ancient Music recording). It turns out that those genre's don't mix. So far as I can find, Kirkby has never done grand opera. Very strange in an era in which so many cross-overs (I can name dozens, e.g. Huun Huur Tu and Angelite ) are happening. The state-space is growing exponentially, as every distinctive sub-genre is a new dimension. HHT is one of those dimensions, Angelite is another. They are both playing across a wide variety of genres.

This intersection is, IMHO, quite good : Fly, Fly, my Sadness

Consequently, only 4 books: Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson "The Lifeship". I have to think about why this novel is such a big step above what came before it, and why the step to Kim Stanley Robinson, McLeod, ... is another. There was something incomplete about the alien's mental universe. Cherryh does a much better job of revealing the evolving mental universe of the 'Adelman', effectively a slave owner. 3 = OK, but not a 'must-read'.

Jack mcDevitt's "Odyssey". Another "Priscilla Hutchins" ( 'Hutch' ) novel. This was good, nice mix of hard scifi, genuine logistics, a lot of well-drawn characters and insights into social roles and people. Very well written, IMHO. More than OK, not a 'must-read'.

A.R.Homer's "The Sobs of Autumn's Violins". WWII English counter-espionage as D-day happens. 2 = Marginal, didn't learn enough, characters weren't real enough.

Gordon R. Dickerson's "The Human Edge". A dozen short stories, each with some example of outside-the-box thinking. A good book for high-schoolers?