Dear Prof,

I observe you have not commented on my post. I will be glad you comments and also try to read my article and possibly leave a comment- Perhaps some statement were not clearly stated in my previous post. There was electricity failure (power cut) in my area and the PC battery was almost empty and so the post was sent in hurry!

In my article, the hypothesis is hinged on "No natural disaster" which appears to be constant since humanity cannot interfere with this. As you know, certain assumptions could be made while conducting academic research; should we therefore put the "side criticisms and restrictions" on gamification has explained in my previous post as variables to be kept constant? I am a little familiar with your model of gamification that is why I have raised this point. Could you also check up with the researchers at the University of Hamburg Germany if possible? Thank you.

You wrote about human's action matching his reaction. Likewise his "intuitive feeling matches with decision". This is similar to some of my outlooks in my article and really be glad if you can read it. I based my philosophy of human's actions on Newton laws. Please kindly find time to read it and leave a comment behind.

Thank you.

Gbenga

Sabine<

Your 5 step plan is like a science-aided process. Processes are something common in our corporate world, something that doesn't require thought, only action. Fortunately your steps don't involve just external actions but engaged brains as well.

Your "gamification" is a recognition of the short-term gratification enhancing long-term goals. Certainly it is a recognition of how short-term solutions run rampant in government and corporations, something contributing to long-term needs like climate change being ignored.

Great ideas for a daunting problem

Jim

    Sabine,

    A really well written essay which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. One question I have which I would appreciate your response to: you seem to be more focused on individual or social decision making, but don't really get into political decisionmaking. Isn't it in some sense the job of political institutions to take the long term view and structure society and incentives with that in mind? Of course, in many places they are failing miserably at this long view- is the reason for this the same as with the rest of us?

    I would love your feedback and vote on my own essay- even if it might be negative Such is the only way we learn anything. Thanks again for your enjoyable piece.

    Rick Searle

      Sabine --

      A very fine essay... like your blog, clear and sensible and fun to read. I think it should win, if only because it might be the only entry with a practical approach. I agree, it doesn't make sense to try to change people, but we can change the informational environment in which they operate. In fact, that environment is changing quite radically, now -- which is the theme of my essay on communications technology. And this is an evolution we might hope to "steer" in the manner you suggest.

      I like very much that you focus on an everyday issue I can easily relate to -- that no matter how much I'd like to do the right thing and act responsibly, it's so hard to know what that means that I basically give up... just give a few dollars to a few organizations that I hope know what they're doing, and try not to think about it. But it's not just complexity that's my problem. It's also the feeling that whatever I do can make only the tiniest difference to what's happening at a global scale. I don't respond to phone surveys because it's too depressing that what I say won't matter, that it gets reduced to a checkbox answer.

      In fact, I think you're wrong that complexity is the root of our problems now. Maybe things look different in the civilized world, but here in the US it seems clear that the free-market principle (which I certainly agree with) has become an ideological screen for the domination of markets by financial power and its political allies. It's a deep problem that so much power lies with institutions, private and public, that have their own very primitive priorities. That's the main obstacle to effective action on climate change, to take one example -- not the complexity of the science.

      But the issue you address is very important, and the notion of priority maps feeding into a global information network gives me hope -- maybe we can find ways to shift the balance back toward a participatory democracy. But I wonder if there's something missing. I think many of us would have a hard time prioritizing our hopes and desires, or even putting them into words. I'm not sure passing out questionnaires will provide the needed input to your system, though if such a project got off the ground, it might help get us focused on what we really need and want. As to brain-scans, I'm happiest believing that no such technology will ever be feasible.

      Yet you've already addressed this problem in your essay, suggesting we get the scientists to develop this system for us first, working with a limited range of priorities that might be more explicit and quantifiable. If it works for them, we can think about how to broaden the scope.

      Thanks again for giving us such a clear-minded and inventive piece.

      -- Conrad

        Igwe

        I think you addressed the author as comrade. This salutation has some political connotations. That's just my thoughts.

        Thanks for sharing this essay, Sabine. I think you're right that humanity's greatest challenge is social rather than technological. I think you're also right to say that we could do a lot--both technologically and institutionally--to improve our collective decision-making. If we made choices more rationally and on the basis of better information it would go a long way toward improving our future prospects.

        But in my view better information-processing isn't enough. I don't believe most of our problems stem from an inability to reason through the consequences of our actions (although we could certainly do a better job of reasoning through the consequences of our actions!). In my view--this is what I argue in my own essay--the more profound issue is that there is no single neutral best course of action.

        We're not fighting over the steering wheel just because we are stupid, but because we want to go to different places. This makes simply designing an impartial information processing framework a political problem as well as a technological problem. Not only do we have competing visions for the future--I doubt even individuals have stable, well-defined sets of priorities of the kind you seem to imagine--but we disagree over who should receive the benefits of and who should bear the costs of the choices we make. We disagree, in other words, over what's fair.

        My own view is that we also need to create institutions that do more align the interests of individuals more directly with the interests of humanity as a whole. Otherwise we may be in danger of steering humanity off a cliff.

        Best,

        Robert de Neufville

          This is still my favorite essay for its informality and straightforward realism. But I'm not seeing the five-step program to save the world. What is new about identifying goals, other than calling this "priority maps (TM)"? OK, everybody should get clear about what they want. And we should all be more efficient and consistent in ordering our priorities and pursuing them effectively. Maybe use some advertising and management techniques on ourselves to keep ourselves on track. What else? I'm seeing some big problems in this world, and maybe small thinking is the best we can do, but...

            Mark,

            We are failing to solve problems that affect mankind on a global scale, problems that have many layers, are interrelated, and require that we act in a coordinated way. We are presently unable to solve these problems because we do not, as a collective, have a way to route the necessary information to the actors, that is, individual people. The priority maps are the routers of this information. This is what is necessary to be able to solve the problems. I am not claiming it is sufficient, but without a mechanism like this, I don't think mankind will fare very well in the long run. Sooner or later, this ability to correctly anticipate collective action and its consequences on large scales might develop by natural selection. But I don't think we have the time for this. Best,

            Sabine

            Robert,

            You are right of course that better information routing isn't sufficient, but it is necessary. Of course we do not agree on what to do and also need means to aggregate people's vlues and convert them into action, but for people's opinions to be taken into account they first need to have the information to be able to form an opinion. I will put your essay on the reading list, it sounds interesting :) Best,

            Sabine

            Hi Conrad,

            Thanks for the kind words. I have actually tried to avoid the word 'complexity' though I wasn't entirely successful. It's such a vague expression that people cannot really agree on what it means. Forget about the word for a moment, it remains the fact that humans lack the skill to anticipate large-scale and long-term trends in global systems, systems consisting of people and their environment, of financial and economic transactions, of media influence and political corruption. These problems are solvable if the system is adaptive, but it can only adapt if information about its status is feed back in, leading to a change in behavior. Now the behavior of all these systems is routed through humans, meaning the information has to go through the humans. That's why the priority maps. Best,

            Sabine

            Rick,

            Well, 9 pages isn't much space. You're right that I didn't get into political decision making. Political decision making basically means aggregating individual values to convert them into systemic changes. The political systems that we presently have don't do this very well. One major problem with them is that they are too slow compared to the speed at which the economic and financial system reacts. In any case, the mechanism to update the political system is the same again, you need to enable simple feedback about its status combined with knowledge about the system. I certainly hope that we'll see a major reconstruction and update of western democracies in the soon future. I'll have a look at your essay, but I presently have a lot on my reading list already, so it might take a while. Thanks for your feedback,

            Sabine

            I think it would be a good idea to offer the organizing and reward services you describe in the essay. It comes across as ethically acceptable due to the voluntary nature of these "apps" (should they be called brain apps or etc?) However we can wonder, if the presumed easier access of elites to these apps would give them even more advantage. I wonder if, instead of just reflecting back each individual's preferences, the app could be engineered or even required in regulations, to present at least some portion of global priorities etc? Something to think about at least.

            PS, my essay is up at: Flashlights, Mirrors, Real Brains and Willpower: Steering Ourselves to Steer Our Future.

            People have for many decades worked to create automated tools where users express their preferences and then get decision recommendations. There are even a number of such sites for political recommendations. In general these are not popular, and they are mostly just not good. Most useful decision recommendation tools, like Google or Auto GPSs, don't vary much at all with the person, and so don't bother to collect personal preferences. The useful tools that do vary more by person tend to base their recommendations on a dataset of prior decisions by that person, instead of on explicit abstract expressions of preference.

            If our tools are this weak for concrete problems where we have a lot of data and feedback, I don't see much hope for them giving much assistance anytime soon on the big hard problems of how we can each help humanity's future. Datasets of previous decisions by a person aren't very useful, most people don't much understand the relevant abstract concepts, the decision problems are very hard, and there are far more reasons to be concerned that claimed sources of advice are really pushing some agenda.

            Really, this isn't a problem that is ready to be handed off to smart robots. We'll have to actually *think* about it ourselves.

              Dear Sabine;

              You wrote : "some think that quantum computers will solve our problems" and you mention that they will not be able to do so.

              My proposition is that quantum computers are not limited by the "black OR white" solution but can also reach all the tones of grey in between the black and white. Once we will have created a quantum computer with 1,000 qubits and control its "decoherence" there will be 10^300 possible configurations, which is more as all the atoms in our visible universe, so we have stocked 10^300 solutions for problems that can occur. Of course this does not mean that any question can be answered, but maybe every question is already answered the moment we achieved this quantum state, even putting on the "power" may not be nececerry...

              When we will be able to couple this quantum "computer" to the brain microtubules and so create an entanglement between the available solutions in the "machine" and the quantum coherence in our brain in these microtubules we will have "available" all the answers and maybe able to steer our causal "future".

              see [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1991]my essay :"STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS ?"[:link] Thnak you for putting it on your reading list, maybe you will leave a comment on my thread and rate it in conformity with your appreciation.

              best regards

              Wilhelmus

              I agree, Robin. I think Sabine is right to argue that better decision-making tools would help. We could certainly improve the tools we have now. But it's not clear humans actually have the stable, well-defined sets of preferences we like to imagine we do. Nor is it clear any set of decision-making tools can really be neutral. How we make decisions inevitably becomes the source of political and ideological conflict.

              Dear Sabine Hossenfelder,

              Thanks for your excellent essay, appreciated by many judging from your score and the number of comments. You acknowledge "inborn knowledge", a topic James Putnam's essay deals with.

              You also note that our political, economic, and social systems that govern our lives are presently adaptive by trial and error, concluding that this is too slow to solve current problems we face. John C Hodge addresses this in his essay, and is somewhat at odds with this. The key is to partition the system finely -- many instances of local trial and error. Our Internet and existing communication systems will tell us which work and which fail, just as the state of major cities in the US tells us which policies work and which don't work very well. This is essentially parallel processing! Of course, if you are referring to a global system operating by trial and error, then the result is likely catastrophic.

              I certainly agree that "quantum computing" will not solve our problems. My favorite line in your essay is:

              "The point here is not to manipulate people into changing their ways because I or you or some supercomputer thinks it would be better... The point is to help people make decisions."

              I quote you in my essay and suggest change I think would be very helpful.

              Your "politics by looks" is shocking but not surprising. That's partly why Washington DC is called "Hollywood for ugly people" (relatively speaking). Also, your example of the mortgage housing crisis was hardly unrecognized. But the politicians who benefited by forcing banks to provide bad loans to their constituents actively opposed efforts to rein things in -- part of the problem I address. I also quibble a little with your distinction between science in the academy and "for-profit" science. Much science today has been politicized, and is essentially "for-profit", whether labeled so or not.

              Anyway, thanks again for your fine essay and well thought out approach, and I hope you will find my essay, the Thermodynamics of Freedom, interesting and compatible with your ideas. I look forward to any comments you might make.

              My best regards,

              Edwin Eugene Klingman

                Edwin,

                Thanks for your comment. I agree with what you say. I see that my sentence about trial and error can be misunderstood. You need a system that provides feedback which tells people whether a decision was working towards or against their goals. I think that is what you mean with 'many local trial and errors' though I think the word 'local' is misleading here. I would call that a small variation and learning. With 'error' I basically mean complete failure that may lead to a breakdown, which is what you want to avoid. Example: You want a feedback that stabilizes the financial system (reaction to small variations) rather than one which only kicks in if things have gone dramatically wrong (error). I can see though that I didn't make this very clear.

                In any case, I will have a look at your essay which sounds very interesting. Best,

                Sabine