Societal Path Integral by Douglas Alexander Singleton

Great essay, Douglas. The path integral metaphor is beautiful and evocative (and among other things reminds me how much I loved Feynman's little book on QED). I completely agree with you on the advantages of social experimentation. I think Diamond is right to argue that Europe's fragmentation gave cities and states the space to experiment that eventually produced modern liberal democracy and capitalism.

You anticipated and addressed almost all the caveats that struck me. As you say, institutional structures may not scale up (or down--it's easier in many ways, for example, to address the entire US health care market at once than in pieces). And politics constrains what's possible, since we aren't governed by technocratic utility maximizers.

I would also add that while we may not have the ability to control which black-swan events befall us--this is what I write in my own essay--we can nevertheless make society more resilient to unexpected shocks. We can't prevent lightning from striking, but we can ensure ourselves against damage. In general, I think we should prepare not just for our median, best guess about the future, but for as much of the space of potential futures as possible.

Again, great essay. It deserves to do well.

Best,

Robert de Neufville

Doug,

I agree with an electron experiment, but not sure it's doable. Photons do fine to verify my thesis, o consistent with the links you give and many others. It ideally needs a 'range' of settings, filters and p-multiplyers to give enough data points to prove it's an elephant not the present camel! I'd have thought predicting the unexplained Aspect and Weihs data may have carried some weiht! (lol) but it seems old doctrine needs to be crushed to death before anyone will even look. I'm not sure that's possible.

Victor Vaguine's essay is interesting, including the Bell interview excerpt from 'Ghost in the Atom'; Question: "And you can't imagine a more elaborate arrangement that might expose these defects in quantum mechanics?"

John Bell: "I cannot, but I hope that's only because of my limitations. I think it is very probable that the solution to our problems will come through the back door; some person who is not addressing himself to these difficulties with which I am concerned will probably see the light. An analogy that I like is that of the fly buzzing against a window when the door is open. It can be extremely useful to stand back from your problems and just wonder about for a time, and it is quite possible that those of us who are somewhat fixated on these questions will not be those who see the way through".

He was almost certainly right. But unfortunately it seems even if a large butterfly shows the way in the flies will still insist there isn't one because the glass is still intact. How can that be overcome? I suggest a paper with a dozen or more authors may be needed to be taken seriously be editors. What do you think?

Peter

Glad to see your essay bouncing back after a probable sneak assault with 1's. I'm still getting them too. Hold tight for the roller coaster!

Hi Doug,

I'm very pleased that you liked my approach, as you appear to be the only other author to apply a physics metaphor to the problem.

We do agree on the central point of your essay, which is to 'try all paths' instead of a centralized command and control.

You mentioned that the path integral approach is a very close connection to thermodynamics/statistical mechanics. I have recently re-awakened to the fact that the Wick rotation will convert the partition function into a path integral and vice versa. I've spent some time on this amazing fact, and I plan to spend more.

Perhaps we can continue this discussion offline.

Congratulations on your current well-deserved high ranking in the contest.

By the way I received the 23 May 2014 issue of 'Science' in the mail this morning. It has a whole special section dedicated to "the Science of Inequality". There may be a new field budding.

My best regards

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Douglas,

The reason why you didn't comment on my essay might be your disagreement with paths of reasoning that I adopted from Galileo, Nobel, Michelson, and Shannon who deviated from current Ein(stein)stream.

On the other hand, I am sure some basic arguments must not be ignored:

- The only acceptable human perspective is that of mankind as a whole, not of any single national path; ethics must be adapted appropriately.

- The future is open.

- Non-causality only occurs as an artifact.

- All paths of reality are directed ahead.

- War, malnutrition, illnesses etc. were necessary and must be substituted instead of fighting against mere symptoms of irresponsible developments.

- Within foreseeable future mankind has only one earth.

- Paths of obvious fraud, e.g. claimed achieved cold fusion, are futile.

- While the topic "How should humanity steer the future?" suggests taking the somewhat illusory position of someone who steers e.g. by selected funding, I see the possibilities to anticipate discoveries and inventions rather limited.

Let me tell a story: A man who chaired an institute about 30 years ago dared promising to government and party in what was the GDR (Eastern part of Germany) to deliver exactly 40 inventions in honor of their 40th anniversary. Most of these planned inventions were, of course, close to fraud.

Don't you agree?

Best,

Eckard

Dear Douglas Singelton

You found a good analogy between path integrals and diversity, which is necessary in selection of good ideas. Another analogy are also neuronal networks. You also included the Black Swan theory. The first condition is that there is a lot of ideas. Capitalism and free market are also more successful than socialism because this diversity is allowed. Non-diversity was also one of the causes for the last financial crisis.

But we need also large scale planning or state initiative. Military research, for instance, gave that the internet arose. Similar diversity in needed also for publication of scientific papers, but here it is almost embargo for papers which are not from universities. It is written by Gibbs. This is analogically as free market embargo. Your formula for relations between energy and civilisations is also in connection with the paper, which try to find explanation, how life evolved. He claims that more developed life forms use more energy and so they are increasing entropy. I claim that mammals use more energy than lizards. Even today more developed cultures use more energy and causes more pollution (entropy). But, I think that computer technology reduces entropy, a little.

My essay

Best regards

Janko Kokosar

Douglas,

I have responded to your comments in my thread (under the common accidental Anonymous nickname!).

I also added the following:

PS - I know that the deadline is approaching. I did rate your essay, a few days ago, after commenting. You write that you hope to find more time to give a more thorough reading to my work. If this means that you have not yet rated it, please do (the deadline is approaching). Rating here is definitely a complex system. I`ve been for a long time in the top 15, but a couple of days ago, probably due to a malicious antipodal butterfly, I jumped to around rank 30 in one shot, which looks strange to me under both a continuous and a discrete mathematical viewpoint.

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for the interesting essay.

I think you might find some connection with my essay on computationally intelligent personal dialogic agents. This system (I have a prototype developed as part of a NSF CAREER award) can "steer" individual interactions by providing guidance in the moment of action. I envision many kinds of evaluation incorporating a multitude of factors as the system "tests" different interventions in human dialogue. It will be able to take your idea of evaluating many small projects and moving them to the level of conversations.

I'd appreciate a rating, if you can do that, since I am a bit short on ratings, and also appreciate it if you know of any potential collaborators in the further development of the dialogic system.

Thanks,

Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

Hi Janko,

Thanks for reading my essay and now that we have more time I will be able to read yours.I still have a list of other essays I promised to read, but the points you make are interesting and appear to have some connection to some of the themes in my essay. In regard to capitalism vs. socialism I would say one needs a socialistic form of capitalism :-) or probably more plainly capitalism with socialistic constraints in order to make the system a fair competition. For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union there was probably no more purely capitalistic place on Earth than Russia -- everything was for sale. But very quickly the wealth of Russia was concentrated into the hands of a few oligarchs. What seems to happen in unfettered capitalism (at least this appeared the case in Russia) was that after a brief period of competition the "winners" would use their position to unfairly crush the competition at which point one no longer had real capitalism -- a fair and open market place. Thus my conclusion was that one needed some outside constraints in place to prevent this from happening. However if some country becomes too regulated this is also not good.

On a different topic I agree with Phil Gibbs' critic of peer review. A lot of nonsense gets published that is just minor piddling with equations, and some stuff gets rejected that is really worthwhile. In this regard Phil is correct that not having an academic affiliation will put you already at a disadvantage. However, even if you have an academic affiliation and even if you have won a Nobel prize there can be resistance if you propose a really new idea. Look at the discussion above with Peter Jackson. He mentions a Nobel laureate in chemistry (Dan Shecktman) who proposed some novel idea in chemistry but had his work rejected for a long time. In a recent Cosmos episode it is discussed how Faraday's later ideas of E&M fields were ignored despite his many earlier successes. Finally there is the case of Julian Schwinger, one of the giants of 20th century physics, being rejected when he started to work on a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Cold fusion of course in regard to the original claims appears wrong, but there nevertheless seems to be some interesting but not understood reaction going on and at the time it was not clear immediately this was wrong so Schwinger was looking to see if there was some theoretical basis for this. I think Schwinger was so upset/disgusted with the reaction of his peers that he quit the National Academy of Science.

Anyway I will get to your essay before next Friday. Best,

Doug

Hi Doug

If you will read my essay, you will see that I think similarly as you. My arugment is that gaussian curve go from -infinity to plus infinity. I wish to say that university people have better chances for good idea, but, people outside the university has smaller chances, but this chance is not zero. Thus, for them we need better stronger filter. But the politics of arXiv, for instance is that almost absolutely reject our papers. (endorser, almost zero possibility).

About capitalsm I agree with you, it should be regulated.

But I only wish to say, that ideas (arXiv) or products (capitalism) come also from less state planed projects or from people with less capacity, although with less probability for sucess. If we cut gaussian curve that all that remain is very close to average, we loss, let us say 99% of all possible good products, or good ideas.

Best regards

Janko Kokosar

Hi Doug,

Your essay is extremely interesting, and I realize that it is of direct relevance to my work. Thank you very much for conceiving of it and crafting it so beautifully. I have downloaded it and I will be studying it further.

I started to expound upon such relevance, but I realize that any such discussion should be conducted after you have had a chance to read my work (if you haven't done so already).

In any case, I've rated your essay highly. I feel that it has some extremely important information for the optimization of our future course. All the best!

Warmly,

Aaron

P.S., You've probably read it, but if you haven't, I think you'll love Feynman's lecture on the principle of least action, Vol. 2, Ch. 19 of his [link:selfdefinition.org/science/25-greatest-science-books-of-all-time/20.%20Feynman%20et%20al.%20-%20The%20Feynman%20Lectures%20on%20Physics%20Volumes%201%20-%203%20%281963%29.pdf]Lectures on Physics[/link].

Doug,

I found your essay very readable well-thought-out and relevant. Far be it for me to judge how humanity should steer the future (I have made Einstein say as much in my essay) and particularly the very reasonable and logical multiple path search optimisation method you have suggested.

My instincts however are that in social and political action people just go ahead and do what they know best, the tried and true, the easiest, or in a society like Japan, what is least likely to be criticised by friends and neighbors. In other words searching out different possible paths may go against the grain of human nature.

Or indeed of physics, Feynman notwithstanding. In my Streamline Diffraction Theory the streamline is the path integral along which energy flows as light diffracts. And according to my Beautiful Universe theory, nature follows these streamlines to propagate energy, form atoms and all sorts of fields. In all these cases, Nature finds a unique path from A to B. Perhaps humans have evolved to act that way too. Picasso said "I do not seek, I find". Perhaps for humanity to get out of its present difficulty, such confidence, even arrogance and sense of venturing linearly along a a single path (and I do not mean that Bali bridge!) is needed.

Yours is certainly the safer way, though!!

Best wishes

Vladimir

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for having a look at my essay and your comments.

Yes, whether my proposal or any proposal would be implemented is a big question. The people entrusted to enact laws for society and provide direction are often driven by the desire to stay in office which is a very poor motivator for (or at least is uncorrelated to) building a well functioning and logical society. This was the point of my ending story in the essay. In any case I agree that coming up with some plan and actually implementing it are very different beasts.

Also since you use Einstein in your essay (which I will try to read soon) let me say that he is an example, in the scientific realm, of going straight toward a goal rather than trying out different paths. Einstein had a fixed set of concepts in mind of how Nature should work and he was vindicated in his choice of concepts with special relativity and general relativity. However, later in his scientific life this dogged adherence to these fixed concepts lead him only to dead ends (apparently, since it could still be that when we really understand QM Einstein's adherence to his idea of how Nature should work may be proven correct). So if I take your meaning correctly you would suggest that having a social/political version of Einstein would be better than the slow trial and error method suggested by my path integral metaphor. I agree with this but (i) Einstein's in any field are extremely rare (ii) even Einstein was (apparently) wrong after some point in his life by his strict adherence to certain fundamental concepts. The path integral suggested approach is a way to have built in flexibility and openness to new directions once old directions have taken one as far as one can go. It has the disadvantage of being much slower than an inspired move in the right direction, but it also would avoid "inspired" moves in the wrong direction (e.g. Pol Pot's turning Cambodia into an agrarian communist "paradise").

I will get to your essay soon. Best regards,

Doug

Hi Doug,

Thanks for bringing some basic physics into tbe essay mix. Calculating the best probabilities for the future is the method to steer to desired goals.

I advocate a technique to use when the goals are fuzzy... universal education. Take a look, I think you will find it interesting.

Thanks,

Don Limuti