(Above: Moments before delivering my 'Best Man' speech at my brother's wonderful wedding a few months ago.)
Healthcare Epistemocrat says, "Cheers to Chris, a fellow Epistemocrat!"
All members of the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE), each and every 'Patient of One', engages in his/her own personalized, anthropological 'searching and acting' along the healthcare spectrum through tinkering. This weekend, Chris Owens (@SingleOrigin), a primal / paleo / evolutionary / ancestral fitness 'theory to practice' practitioner, shared with me his 'n=1' clinical trial in body by science self-experimentation--he's on a wholistic, non-linearly meandering and fractally jumping course. Notice, as you read his personal mythology--his story--how his reflective activities (researching, thinking, trial-and-error solution seeking) can be visualized as Levy-flights: intense, focused study in one domain (a newfound CrossFit Web site, for instance) followed by a 'flight' into a novel realm (the Paleo diet, for example) for another vigorous excavation process, turning up unexpected gems and insights as well as serendipitous leads and connections along the way. It's entropy maximizing, with systemic protection against 'tunneling' built in (an 'anti-tunneling' device), given fixed path-length constraints.
So, as an elegant introduction, here is how philosopher David Hume, who shares a kindred and epistemocratic spirit with Nassim Taleb, described his tinkering affairs (warm thanks to Dave Lull):
Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou'd at last guide me on her foot-steps?
In a similar fashion, Chris followed 'fortune' as his 'Eureka(!), I have found it' guiding light, 'leaving all established (SAD) opinions' behind in the falsified dust; he opted, instead, for perceptively pursuing, to their (physio)logical conclusions, the positive Black Swan hits that emerged unexpectedly from the envelope of serendipity (*bolded sections below = emphasis mine):
I had not really given diet or fitness much serious consideration. I have always been thin, but I did start to notice a "softening" in my late twenties. We moved from New York to Atlanta shortly thereafter. In New York, I walked everywhere, and I stood all day for work. Upon arriving in Atlanta, we immediately got a car and I sat ... all the time. Needless to say, this did nothing but add to the softening. On top of that, I was tired all the time and had a general feeling of malaise and depression. I decided something needed to be done. The longer I waited, the harder it was going to be.
I, like most people, thought the key to losing weight was going to be exercise. I started to do some research (I’m always researching something to my wife’s constant annoyance). I knew I wanted this exercise to be functional, but I couldn't figure out exactly what to do. One day, while in one of my coffee shop accounts, I noticed a flyer for the local CrossFit. I read their little blurb and it seemed really good. Well, as good as anything can seem on a flyer. I went home and went online to do some research. Of course I ended up at the main site and dove in. I read the philosophy and watched hours and hours of videos. This seemed like exactly what I wanted to do. At the same time, I was scared out of my mind to try.
While freaking myself out on crossfit.com, I noticed that the diet they recommended was The Zone. This gave me pause, actually, because in my mind this was a fad diet from the 90's. I decided to read up on it and found they had some sound reasoning for using it, and it wasn’t like the cabbage soup diet. But in my research of The Zone, I kept running across The Paleo Diet. Once I read the theory behind it, everything just made sense. I have no other way to explain it. It seemed obvious all of the sudden. I was hooked. I started digging deeper and deeper into paleo/primal/ancestral nutrition and fitness. That's how I discovered people like Art De Vany, Mark Sisson, Robb Wolf, Stephan Guyenet and yourself (as well as a host of others). It has been a revelation.
Although it all seemed too difficult at first, I took it one step at a time. I thought I might die after that first CrossFit workout, but I went back the next day. The same is true with my diet. It was hard at first, but I’ve just tried to move forward everyday. Educating myself on the topic made things a lot easier. I now eat almost completely "paleo" and just started up CrossFit again in August. Since starting this journey, I'm down 20lbs, I'm 8-9% body-fat, feel better, sleep better, my mood has improved dramatically, and I can do a double bodyweight deadlift. In general I feel pretty freaking great! Now, all I want is to keep learning, keep progressing, keep improving and help others do the same.
Take care,
Chris Owens
@SingleOrigin
Again, "Cheers to Chris, a fellow AFE 'Patient of One' Epistemocrat!"
Feel free to contact me anytime to share your 'n=1' mythology with the AFE (community). Each (hero's) journey provides another valuable data-point in the 'book' we are writing collectively.
We're creating quite a healthy '12-Step' program in sugar (debt) detox.
And the positive Black Swan soars in to rid us of our sugar and debt addictions for good: remember, physiological economics keeps (grace) hopes high.
Look alive.
Together, we can thrive.
To good health,
Brent
Great post.
ReplyDeleteYou inquired as to my client's responses to the note "we live by fiction." I'll be writing an entire blog post about it and how it relates to teaching in general. The response has created great conversation thus far.
Best,
Skyler
Thanks, Skyler.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading your 'We Live by Fiction' essay. Please post a link here when it goes live.
Keep the conversation going.
Best,
Brent
Hey Brent,
ReplyDeleteYou (formerly?) had on this post "Interestingly, I read comments that spontaneous order maximizes entropy as well, which bolsters the epistemology behind bottom-up, undirected trial-and-error experimentation. " -- I was interested in this, could you expand on this as possible? (specifically, spontaneous order -> entropy)
Hi Brett,
ReplyDeleteIn my, 'Toxicity of Information Paradox' essay, I made that statement:
http://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2008/04/toxicity-of-information-paradox.html
I also said that we can view entropy as, "diversification across as many scales and dimensions as possible."
Fixed path-length constraints are the ecological realities of searching under uncertainty in the real-world: we only have so much energy, time in the day, brain storage and reflection capacity, degrees of freedom to think and act, etc. So, in light of this scenario, maximizing entropy when tinkering, given these limits, would expose us in the most diversified manner possible to the envelope of serendipity; that is, we optimize our chances of discovering positive Black Swan hits and novelties that we never could have imagined. This is built into the Barbell philosophy for the ~10-20% of your 'portfolio' that you commit to self-experimenting (tinkering / trial-and-error solution searching).
Enter spontaneous order: Imagine you are playing with Legos. The parts come in different shapes and sizes, and there is a Lego manual that gives very detailed, top-down instructions for how to build the object displayed on the cover of the box, be it a ship or a castle. By following the non-spontaneous, directed/paternal engineering instructions in this step-by-step manual, you will surely use all the Lego pieces included in the box as directed and will construct the object as the manufacturers intended. Bravo: you followed the Food Pyramid, serving suggestions and all, and you turned into an 'alien' (the predicted outcome). This approach produces a very low entropy system via an entropy minimizing process. Enter entropy: increasing entropy turns over new leafs and previously explored crevices, sprawling into the world of 'unknown unknowns'. So, conversely, imagine that you boldly throw out the manual entirely (give it to a 'social engineer' so he can write the 24th Edition, this time with ten times the number of hoop-jumping steps), and instead opt to construct a 'yet-to-be-built' object by tinkering stochastically with the available resources (the fixed limits of Lego pieces that came in the box), stacking and connecting these building blocks as you see fit (and you may not use all of them). This is bottom-up, undirected trial-and-error action. This is how spontaneous order operates. Spontaneously, as local dynamics play out--only certain pieces can combine with certain pieces give the number of holes in and the shape of the Lego pieces you were dealt--you act as an 'experimental architect' and view the construction process as a living and evolving entity. Then, like an artist, at some point, you stop, following much piecing, unpiecing, repiecing, and realize that you have built, spontaneously, a house that is much more aesthetically appealing and valuable than the 'stock' object featured on the cover of the Lego box. For most of the construction process, as a bottom-up self-experimenter--an Architect of One--you had no idea what the final product would look like; however, despite this apparent disorder in your modus operandi, the final product coalesced nicely, manifesting as a novel product that was better than anything you could have imagined a priori. This is a high entropy process because it stretches the possibilities explored along the way, bringing uncertainty into the equation, harnessing it in a positive way. Thus, undirected stochastic tinkering diversified the scales and dimensions that you considered and tried during construction, and the product that resulted displayed spontaneous order that trumped the predictable, top-down product on the Lego cover.
Best,
Brent
Correction: "Enter entropy: increasing entropy turns over new leafs and previously explored crevices, sprawling into the world of 'unknown unknowns'."
ReplyDeleteOf course, I meant "unexplored crevices".
Consider the Web world: PatientsLikeMe.com is a hotbed for increasing informational entropy--each thread, discussion, topic covered, conversation, etc. on that Web site expands our collective knowledge into deeper and deeper niches of understanding diseases, medicine, healing, and health. PatientsLikeMe.com is self-directing, organizing spontaneously from the bottom-up, Wiki-style, as users respond to local dynamics in their own personal pursuits.
However, we can 'tunnel too deeply' and lose sight of the bigger picture; that's the downside of increasing entropy: we get 'out of touch', so to speak. Hence, Levy-flights act as anti-tunneling devices, prompting us to take a 'flight' out of these deep, dark, unexplored crevices and go find another realm, domain, or perspective to search and entertain.
Thanks, Brett.
Great question/consideration.
Best,
Brent
Brent,
ReplyDeleteYou mean paint-by-numbers is for aliens? Oh well, back to the canvas.
Seriously, doing research is a bit like tunneling, but teaching a course is like taking a Levy flight. As a result, I get to see both the forest and the trees.
Thanks, Aaron.
ReplyDeleteI agree; that's a great analogy--one I have used as well.
I have always liked that model for operation in academia. Teaching is a great way to step back, reflect, and reorient your perspective to stay connected with the 'bigger picture' and a large-scale sense of time. You don't want to tunnel too deeply, get lost with no return, and never re-emerge from the forest again. Your efforts are for naught if that occurs.
There is no step-by-step 'Lego manual' for research; you are tunneling, advancing the entropy front, in a self-directed manner into uncharted waters, and, as a result, the only way you can succeed is through tinkering iteratively in a trial-and-error, updating function type of approach. The research project evolves as it unfolds, and then it revolves and evolves again. That's the only way to stumble upon novelty and breakthroughs. Unfortunately, the NIH tries to direct research too often in a top-down manner, spending billions of dollars while attempting to attack problems like cancer in an 'organized' fashion. However, as Morton Meyers' critically important book, 'Happy Accidents', shows (http://mortonmeyers.com/ --> Nassim Taleb says, "Read it twice!"), the greatest leaps in medicine, including cancer treatments, have come from unexpected off-model positive Black Swan hits producing therapeutic results in ways we never could have predicted nor imagined. Luckily, folks pursued these novel presentations, and did not shirk them off as unimportant, to their logical conclusions and discovered life-saving healing modalities.
It's a problem of making the unseen seen. The NIH thinks it 'sees' the unseen, a priori, or knows where to find the unseen; Seth Roberts and self-experimenters know that the unseen is unseen and thus can only become seen by stumbling upon the positive Black Swans that emerge from the envelope of serendipity--you can't envision the wheel before the wheel exists; otherwise, you already had the wheel (it's the inherent nature of technological progress). Experimenters who operate in this bottom-up, semi-blind way continually ask new questions, reframe situations differently, and keep, as Feynman says, "the door to the unknown ajar." The problem is, as we lose self-ownership in scholarship, the folks with the purse-strings may control things and not allow scientists to pursue these new options that emerge unexpectedly during the pre-planned research process. If this limit occurs, researchers must grind through the directed plan they set out on when they started and must, unfortunately, ignore revelations that could prove exponentially more fruitful than the previously envisioned study.
I think there is a sophisticated craftsmanship to integrating paint-by-the numbers with being an artist: both provide value, but tunneling on numbers can increase exposure to negative Black Swans (think banking risk management tools like VaR, despite their 'scientification') while also restricting our abilities to pursue positive Black Swans (consider how the Gaussian tells us to ignore tail events, despite the empirical reality that these tail events 'take the cake' and trump all other points within the 95% Confidence Intervals).
There's a Barbell portfolio approach to academia as well, and I think you live it quite well.
Best,
Brent
I agree that the top-down attack on diseases like cancer and obesity that NIH tries to drive is not a very effective approach, but in their defense, NIH is a multi-faceted organization made up of thousands of scientists as well as the administrators, clerks, staff, etc. In fact, I'm serving as a grant proposal reviewer on an NIH panel that meets in two weeks, so I'm part of the system. The good thing is that many of us do try to fund projects based on the science but not the 'objectives' so to speak. That is, I review many grant proposals that are exciting, but may turn out nothing. Most of the scientist reviewers, like myself, acknowledge that every funded researcher is going to use some of their funding to pay for side projects that might not even be remotely related to the proposal, and that they are expected to pursue serendipitous findings that may (and usually do) turn up while engaged in the funded work. I do this and so do all of my colleagues who are funded by NIH (and NSF). It is sort of an understood given that without this type of exploratory research, new discoveries and ideas would grind to a halt. Still, I wish we didn't have to pay lip service to the stated goals of our proposals and pretend like we aren't all engaged in undisclosed side-projects as well. I don't like the "don't ask, don't tell" unwritten policy as it probably stifles creativity and exploration to some degree.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Aaron.
ReplyDeletehttp://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/38468
The NIH, perhaps, is too big and unwieldy, I suspect. Innovation in research is best supported by a smaller-scale, entrepreneurial type of ecology. Like any program, the entrepreneurs/researchers find creative ways to pursue their side-projects while still jumping through the necessary hoops. Open science would be better, as you said. There certainly are fads and fashions in NIH funding (think genetics research), which narrow the range of research projects pursued considerably: follow the money. Despite any of this, though, it's hard to defend an organization that missed the effects of sugar and poor nutrition on cancer and diabetes while funding billions of dollars in drug treatment research.
For instance, if AVMs (Ancestral Vending Machines) were proposed as a research project, the NIH would not fund it. Many big banks would not have funded Google in the late 1990s; at that time, Yahoo viewed Google as a small niche search engine that would never compete with them.
I think it's a struggle between those researchers/practitioners who know how science really works and the bureaucratization of the research industrial complex.
Best,
Brent
Thanks for the breakdown, Brent!
ReplyDeleteI do believe that spontaneity does have innate forms of order (though generally not apparent to us - as it is perceieved as spontaneous/undirected) - though I had construed your 'spontaneous order' as order emerging spontaneously, as opposed to order growing out of a base of spontaneity (to use your example, the first would be shaking the box of legos and pouring them on the floor and expecting a orderly structure to appear, the second taking spontaneously used/chosen parts to form order/structure).
The Web is an amazing, wide open space where spontaneity and undirected exploration can be pursued to, potentially, significant positives. I see many commenting (not here) on the fact that the internet allows extreme tunneling (i.e., viewing a whole family of websites that align only with ones own political view) - I see few reflecting simultaneously that such freedom of choice, and massive amount of sites and data, also increase the chances of coming across the unexpected.
My own interest in spontaneity and its outlays was prompted by my work (performance & research) in Improvisation - which I posted about Here. Thanks again!
Thanks, Brett.
ReplyDeleteThe 'spontaneous order' process depends upon the medium. Building a Lego house out of Legos involves a different medium than sugar crystal formation or improvisation. Sugar crystals, snow flakes, etc. form by 'just throwing the reactants together' through what appears, on the surface, to be chaotic processes, but they generate novel products with intricate order each time. Improvisation is an excellent example of bottom-up versus top-down process. You could direct someone from the top down, instructing him on every move to make (low entropy), or you could embrace entropy's role in uncovering the unknown and let the scene evolve via minimally structured improvisation upon/within a foundational framework. Improvisation in this way would be a high entropy, non-linear process that yields novel results each time, just as the sugar crystals and snow flakes do. And, humans enjoy this type of uncertainty, from an entertainment perspective, when done right:
http://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2008/04/asymmetry-of-uncertainty.html
To improvising as we go,
Brent
And, yes, I agree, the Web is amazing place for engaging the right search process to uncover the unknown. Reflection on the move is the key to doing this right.
ReplyDeletePS. 'Aesthetics and Tinkering'
ReplyDeletehttp://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2008/01/aesthetics-and-tinkering.html
Question: If, instead of the NIH primarily driving the research engine, the research 'economy' operated via a diverse landscape of Craig Venter type labs, would we increase exposure to technological innovation. In short, would research in cancer, diabetes, etc. advance more rapidly like we see with technology in the Silicon Valley and beyond?
To thought experimenting,
Brent
Interesting observations about the two types of spontaneity: bottom-up such as what produces snowflakes, and top-down such as what produces houses (and paintings, etc.). I actually think that, in light of evolution by natural selection, they are both top-down in a sense. The constraints set by the laws of the physical universe results in the formation of snowflakes from the right starting reagents. That is, top-down from the point of view of the physical universe. Humans have evolved a remarkable ability for pattern completion (narrative construction, for example--Taleb discusses this at great length in his book, and on how this gets humans into trouble). The psychological processes of pattern-completion in humans (and other species) was presumably designed by evolution by natural selection, which is one of the fundamental laws of our physical universe. So an alien from ANOTHER universe that operates by different fundamental principles (laws) might view snowflakes and houses as both produced by the same natural laws of the universe which it is visiting (i.e., ours).
ReplyDeleteThanks, Aaron.
ReplyDeleteNice addition.
This is critically important:
"The psychological processes of pattern-completion ..."
Enter the world of 'grace nudges' and 'choice architecture'. We can engage our evolved natures constructively and in healthy, developmental and supportive ways, if nurtured in the right decision making ecology, without using force and total top-down directive (that just blows up in human behavior realms anyways; folks rebel). Building the right platforms and social scaffolding points to allow people to construct their lifestyles effectively is an important process.
Like Nassim says, 'the best way to cut a diamond, is with a diamond'. We live by personal mythology--our own narratives--so embracing this reality to help people craft better stories to live by is the key to taking science from the bench to the beach (real-life), so to speak.
Best,
Brent
We definitely do enjoy uncertainty - watching it (the unknown) be encountered on stage (in improv, for example) is thrilling, knowing that the performer is walking headlong into the unplanned darkness. There's certainly a vicarious aspect of it, "living" the unknown that's being encountered, just through seeing someone else experience it.
ReplyDeleteThe pattern-forming (and pattern-searching/recognizing) instinct that you and Aaron mention I believe is actually a big part of being able to improvise - generating something, then 'justifying' it (that is, recognizing/creating a pattern where the generated 'thing' could fit). This is something that I continue to formulate, a concept that I realized has strong resonance (actually originally prompted in part by my first read of Taleb's The Black Swan) -- a connection between two (now-)unrelated fields that i'm working to furrow a path between, one to the other.
Thanks, Brett.
ReplyDeleteThis type of 'live/active narrating' that you describe is critical to athletic performance, from a sports psychology perspective. As an athlete, I constantly tell myself 'stories' throughout competitions (and training) in order to push myself, focus, and excel given the constantly changing conditions. It's bricolage psychology: you have to take the given resources available and the ecological conditions in the present, and craft a story to 'justify' your next move. Over time, high performing athletes learn to do this instinctively and expediently, raising their reaction times and improving the effectiveness of their decision making. Playing basketball, soccer, tennis, etc. is quite similar, from this cognitive / psychological perspective, to improvisation: everything unfolds uncertainly, but often turns out even better than expected--entropy harnessed to produce spontaneous order.
Aaron, I am sure you have had this experience teaching: entering a lecture with an intended 'game plan', then the lecture takes an unexpected course and you improvise to deliver a presentation that was better than you had imagined a priori.
'Chance favors the prepared mind', they (Pasteur) say.
Best,
Brent
Yep, my favorite lectures were ones that were Pasteurized. The worst thing I face as a professor is an unresponsive (usually read uninterested) class. Ugs!
ReplyDelete'Many of the NASA researchers I've interviewed over the years have said that the biggest breakthroughs tended to come not from carefully planned, narrow investigations, but from a scientist or engineer cocking their head one day and saying, "I wonder what would happen if ..."' (thanks to Dave Lull)
ReplyDeletehttp://correspondents.theatlantic.com/lane_wallace/2009/09/curiosity.php
The article touches on making the unseen seen, and how that actually occurs in practice:
'"High-risk, high-reward projects require hard decisions that are best made by individuals, not committees," The Economist quoted Williams as arguing, in a debate over changing the current research approval and funding processes at large observatories.'