Above: My short piece about Game Plan Academy (GPA) in Sacramento Press features a hyper-local synergy:
Brian Geremia is a
GPA &
Ancestry co-founder and, as you can see in the picture above, his family's business,
Geremia Pools, which was founded in 1922 and has served Sacramento's local and surrounding communities loyally ever since, has an advertisement running right now in
Sacramento Press, which would be even better if it also included a line that read, "
Discover Geremia's Living by Bliss."
Popper's Republic of Science: Searching for Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy
"A robust society is a society that can withstand large shocks and survive. The human body is a robust system. It has redundant pathways. Redundancy is the exact opposite of debt. Nature builds things in very robust ways." - Nassim Taleb
Reflection: In reality, a robust society is one that can withstand all my waffling, all my inefficiencies. I waffle. I shuffle. I talk tangentially, abstractly, non-concretely, and overly fuzzily. I repeat myself. I digress. I use too many words when fewer would suffice. I talk about the intractable, about fractals, about Black/Gray/White Swan dynamics, about cheap health options, about ancestral health paradigms, about uncertainty, about non-Gaussian distributions, about things like epistemic humility and self-experimentation in decision-making excessively. I speak of mythology, and m=1 my-thology, especially in relation to scientific inquiry, unceasingly. Did I say
avoiding the justificationist addiction in the context of a deductivist lifestyle? I make up new words by "werging" (as my friend,
Aaron Blaisdell, likes to say)--FRACTICAL = Fractal + Practical, as one example--and I sometimes even coin new terms, such as
epimicrobiomics. I repeat myself (Did I say, "I repeat myself?"). I re-hash old ideas that have been around for centuries in my own adapted ways--"These ideas aren't new," as
Seth Roberts likes to say--and I even sometimes create intuitive mathematics to accompanying these sorts of things (say, for instance, with
m=1 +
n=1 =
s=1 reasoning). In short, I write and think iteratively, often unclearly, usually imprecisely. I wear these shortcomings like ornaments, as Nassim Taleb suggests that we do in the name of transparency. We all have strengths and weaknesses. I diverge, diverge, diverge, diverge, churning and spinning my wheels, typing away without much organization, without direction, but then, every once in awhile, for some reason, unexpectedly, after essentially failing to communicate ideas and concepts lucidly, things converge serendipitously. That is, I get lucky. Luck strikes like lightning, it seems.
Case Study: For instance, after werging "thinking + tinkering" to conceive
thinkering as
a new approach to biotechnology (with the associated
Patient of One n=1 clinical trials nonsense), unsure of where all this 'hot air' would lead, Aaron,
Chris, and I
stumbled upon the
Ancestral Health Symposium, which just happened to embed nicely into the yet-to-be-defined "school" that Brian Geremia and I had previously conceived called
Ancestry (which we still have absolutely no idea of what it looks like in reality; perhaps, it will manifest as an "
invisible college"). But, somehow, now, in concrete terms,
a real event--The Ancestral Health Symposium--will take place next August at UCLA (an
e-patient self-experimentation conference, in many ways) and
a real 501(c)(3)--Ancestry--is in the process of being formed legally. Those are two tangible things that emerged from some way-too-abstract-imagining, from some
thinkering. Admittedly, I have no idea
why these things work out the way they do, but it appears that
how they occur is, I suspect, dependent on having some level of
feeling free to play with ideas without fear of failing, without fear of having notions and calls to action fall on deaf ears. That is, divergence breeds convergence when conditions that meet
Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy exist; when epistemic humility rules the day.
Because epistemocracy--a society robust to my waffling--is full of
the wrong stuff (thanks to Dave Lull). It's full of errors, shortcomings, and inconsistencies.
And
epistemocracy--
a society that is robust to and capitalizes on human error (of course, we will never get there completely, but we can surely try)--embraces the reality that human beings just won't get things right all the time, even when we work diligently and do due-diligence rigorously, with some reflection and open communication in between ("
To err is human," as they say in healthcare). And, even when we do get things right specifically, we know that our understanding of why (assigning causation) may just end up being a transiently misplaced modifier and thus may not replicate into the future indefinitely. Undoubtedly, we're fallible creatures and that's what makes us so interesting, so fascinating.
In fact, we're still scratching our heads while trying to figure out what really motivates us (thanks to Stephen Cheung):
(
Hint: Carrot-and-stick hedonics work moderately well in
mediocristan--a place where linear, Gaussian mathematics link input to output crisply--but, it appears that self-direction is what we desperately need to work best in
extremistan--domains where nonlinearities and
power laws dominate the stage, complexifying input-output interactions with things like "
butterfly effects" and Levy flights.)
That is, human beings are fascinating creatures as long as they aren't deceiving each other dishonestly.
Manipulative deception is the bane of epistemocracy. Institutions should foster accountability. Dishonesty, even more so than excessive debt leverage (though the two are inseparable, really), is the most non-robust strategy in human history because the lies we weave when we deceive come back to net all our efforts into one big heaping mess of wickedness: in time,
we become NNT's Thanksgiving Turkeys because
we spread ourselves too thin and the interlocking fragility of our manipulative efforts explodes, much to our chagrin. We can anticipate generally, but not predict precisely, that destruction will come to fruition when dishonesty infiltrates the rules of the game.
Of course, in addition to removing dishonesty from epistemocracy, we also do want to erode errors in systems; that's how trial-and-error evolutionary progress will hopefully proceed, with one generation standing even taller on the shoulders of previous generations, reaching new heights and insights about the human condition. That's why
Atul Gawande works on check lists, for example, to improve the safety of basic medical procedures like preparing for surgery: he knows surgery teams are fallible too, and so he creates practical execution frameworks to help folks hedge against these known missteps.
Plus, we also want error to be our friendly generator of serendipity, of unexpected discoveries and positive side-benefits: in essence, we want to see (honest) mistakes and (genuine) errors as ways to buy
long-tail cheap options that increase our exposure to
the envelope of serendipity.
And discoveries, it seems, are the business of scientific inquiry. At least they should be, minimally. Science is a method. No more. No less. A method for making discoveries, for figuring stuff out: for "
sensemaking" (or for just realizing that it's all nonsensical anyways). Science--which I argue is difficult to define, to confine--provides an approach to exploring the world. The typical goal, for instance, is to
disprove that nothing is happening. That is, to falsify--prove wrong--the null hypothesis on a case-by-case basis. Basically, in practice, science comes down to generating a story (
m=1 my-thology), figuring out ways to test that story in empirical reality (
Patient of One clinical trial), conducting these tests as experiments (
n=1 self-experimentation), gathering observations about how the universe reacts (
Qualitative/Quantitative Self), and then integrating this feedback to draw tentative conclusions and to develop new conjectures for further inquiry (
thinkering). That's a pretty logical process for investigating the world around us, and, not unsurprisingly, provides value in many ways.
Through self-experimentation, science becomes hyper-local (
n=1 =
my body), which is great, but, at some point, hyper-local data points need to link up to produce
reproducibility. And when human beings start aggregating, they seem to spontaneously form institutions. Institutions are collectivities of people that share common goals: they're tribes. Interestingly, after grappling with
Philosophy of Science for many years,
Sir Karl Popper (who worked on
The Problem of Induction extensively) started considering science in relation to
institutions (see Jarvie's excellent essay; thanks to Dave Lull):
Parties with some purpose in common refers, of course, to a social group of some sort. The social group in question seeks knowledge of the world of our experience, the real world.
If science is a method that people use to solve problems, and if these people are going to coalesce naturally into groups and do science in interdisciplinary teams, then this social phenomenon might just need some "
rules of the game" to play by. Which connects directly with my reflections above: evidently, Karl Popper and I both stumbled upon
Meta-Rules (meta-methodology, generally) independently (offering another example of homoplasy). Decades ago, Karl Popper played with meta-methodology in the context of his envisioned
Republic of Science, and I dreamt up self-experimentation with
Meta-Rule formation in the context of
Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy, adapted with an evolutionary story-system healthcare theme as the
Ancestral Health epistemocracy.
Connecting the Dots: Walking through Jarvie's account of Karl Popper's evolution in these domains is enlightening. In Jarvie's essay, "
Popper's Republic of Science," we find the following:
Here, in the shift from purely logical criteria for science to methodology, we find the beginnings of Popper's social view of science. A methodology consists of methodological rules; each rule represents a decision, a choice to act in a certain way; we make these choices, in turn, in order to foster certain aims. They are thus open to discussion. Both the rationale of the choices and whether the choices will in fact foster the desired aims are matters on which there can be reasoned dispute.
As this passage hints, figuring out how best to combine the social structures and the methods of science synergistically was important to Popper. He wanted to see that people engaged in science would succeed (achieve "certain aims"), I think. I feel the same way. Personally, the term "
Meta-Rule" just popped into my mind one day for unknown reasons. I knew that "meta" meant "above" (similar to what "epi" translates as from Latin) and then, somehow, my "
Black Swan Logic for n=1 Health" essay seemingly 'wrote itself' semi-effortlessly. I think that Nassim Taleb, in his discussions of how to
robustify economies against (-) Black Swan shocks by de-leveraging ("Tightening our belts," as he says), is expressing a kindred spirit to what Karl Popper used to worry about. How? Well, based on recent real-world experiences, leaders of our financial institutions have experienced the humble limits of their top-down interventions, and Karl Popper cared about basing science in human experiences:
For those concerned to keep science anchored in experience, Popper suggests adopting a supreme or meta-methodological rule not to avoid falsification.
Scientific statements must be stated in a way that permits testing. For instance, Nassim Taleb continues to nudge people to recognize that we have falsified the social hypothesis that current debt levels are sustainable and manageable. He points to the humble ancestral finance wisdom embedded within many historic societies--he often cites the
Babylonians or references in the Bible, as two examples--that outlawed or strongly limited debt (spending money that you don't have saved up already; gambling on future cash flows, essentially). When it comes to societal experimenting with debt leveraging, history does provide
n=millions of tests associated with how best to structure economies' financial policies. And, historically, debt has permitted larger and larger firm and government sizes, and large size increases fragility (hence, the elephant is the largest land animal in nature), and fragility increases susceptibility to cracking from unexpected shocks. Epistemocracy is about withstanding these shocks.
So, when we move to construct Popper's Republic of Science as Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy, we must keep this Meta-Meta-Rule by Popper in mind:
"I propose to adopt such rules as will ensure the testability of scientific statements; which is to say, their falsifiability."
Though, that is as "meta" as I'd like to get, to avoid "thinking about thinking about thinking" too much--I like to stick to "thinking about thinking" as much as possible, though I probably even think about that way too much.
Then, when we move to conceive the Ancestral Health epistemocracy, by hybridizing Popper's and Taleb's dreams for society, we can look to this analogy for guidance:
That Popper is thinking institutionally could not, I think, be clearer; all the more puzzling, then, that it has been overlooked. Popper is here proposing that science is to be seen as an interested group that shares an aim and then legislates conventions for itself in order the better to pursue that aim. He does not explicitly say that his view is social, but he offers some analogies with the social institutions of games and of trial by jury, going so far as to refer to "the game of empirical science" (LScD, p. 53) and comparing its rules to the rules of chess. Certainly he seems to be arguing that science is constituted by its rules, as is chess. He also seems to be allowing that the rules of science can be debated, hence they are not immutable. Much the same goes for chess. The rules of chess have evolved and might evolve more. A rule revision would not necessarily make for a new game, especially if the rule was adopted by the International Federation. The fact that, in baseball, the American League permits the designated hitter to substitute for the pitcher and the National League does not, hardly raises serious questions about which league really plays baseball.
Clearly (bold = emphasis mine, above), we can falsify Meta-Rules too. The process of building our own m=1/n=1 individualized health maps by forming our own Meta-Rules is one that opens us up to testing the conjectures that we deduce from a general Meta-Rule--deducing, "Don't drink more than three beers per week," for instance, from the higher precept, "Don't consume anything that correlates with facial inflammation"--and to testing the overarching negative advice as well. Because this, I suspect, is part of the foundation of epistemic humility:
"The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game."
All the while, we know that our end result may turn up fruitless but, as John Wooden reminds us,
it's the journey that matters. And, as we make our ways through this journey, we must always remember the following:
"[A]fter having produced some criticism of a rival theory, we should always make a serious attempt to apply this criticism to our own theory."
Which is why
nutritional bricolage is so neat, I think; because we can test things cheaply and quickly with minimal barriers to entry:
"This makes our methodological rule that those theories should be given preference which can be most severely tested ... equivalent to a rule favouring theories with the highest possible empirical content."
Which is also why I've archived
my Meta-Rule project as a static entity on my blog, so that we can keep updating and editing it as we hash out all this deductivist rule-making business:
A Constitution for the Republic of Science would need many more rules, and some specification of their institutional embodiment, including rules for dispute settlement. Popper makes no effort to organise the rules systematically and lay them out in a table so that they can be checked against one another and debated in relation to one another and the aims. This may explain why they are an aspect of his philosophy that is seldom discussed.
But, maybe, just maybe, we are collectively constructing this implied social institution on the periphery thanks to the power of online connectedness?
What kind of a social institution is it? Popper nowhere says anything about its internal organisation. The rules give us no guidance to the manner in which it is governed, or to whether there is established leadership. Indeed, although many rules are put forward for discussion, the issues of how these discussion are to be conducted and how decisions about amending the rules are to be made are not entered. Thus it is a stretch to see these rules as a Constitution for the Republic of Science or even as a proto-constitution. They are more like a proposed set of procedural rules for discussion by a body already in place.
And here we find
Ancestry:
Another way to think of science is not as a series of concrete institutions but as an invisible college, an abstract institution rather like language. We might see Popper's rules as addressed to this wider community of science, one that has to do with self-identification and not with institutional gatekeepers.
Perhaps it's a home for opportunistic generalists?
... just as I see a great danger in the increase of specialisation, which also is an undeniable historical fact: a danger to science and, indeed, to our civilization.
Karl Popper and
Richard Feynman (who liked to say that we must always "keep the door to the unknown ajar"), are kindred citizen scientists it seems too. I would say that Feynam arrived at this same conclusion, as far as I can tell, independent of Popper (unless someone has seen Feynman discussing Popper's influence on his thinking explicitly in this manner?):
"It might indeed be said that the majority of the problems of theoretical philosophy, and the most interesting ones, can be re-interpreted ... as problems of method."
Which brings me to the point of this entire messy essay on the messiness of science in the context of social institutions and human interactions:
There is value in reflecting on the methods we use to inquire about the human condition in the information age. Or, as Marc Simonson calls it:
The Differentiation of Information Age. This contemporary era is a novelty that we're still adapting to as human beings. Our local intuitions are being stretched, taxed, and enhanced by global influences. So, in response, I suspect we could benefit from adapting
Popper's Republic of Science and
Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy in concrete ways in modern day to help us blend the wisdom of our ancestral heritages with the advancements of science and technology gracefully.
And grace doesn't imply clarity, in the short-term, if ever. For example, nature grows in what appear to be messy ways, but it can still grow robustly (fractally):
"WE WATCH PLANTS IN THE PLANT WORLD GROW SLOWLY; AND, IF WE ARE ALERT, WE WILL REALIZE THAT THIS GROWTH PROCEEDS IN A FRACTAL MANNER." - Marc Simonson
How? Well, TheDailyG says, "[T]hings that grow in slow, nonlinear ways tend to be the richest, most complex, highest-quality end-products. It's not a rigid absolute rule, but a general truth pervasive enough that you can taste its operation in two different chickens: factory versus free-range. I also think that you see the difference in human minds. There are 'factory farmed' minds that are trained to efficiently pass exams, and broader, 'school of life' minds that have had freedom and time to explore and browse the real world and a variety of perspectives.
Conclusion: To close, human growth and development (maturation) proceed in messy, nonlinear ways, but, for whatever reason, if we hang in there with people and show some patience and perseverance, it seems like things, more often than not, tend to break through and turn out even better than expected.
Thus, it is my simple hope that by searching for epistemocracy, for a republic of science today, we just may increase our robustness against human error while simultaneously increasing our abilities to take advantage of novel opportunities.
Meta-Rule: Don't be afraid of being messy and failing.
Who knows? Things just may converge one day.
As I like to say, "Alternative Universe realities do come true."
We just don't know when, where, or why.
But they do.
To good health,
Brent
