Complex Systems Theorists: One Year Away From Global Riots

[NeonLX]

NPR is arguably worse than the commerical networks. Its listeners are programmed to think that it is much more "fair and balanced" than the other outlets, and it's got that highbrow cash-ay that appeals to the well-informed, cultured individual.

At least you know what's coming from the commercial networks is corporate horsesh!t, but NPR pretends to be "better than that".

[Wombaticus Rex]

Reminds me of Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero Theory.

Indeed! Another pernicious mathematical hallucination. It will be interesting to see what it evolves into post-2012.

[ninakat]

NPR is arguably worse than the commerical networks. Its listeners are programmed to think that it is much more "fair and balanced" than the other outlets, and it's got that highbrow cash-ay that appeals to the well-informed, cultured individual.

At least you know what's coming from the commercial networks is corporate horsesh!t, but NPR pretends to be "better than that".

You got it Neon. And that's my argument about the Obamaphenomenon -- we've had four years of a continuation of Bush with very little resistance. Definitely worse. Perhaps if Romney "wins," the cultured lazy-ass progressives will get motivated into battle once again -- they can fight over the crumbs of empire left behind. Because it's most definitely over, despite the delusional belief systems of most progressives.

(Neon, good to see you!)

[Nordic]

It was a great chance for me to bring up the fact that NPR has been selling out for a decade or more now. She of course responded that it's so much more balanced and in-depth than CNN and NBC, as if that somehow justifies allowing ones views to be influenced by inaccurate, controlled info.

Her response is almost more infuriating than the propaganda itself. It's the same kind of delusional thinking that people projected onto Obama, despite the preponderance of evidence that he was one of them. This is why I find the gullibility of liberals/progressives so disgusting. Actually, I'm less forgiving now -- I don't really see them as gullible anymore -- they're in serious denial because they're too fucking comfy and unwilling to deal with the responsibility of owning up to reality -- the prospect of hardship is just too much to bear. So, as it's turning out, they're becoming just as culpable as their corporate foes. The fact that National Propaganda Radio is now almost indistinguishable from Faux News escapes the delusional progressives, because NPR has been one of their cherished institutions. Apparently it always will be.

I couldn't agree more.

[JackRiddler]

You guys are obsessed with Obama. You talk as though you had believed this administration would do anything differently from what it has done. Did you? Are you disappoined? I'm not! It's exactly what I expected. Of course it's a scam. Of course it's a consolidation and normalization of the Bush achievements. Romney's not supposed to win, and if he does it's a new systemic break and carte blanche for another round of radical pathbreaking. The system will be out of control, in a bad way.

Rest of rant, removed.

[stoneonstone]

NPR is arguably worse than the commerical networks. Its listeners are programmed to think that it is much more "fair and balanced" than the other outlets, and it's got that highbrow cash-ay that appeals to the well-informed, cultured individual.

At least you know what's coming from the commercial networks is corporate horsesh!t, but NPR pretends to be "better than that".

You got it Neon. And that's my argument about the Obamaphenomenon -- we've had four years of a continuation of Bush with very little resistance. Definitely worse. Perhaps if Romney "wins," the cultured lazy-ass progressives will get motivated into battle once again -- they can fight over the crumbs of empire left behind. Because it's most definitely over, despite the delusional belief systems of most progressives.

(Neon, good to see you!)

I'm sort of between a rock and a hardplace. On my little isle on Lake Ontario, I gave up listening to the CBC about 11 years ago, as the first wave of "if we eviscerate ourselves, the government will leave our funding alone". Instead the programming declined. I switched to NPR, bounced across the Lake from Oswego and Rochester. At least it was novel. And shows like Prairie Home Companion, Wait Wait, Says You, and American Life are as good as anything out there. Better than the Canadian equivalents, because there aren't any.

The main newscasts on both are horseshit, have been, and have become even more shorn of thought, observation, news, and language dexterity (big words and complex ideas were not forbidden, as they are now). Now, as NPR guts itself, I am shocked by the number of CBC shows migrating to NPR to fill space and the dollar vacuum.

CBC's As it Happens, Ghomeshi's Q...and one or two others that escape me...now fill in the NPR signal from the south.

Not to delude ourselves that there was any real discussion out there, compared to the acrid, stupid badlands of private broadcasting in both the US and Canada, there was respite, and the chance to discover ( I don't think I'd know who Lilly Allen or Castle Freeman were unless listening to NPR). And, well, both CBC and NPR always interview Nick Lowe when he's touring.

Private stations and the primary colours of radio 'networks' not so much.

[ninakat]

You guys are obsessed with Obama. You talk as though you had believed this administration would do anything differently from what it has done. Did you? Are you disappoined? I'm not! It's exactly what I expected. Of course it's a scam. Of course it's a consolidation and normalization of the Bush achievements. Romney's not supposed to win, and if he does it's a new systemic break and carte blanche for another round of radical pathbreaking. The system will be out of control, in a bad way.

Rest of rant, removed.

If you read the Fuck Obama thread, you'll see that many of us were just as clued in as you are/were, Jack. I'm certainly not obsessed with Obama. I'm disgusted with the people who believed in him, especially those who continue even now. You know, like George Clooney and various pop stars who don't seem to have a clue. Oh, and Michael Moore.

Anyway, enough of the thread derailment. Let's talk riots bro!

[ninakat]

Nordic, thanks. Love your avatar, btw -- read about it in the lounge.

stoneonstone, I agree because there is solid programming on NPR -- I like Fresh Air when I happen to catch it. It was the propaganda side of things which I was alluding to, of course, since, like you said, their newscasts are horseshit. Same can be said of the BBC, or pretty much any media outlet, even the commercial ones (although it's really hard to find quality programming there).

[Aldebaran]

For something like riots, you would need to take in an extremely large and complex data set, how good is the police force at suppressing riots, what are the motivations of agitators (always varied), things like that, which is way beyond my level of expertise at the moment.

The value of the following the entire process, from having solid data to good analysis and synthesis protocol is very important.

And all of the implicit assumptions must be outlined, as well as the explicit ones built into the simulation itself.

The obvious solution then is to get our computers to build our models for us. Somewhat larger datasets required, of course, but I'd wager that's the less bottle-necked portion of the problem.

Here are two big fuzzy problems which come up in lots of areas of science:

How do we find patterns in our data?
How do some natural objects compute, or process information?

Computational mechanics is a research program, developed by Jim Crutchfield and henchmen, which aims to address both of these problems with the same set of tricks. Since I think this is an under-appreciated line of research, and because I became one of the aforesaid henchmen in January 1998, I'll explain this at some length.

You go to the lab and you take your favorite set of measurements, until you can't stand it any more, and you want to make something of the data. You might look for structures or patterns in your data: these may even be those emergent properties so fabled in legend and philosophy. To do this, you need a way of characterizing different structures or patterns, and one of doing this is to write down a procedure which will reproduce the pattern, to a certain level of abstraction and accuracy. Fortunately there's a lot of theory on the subject of "effective procedures" in general: it's an off-shoot of mathematical logic called computation theory, or automata theory, which turns out to be equivalent to the theory of formal languages. The languages or automata form a hierarchy, in which those at the higher levels can do anything those at the lower levels can: Turing machines perch at the very top of the heap. (The most basic form of the hierarchy was discovered by Chomsky back when he worked for the Air Force, and is called the Chomsky hierarchy.) Now, Occam's razor tells us to use the simplest procedure we can find, and there are plenty of good ways of saying how complicated an automaton is: the more interesting ones even say that highly random automata are simple.

The computational mechanics procedure, then, is to take your data, discretize it so you've only got a small "finite alphabet" to deal with, and then look for "causal states." Two histories, two series of past data, leave you in the same causal state if they leave you with the same distribution of future data, i.e., if it makes no difference to the future whether you saw one data-series or the other. This being the case, the difference between the series is unimportant, and we lump them together. This procedure identifies causal states, and also identifies the structure of connections or succession in causal states, and so automatically creates an automaton in the lowest Chomsky class you can get away with. (If, as you consider longer and longer stretches of data, you need more and more complicated automata, you go to the next most powerful class of automata and start over.) These automata are called "epsilon-machines" and the procedure "epsilon-machine reconstruction": the names are appalling, but I've not heard better ones.

The computation part of "computation, dynamics and inference" is pretty thoroughly in evidence: but the other two? Well, inference is easy: the machine-reconstruction procedure is an extended exercise in statistical inference, or machine learning, or induction (whichever you prefer). We're trying to fit our data to models of pre-specified classes , and to find the simplest, most accurate model we can. (Obviously there are trade-offs between simplicity and accuracy.) In principle, the whole process could be programmed, and encapsulated in a single piece of software: a "phenomenological engine" or "phenomenologimat" (J. Fetter), an automatic finder of empirical regularities. (Look for it in the next version of emacs.)

etc. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabe ... anics.html

[General Patton]

Check em:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=robots-adam-and-eve-ai
This time, for "Adam and Eve" knowledge is not forbidden—it's their mission. Working with computers and robots in the lab, scientists have been able to generate exponentially increasing amounts of data as the technology improves. Concerned they lack the manpower to translate the deluge of raw information into results, researchers are programming their mechanical lab assistants to share more of the workload. A prime example of this is "Adam," an autonomous mini laboratory that uses computers, robotics and lab equipment to conduct scientific experiments, automatically generate hypotheses to explain the resulting data, test these hypotheses, and then interpret the results.

Researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales and England's University of Cambridge report in Science today that they designed Adam—which is 16.4 feet (five meters) in length, with a height and width of 9.8 feet (three meters)—to perform basic biology experiments with minimal human intervention. They describe how the bot operates by relating how he carried out one of his tasks, in this case to find out more about the genetic makeup of baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism that scientists use to model more complex life systems.

Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesized that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes that catalyze biochemical reactions. The robot devised experiments to test these beliefs, ran the experiments, and interpreted the results. Because biological organisms are so complex, the details of biological experiments must be recorded in great detail so those experiments can faithfully be reproduced, even if this record-keeping is tedious, says lead study author Ross King, an Aberystwyth computer science professor. "With a computer, all of the results and conclusions and structure are expressed in logic," he says, "that can uniformly be understood by other researchers."

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/natural_laws
(A) A computer observes the behavior and dynamics of a real system, and (B) collects data using motion tracking cameras and software. It then automatically searches for equations that describe a natural law relating these variables. (C) Without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry, this algorithm found conservation equations and invariant manifolds that describe the physical laws these systems obey. Pictured, are an actual double pendulum, collected data, and resulting energy conservation law found.

[8bitagent]

You guys are obsessed with Obama. You talk as though you had believed this administration would do anything differently from what it has done. Did you? Are you disappoined? I'm not! It's exactly what I expected. Of course it's a scam. Of course it's a consolidation and normalization of the Bush achievements. Romney's not supposed to win, and if he does it's a new systemic break and carte blanche for another round of radical pathbreaking. The system will be out of control, in a bad way.

Rest of rant, removed.

So question, are you ever *not* dialed man?

But yeah it's been by and large what I expected: soft warfare expansion, hard warfare in some areas. Increase in things Bush couldnt get away with, but big bones tossed to keep the left at bay
with the most important built in feature: rabid right wing crowd who hate Obama for obvious reasons.

I expect Obama to win, as I expected him to do so in 2008. But the Autumn hour can also be a fickle thing, and surprises are often in the running. If Romney wins, you know something fierce is being prepared.

[82_28]

It's exactly what I expected as well. At the bar I was at that night, all were glued as though it were a local sports game and this disturbed me. It was exactly what I knew would happen that night and nothing that Obama has done or not done since has surprised me in the least. In fact, it seems like all the Democrats and lefties out there seem to just talk about what Obama hasn't done and that his hands are tied type shit. Which is fine and "fair enough". Fuck republicans. But what he has done is invisible to Democrats yet what he hasn't done is visible to them and what he definitely isn't, is like a fucking hallucination so real to the idiots of the right that what he has done never even fucking happened, but they think it to be real -- see communist, socialist, Muslim, not an American citizen.

This shit's so fucked because it contains a litany of double binds that can't be argued whether you're for or against this Obama character. I give him a simple pass only and I mean only, because he is a Democrat and because of my upbringing it is Democrat all the way, always. And this is why I don't vote anymore. I don't trust the Democrats anymore (perhaps I do at municipal level), but I hate republicans (as people I do like quite a few -- as politcians, never, ever).

[justdrew]

yeah, it seems like the "complex theory" is... "hey! look at this graph"

but still, seems like a fair bet this isn't too wild a prediction. Maybe some effort will be made to keep prices down and supply up, somehow. maybe. not holding breath.

[JackRiddler]

If you read the Fuck Obama thread, you'll see that many of us were just as clued in as you are/were, Jack. I'm certainly not obsessed with Obama. I'm disgusted with the people who believed in him, especially those who continue even now. You know, like George Clooney and various pop stars who don't seem to have a clue. Oh, and Michael Moore.

Apropos to that, here was a part of the rant I removed:

Forget the minority of liberals who piss you off for their susceptibility to cognitive dissonance (and unbearable smugness). You really are smarter than them, so act like it. The popular psychology matters. A Romney win means the majority will think this is what they want (rather than fake liberalism or "socialism"). It emboldens the right on every level below the White House. It also means Netanyahu effectively in the cabinet, and a bunch of "Justice Bork" appointments. Why do you think the right-wing always goes to such lengths to win, if it doesn't matter? Why are they working so hard to suppress the black and poor vote? It's all a big scam, but someone forgot to inform them. They don't think it's a scam. They relish winning and will try to outdo all previous extremes. Whereas Republicans at 22 percent would mean they were no longer an excuse. I'll take the bastards who fool the good people and try to pressure those bastards, rather than the ones who fire up the fascists on the ground and make no pretenses about wanting to crush you. It sucks!

And I think that this is tangentially relevant to a thread about how complex our models should be.

[2012 Countdown]

Alex Jones interviews Max Keiser : 90% chance of Complete Systemic Collapse by april 2013


Published on Aug 17, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLxJ2xD8NT4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fljroYo-PM8
Published on Aug 17, 2012
Alex Jones Max Keiser How bad could the collapse get?

===

This one is good too-

The Keiser Report - Paul Moore


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uGmjcI2Wc4
Published on Sep 12, 2012 by NewWilberforce
Paul Moore, Founder of the New Wilberforce Alliance is interviewed by Max Keiser on the subject of the Banking Crisis, and how it affects society.


Max tells it like it is...gives out good stuff.

===

In other news...

Obama appeals NDAA indefinite detention ban


Published on Sep 13, 2012 by RTAmerica
A federal judge blocked the government from enforcing a statute that allows the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects. That means a victory for journalists and the activists fighting the law who could be arrested because their jobs sometimes require them to interact with suspect on the government's radar, but it could be a victory short-lived. Only one day after a judge granted a permanent injunction on the NDAA provision, the White House asked for an appeal. Tangerine Bolen, the founder of Revolution Truth and a plaintiff in the case, joins RTs Liz Wahl for more.
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWRZpESh ... r_embedded

But wasn't it his excuse/cover story that he was forced into signing it back then? He just had to sign this as part of something else? Pffft.