SeekerBlog

…the environment for manmade discoveries is governed by a far, far more severe, wilder form of processes, those called “fat tailed”… Against what one might expect, this makes me extremely optimistic about the future in several selective research-oriented domains, those in which there is an asymmetry in outcomes favoring the positive over the negative — like evolution.

“Skeptical empiricist” Nassim Nicholas Taleb [Wikipedia] is optimistic – but for reasons that are likely to be surprising to most readers. I first encountered Taleb as the author of “Fooled by Randomness“, recommended to me by a hedge fund manager as “the most important book I’ve ever read”.

Taleb’s little essay for The World Question 2007 surprised me — proving that I had not generalized what I had learned from “Fooled by Randomness” to arenas outside the financial markets.

Herein Taleb’s theme is essentially this, that growth in research experiments/projects, and increasing variance of results – will lead to more positive “Black Swans”. Taleb discounts cause/effect as the source for important discoveries/inventions – favoring a view that is closer to evolution:

…These domains thrive on randomness. The higher the uncertainty in such environments, the rosier the future — since we only select what works and discard the rest. With unplanned discoveries, you pick what’s best; as with a financial option, you do not have any obligation to take what you do not like. Rigorous reasoning applies less to the planning than to the

selection of what works.

A corollary of the Taleb model is advantage America, where the high-variance new stuff gets generated onshore, while the drone jobs get outsourced:

…I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people claim …It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists… it produces “doers”, Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and “cultural” states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people’s ideas.

Another factor favoring America over say, Germany, is more small bets instead of allocating the same budget to a few big-company projects:

But if the success rate is very low, the more we search, the more likely we are to find things “by accident”, outside the original plan — or the more an unspecified original “plan” is likely to succeed. Looking at the swelling pipeline, something tells me that the discovery of cures, or near-cures for unspecified diseases is about to happen — except that I do not know which one, nor do I know where it is coming from. More technically, I see the sign of fractal randomness in these payoffs from the fact that results are more linear to the number of investments than they are to quantities invested — thus favoring the multiplication of small bets.

…This idea applies to so many other technological domains. The only bad news is that we can’t really tell where the good news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers.

Highly recommended. And for me, it is time to reread Fooled by Randomness. And if you care to know more about “fat tailed” distributions, see “Mandelbrot makes sense” [PDF].

I am optimistic because I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature.



Physicist Freeman Dyson is an optimist’s optimist. But did you know about the discovery of HAR1 ( Human Accelerated Region 1)? Finally a hint of what is truly novel about the human genome:

…I am especially optimistic just now because of a seminal discovery that was made recently by comparing genomes of different species. David Haussler and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz discovered a small patch of DNA which they call HAR1, short for Human Accelerated Region 1. This patch appears to be strictly conserved in the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee, which means that it must have been performing an essential function that was unchanged for about three hundred million years from the last common ancestor of birds and mammals until today.

But the same patch appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations in the human genome, which means that it must have changed its function in the last six million years from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to modern humans. Somehow, that little patch of DNA expresses an essential difference between humans and other mammals. We know two other significant facts about HAR1. First, it does not code for a protein but codes for RNA. Second, the RNA for which it codes is active in the cortex of the human embryonic brain during the second trimester of pregnancy. It is likely that the rapid evolution of HAR1 has something to do with the rapid evolution of the human brain during the last six million years.

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Dr. Leo Chalupa, Ophthalmologist and Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis

…The other two factors fueling my optimism stem from recent advances in biomedical sciences that offer not just hope, but a virtual guarantee, that we’ll soon be living longer and better lives. What are those recent advances? They come from two major research fronts.

There are some very exciting results showing that manipulations of basic cellular functions can prolong longevity. The literature on this topic is too extensive to summarize here, but one example will suffice. A molecule produced by a variety of plants called resveratrol (think red wine) has been found to significantly improve the lifespan of many different organisms, as much as by 59%, and this even occurs in obese animals! The significance of the latter point is that until recently it was thought that the only way to increase longevity is by going on a strict starvation diet, but now it seems that you can eat your cake and expand your lifespan!

The other relevant scientific breakthroughs come from neurobiology, my field of expertise. We used to think that with age there is a progressive deterioration in brain cell structure and function. But that widespread assumption has proved wrong. New nerve cells have been found to be generated in the brains of old animals, and we’re learning more and more how this amazing property of the aged brain can be manipulated. Low levels of regular exercise, for instance, have been found to significantly enhance neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain structure that deals with memory. Moreover, a recent study from my laboratory showed that certain nerve cells in the eyes of old mice are capable of growing new processes. We have also found such growth of nerve cells in the eyes of old people. And then there is the tremendous promise of stem cell research that is still in its infancy for replacing damaged or dysfunctional body organs.

Taken together, the implications of these and many other findings in the biomedical sciences are clear. We will be able to regenerate parts of the brain that have been worn out or damaged during the course of a lifetime, providing renewed capabilities to those who are currently considered old folks. So better start thinking what you’ll be doing with all those extra years of life.

Peter Schwarz has an outlook similar to Ray Kurzweil’s:

I am very optimistic about growing older. I turned 60 this year and several decades ago I would have looked forward to a steady decline in all my physical and mental capabilities, leading into a long and messy death. The accelerating pace of biological and medical advances that are unfolding in front of us are heavily focused on reducing the infirmities of aging and curing or transforming the diseases of old age from fatal to chronic. It means that ninety really will be the new sixty and there is a good chance that I will be among the vigorous new centenarians of mid century, with most of my faculties working fairly well. Vision, hearing, memory, cognition, bone and muscle strength, skin tone, hair and of course sexual vigor will all be remediable in the near future. Alzheimer’s may be curable and most cancers are likely to be treatable if not curable. And regenerative medicine may truly lead to real increase in youthfulness as new custom grown organs replace old less functional ones. And within a few decades we are likely to be able to slow aging itself, which could even lead to life beyond 120.