I have recently discontinued pursuit of my Masters in Business Administration. Accounting was fine, business law is fine, management science, IS for decision-making, and quantitative methods were all fine and dandy, but when I put all of these things together into the context of the modern business world, they suddenly stopped being fine.

The business sciences as we know them have only been around for a little over a century. In that time, we have already gone through six eras, the Industrial, Entrepreneurial, Production, Marketing, Global, and Information Eras. The market viewed in this short timeline seems in a perpetual state of revolution, and, as with all revolutions, there are big winners and endless losers.

This is not to say business has only been around 100 years, people have been buying, selling, and trading goods for millenia; however, the modern mass-market consumerism we have today is a novelty and, while we pretend it has always been thus, it is actually far to mercurial to predict its future trends.

In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court defined a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law.” A corporation is an invisible avatar, meant to protect the real people standing behind it from the financial and legal repurcussions of their actions.

The Corporation documentary asks the question: If a corporation is a legal person, then what kind of person is it? “It is required by law to put its self-interest above all else and to maximize wealth for its shareholders.”

The corporation is a psychopath.

It meets several criteria that define a psychopath: Callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness through repeated lying and conning of others for profit, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. (source)

So we have an artificial social construct filled with imaginary people who are psychopaths.

This just doesn’t grok with my rational mind.

We can see the market’s chaotic nature in the Dow Industrial Average. Ask ten different economists or stock brokers why the DOW Industrial average dropped 500 points in late February, and you will get answers like “concerns that the U.S. and Chinese economies are cooling and that equities prices have become overinflated (source).” or “that selling has begotten selling (source).” or that it was an “overdue correction (source).” or even the “Drudge Report Help Tank the Stock Market” (source).”

Many of these highly-plausible hypotheses on the matter were delivered as solid fact, but with a system as subject to chaos theory as macroeconomics, it’s all just guess work. “Past performance is not indicative of future trends.” To play the prediction game in a system so inherently chaotic is gambling.

Consider the impact the Information age has on the material goods market. People have much less need for books, CDs, DVDs, televisions, stereo sytems, and all the cabinets and shelves used to house them when all of our entertainment needs are now compiled into a single computer system. Europeans are already into a post-modern market that views owning material goods as more of a burden than a benefit. “The things you own end up owning you,” as Tyler Dirden in Fight Club said.

In one sense, it’s hard not to see the market revolutions as a meme that has infected civilizaions on a global scale. When we consider the young age of the modern market system, the incredible natural resources it consumes, and massive quantities of waste it produces, it’s hard not to look at rampant consumerism as a form of mass psychosis infecting people around the world and convincing them to buy mass quantities of things they don’t need. When my brother asked one of his European friends why she had bought a bag of cheap useless trinkets at a Dollar Store, she replied that she wanted to show her friends back home the silly things Americans waste their money on.

I am now looking into a more stable field of knowledge for my masters, something where the rules don’t change on a day to day basis because of governmental regulatory or deregulatory whims, fickle consumerism, technological breakthroughs and obsolescence, cultural progress, and corporations that lie pathologically to keep their stock prices up.

Instead, I’m thinking biostatistics, computer modeling, microbiology, or organic chemistry… some branch of human knowledge that doesn’t change unless its proven wrong, where there exists a common ideal of cooperative competition that shares knowledge and encourages coordination among peers because everyone has the ultimate honest goal of finding out their common reality.

Note: The Corporation documentary is avaiable free online.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
     - Isaac Asimov, Salvor Hardin in “Foundation”

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

A scientist, Hari Seldon, is on trial for treason. His crime: Mathematically proving the Empire will collapse within five centuries. Nothing can avert this disaster, but the Seldon warns there can be either 30,000 years of anarchy and suffering across the galaxy, or the disaster can be limited to one millenia.

Thus opens Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series, a collection of novels that took him 49 years to write and eventually drew all of his science ficiton works into this single universe. The Empire at the book’s beginnning spans the entire galaxy. When it collapses, the millions of habitable worlds within its domain will become isolated as trade routes close. As the markets collapse and people become completely preoccupied with mere survival, technologies and other advances will fall to the wayside and be forgotten. Hari Seldon, using a mathematical science that only exists in fiction called psychohistory, has predicted the innevitability of this decline, similar to our fall of the Roman Empire.

To reduce the period of barbarism from 30,000 years to 1,000, Hari Seldon has the Emperor establish two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy, where a community of scientists will preserve all of the human race’s knowledge about the physical world.

First let me address what’s wrong with these novels:

The books are flawed for being patriarchal, and I concur that, as someone who grew up with heros like Sigorny Weaver in Aliens and strong female roles in Star Trek (Science Fiction has always been so progressive), my enjoyment of the book suffers from these antiquated gender roles. There are two means of understanding why this mistake occurred. Firstly, the book was written in the 1950s, so of course it would carry the cultural morass of its society. Asimov was only human afterall, and we should forgive his lack of vision concerning differences between the sexes. He did consider himself a feminist long before the term was coined, and attributes his lack of strong female characters to inexperience.

The second explanation raises further problems, the societies in the trilogy are medeval in nature, monarchies with Kings, Queens, Barons, and other social parasites. This also hurts the believablity of Asimov’s universe. Just as many Astroanthropologists wonder, “Why would aliens travel X-Billion light years to probe our anuses?” readers may wonder how a species so flawed, ignorant, and self-destructive as those in Foundation’s universe could manage to populate the entire galaxy?

But the story is a fable. Space Opera, not Hard SF, and must be read as a fairy tale, where the fantasy serves as the vehicle for conveying the timelessness of the message.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

So now let me tell you what’s so right with these books to make them qualify as science literature:

Asivov predicts a future where psychology is a concrete mathematical science. We see this fiction becoming reality in our own lifetimes withe the emergence of Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience. The story’s timeline jumps in leaps and bounds. A few decades here, a century there, and although the story focuses more on individuals as it progresses, the focus is primarily on ideas

The heroes of the book are scientists… or more accurately, science is the book’s primary hero. The scientists start out as insulated from the rest of the world as they tended to be in our modern world for decades, only when circumstances force them to interact with the rest of the galaxy is the power of science illustrated. The scientists roaming the galaxy are like wizards or magicians, their technology a form of magic. They become legendary, and a mythos spreads concerning them wherever they make contact.

The book’s other hero is Capitalism, as the scientists lack the military strength of their barbarian neighbors, they must find nonviolent means of dominating them and restoring order to the galaxy. Just as America much more effectively uses its economic strength to persuade the world than its military, so do the scientists use market forces to influence and fend off the barbaric civilizations.

Nonviolence is a pervading theme throughout the books. The heros never resort to violence as a means because, as the character Salvor Hardin notes, it “is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Instead, the characters must use technology and persuation to overcome their obstacles.

Asimov has constructed a universe where the ultimate hero is the “roving mind,” and its lessons apply to our everyday lives.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

It took me all of 2006 to read Jared Diamond’s novel, setting it down several times

So informationally dense, such a delluge of data, an avalanche of not just facts, but where the facts came from, how layers of archeological discoveries translated into Diamond’s conclusions was too overwhelming for me to consume in one sitting. Like eating an elephant, I had to tackle Diamond’s book in small bites.

From geographic locations including Montana, Easter Island, Iceland, Greenland, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Chaco Canyon, Mesoamerica, Rwanda, New Guinea, Japan, China, Australia, India, North America, Europe, Norway, Cambodia, Canada, Hawaii, numerous Pacific Islands, New Zealand, New Guinea, Polynesia, Russia, Scandinavia, and Southern California; through civlizations and cultures such as Mayan, Dutch, Hatian, Feudal Japan, Modern China, Norse, Anasazi, Hutu, Tutsi, Aborigines, Kayenta, Arawak, barbarians, Maori, Ainu, Moche, Native Americans, and Zapotecs; covering issues and factors like Water quality, polution, forests, invasive species, climate change, political unrest, biodiversity, soil analysis, invasive species, irresponsible mining, deforestation, diseases, CFCs, exporting and importing imbalances, air quality, and overpopulation; Jared Diamond constructs an incredibly thorough and immensely complex web of things to consider on this topic.

Woof.

And yet, Diamond’s writing is completely accessible. He doesn’t assume any prior knowledge on his readers part, but remains interesting even when covering facts that many of us will already be familiar with. The book reads like the scientific process in many parts, as he takes us through carbon isotope tests, archeological digs of waste pits, and pollen studies to construct a narration of various civilizations’ final years.

Diamond wants his readers to know in detail how he knows the things he puts into this book. He doesn’t want to leave any doubt that he knows this subject, and doesn’t leave any doubt. Diamond is an expert on this topic, and anyone skeptical of his interpretation of the data will need to work through decades of research before they could assume to challenge him.

Beginning with his childhood home in Montana, Diamond catalogues the environmental damages the mining industry has wrought there. He takes us to Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their environment by cutting down every last tree to build statues to their gods. We witness the final days of Norse Greenland, whose inhabitants must have starved to death one winter after eating the last of their livestock, while the Inuit inhabitants continued to feast on fish and seals. While Mel Gibson’s film Apocalyptico catalogues 101 ways Mayans may kill one another for entertainment purposes, Diamond explores the myriad reasons this civilization declined from their cultural accomplishments in agriculture, astronomy, and governance.

The success stories Diamond provides prove that collapse is not innevitable. The Japanese successfuly managed their forests so that they 80% of their country covered in forest. The Dominican Repbulic Dictatorship successfully implemented top-down environmental management, whose effect is starkly apparent when we look at the country’s border with Haiti, and the environmental collapse that neighbor has experienced because of its inability to manage its resources. The Dutch have implemented the most successful environmental policies, a direct result of the country’s precarious position of having so much land below sea level.

While Diamond focuses on countries and civilizations, we are now a world community and we must consider the emergent and very real possibility that we are now capable of experiencing collapse on a global scale. This is a frightening development when we look at the immensity of the catastrophes our race faces such as anthropogenic global warming, collapsing fish stocks in the Ocean, and unsustainable population growth. If the few thousand inhabitants of Easter Island couldn’t reign in their self-destructive tendencies, what hope does our global village have of managing the momentum of our 6.5 billion members?

Diamond’s tone is ultimately hopeful, mainly because we have ways of knowing the world around us that were not available to ancient peoples. We can learn from the mistakes of past civilizations. We have the benefit of being able to see the decades of changing factors that caused these societies to collapse. Factors that occurred so gradually that the people living in them could not recognize the changes themselves. We have the science to observe and document changes to our environment over time now, and we have the methods and models to project the trends we observe well into the future.

We just need to act on them.

Jared Diamond gave an excellent talk for Seminars About Long-Term Thinking.

The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins

On first read, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene seems repetitive. Dawkins continually takes asides to remind the audience that his verbage, words like “compete,” “betray,” “steal,” etc, in describing animal behaviors are not meant to imply altruism or malevolence, but describe a behavior’s effect on a gene’s ability to propigate. Through chapter after chapter he exhaustively explores different situations in various scopes and the evolutionary dynamics at work within them.

Dawkins’ borderline excessive treatment of his subject is purposeful. For he is attempting to teach his readers how to think in evolutionary terms. He works, quite successfully, to change how we view the world around us, to see all existence from an evolutionary standpoint.

The opening chapter of Dawkins’ book explores evolution before the first single-celled organisms emerged. This is a time when molecules compete for atoms, with stronger molecules surviving to aquire more atoms. Eventually, a self-replicating molecule emerges, similar to the double-helix chains that comprise DNA.

When we get into animal behaviors, Dawkins frames everything in terms of energy. This is a fascinating way to look at the world. Stripping away all the extraneous information, all the social influences on why we do things, and seeing our world purely in terms of solar energy being consumed by plants in turn consumed my animals which are consumed by other animals, we can easily see the importance of aquiring energy, but we often overlook the importance of conserving energy as well.

So many behaviors in the animal kingdom are meant to conserve one animal’s energy by getting another animal to expend energy. The starkest example of this behavior is the cukoo, which lays its egg in the nest of another bird species. When the cukoo hatches early, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest and survives off of the care of its adopted mother. Thus, the cukoo mother tricks another species into raising its offspring, freeing it to expend her energy into producing more offspring.

Similar relationships exist within species, and Dawkins spends a great deal of time exploring the different strategies infants may employ to consume as much of their mother’s energy as possible at the expense of their siblings. Relations between the sexes are also explained in terms of energy, with the male strategy of exploiting the female with sperm, which can impregnate many females, and the female evolving better eggs and fetal environments to entice males into staying to help provide for their offspring. There are even different strategies for males and females, with some males loyal and others deserters, while some females may demand more from males during the courtship phase as a test of loyalty or deserted females may try and trick another male into thinking the offspring is theirs.

There are innumerable strategies at work in the complex web of evolution, and Dawkins explores many of them with simplistic yet engaging detail. All of these strategies and biological innovations have one purpose: to propogate innanimate DNA sequences. Everything plants, animals, and humans do is to carry these combinations of molecules into the future. How successful these biological and behavioral strategies are has less to do with us than with the molecules themselves, which define almost everything we do.

Almost because Dawkins introduces a concept that has become a staple in our Information Age lexicon: the meme. Mammals, especially humans, are not born into this world pre-programmed with everything they need to know to survive. There is an extended childhood, where we learn from our parents how to interact with our environment. Not quite a tabula rosa or blank slate, but born with our heads empty enough that we can learn how to behave wherever we are born to maximally take advantage of that environment. The highly adaptive cerebral cortex, more than anything else, has allowed human beings to inhabit and adapt to every corner of the Earth.

As a result, evolving memes, not genes, have become our primary method of adaptation. Humans with good ideas will survive and the bad ones will quickly die out of the memepool. Examples of such bad ideas are winners of the (often ficticious) Darwin Awards. While examples of the good ideas surround our everday life in the form of technological, medical, and educational advances. As Janine Benyus wrote, “After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

The strength of Dawkins’ analysis of various evolutionary aspects is so convincing because of his ability to quantify seemingly unquantifiable variables. With simple mathematics he is able to establish the degree to which intra-species cooperation benefits its members. Dawkins uses game theory to evolution, specifically the “Prisoner’s Dilema,” to explain altruism in his now famous Nice Guys Finish First argument.

Dawkins was criticized early on for The Selfish Gene because many saw it as a possible defense for eugenics and rejected what they thought was a cold and inhumane representation of nature, but today it is widely accepted as one of the more important texts in modern thinking in existence. Dawkins’ thorough vision of a world completely defined in terms of evolution, deconstructed to just its basic elements of genes and energy will change its reader’s way of looking at the world, and in this sense, it is a very powerful collection of memes that will prove even more successful as human understanding catches up to it.