Bacteria Want Food

Disambiguate the misunderstanding: when we say ‘want’, what we really mean is ‘tends towards’.

If bacteria don't want food, then they at least drift towards nutrients with no awareness of their needs.

What does it mean, after all, to want?


What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Gritty, NYC

Kevin Cyr, 2007ish

"The van I'm known for, the rough, graffiti covered vans, are really only found in New York...Painting these vehicles is my way of documenting the grit and character that is slowly disappearing..."

Kevin Cyr, Juxtapoz, jun2012, n137, p63

..makes me think about what happened with the double-edged miracle of the High Line, and just gentrification in general in nyc, and the role of art in that process, and especially conventional/fine art vs. street art.

Progress

Systems – all systems - generate their own momentum.

(p15)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization

A gracious thanks to Mr. Hugh Hamilton for arguing with me upon my delivery of this topic. His live radio program, TalkBack! (where he takes calls from confused people like me) must be a vital part of the education of anyone who listens on a regular basis. It can be heard weekdays from 3pm-5pm, on WBAI 99.5 FM or at wbai.org. The following does not necessarily reflect the views of Mr. Hamilton in any way, however.

There is now a disconnect between our system for ensuring the beneficial effects of public oversight via government and that government’s ability to provide those benefits within the financial system that enables it.

An introductory note should begin by distinguishing between potentially fuzzy understandings of decision-making. Decisions are made both by individuals, and by groups, and they result from both conscious and unconscious processes.  The majesty of the democracy as practiced in America, for example, is that it takes input from and feedbacks with a large group of individual decision-makers, to create a collective decision-making apparatus, that, by way of its feedbacking abilities, maintains a balance between what the individuals want and what the group wants (the group in this case would be the American voters). Over the years, the structure of decision-making for the financial aspect of our government has become increasingly separated from the same structure which drives the “upholding of public safety and public good” part of the government. When not being held accountable for people, the market is very good at what it does, which is to make sound, collective economic decisions.

The travesty here, is that the economic part of this system works by a different decision-making apparatus, one which seems to have adapted more readily to a complexifying world, but one in which we, the people, are not part of that apparatus in any meaningful way in regards to oversight benefiting our own public good.

The financing, or economic part of our government has been intercepted by the private industry, that is, any for-profit industry which makes its collective decisions from the aggregate of individual decision-making in the market. This interception is visible both in the private industry’s ability to manipulate the feedback system of government, via things like Citizens United, and in the private industry’s ability to sidestep the laws used by the government to ensure the benefits of their oversight. In these regards, the private industry has shown that its form of decision-making is better at playing the game than ours. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about who’s winning, and the private industry is winning right now.

It would be unfortunate if the private industry continued to take over more and more of the decision-making that is not, but should be, done on our behalf. So we have two choices: We either change the decision-making apparatus in our government to act more like the market, or we change the myriad decision-maker market to look more like a democratically-elected government (whatever that may come to mean in the near future).

How do we begin to interface with private industry directly? Maybe the government (as it now stands; we’re not talking anarchy here) should no longer be our mediator. It shows itself more every day to be failing at its task in this. That private industry manipulates voters and sidesteps the law supports this notion. We the people have yet to find our voice in this system.

How do we get the private industry to do well what our governments used to be so good at?

How do we rewrite the laws of our new government so that we can take back our roles as decision-makers?

note:

I like Richard Wolff’s “Democracy at Work” idea, and I like Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution idea.

epilogue:

If your only objective was to get as much money as possible, and you could totally ignore the needs of the people, wouldn’t you do the same thing as the banks? Theirs is not to think about the public good, only money. No concern for people, not now, not ever. Banks aren’t people, but they are controlled by people – individuals making decisions that filter up to other hierarchically arranged groups of people and so on until you reach the designated collective. The purpose of all the individual decision-makers involved is to make the right decisions in the hopes that you can keep the thing going. Greed is just another word for momentum.

The financial system, the private industry, Capitalism, are all really good at looking out for themselves. They aren’t stupid, though they aren’t conscious either. People tell these things what to do. We should be those people.

update:

I guess it should be noted that the market actually now makes decisions based on algorithms, the workings of which we, at times, don’t even understand. This puts the decision-making of the private industry even further away from the one used within our governments.

NYSE looks into 'irregular trading' in 140 stocks

1 August 2012

“Reports in US media suggested that a trading algorithm used by the brokerage Knight Capital may have been behind the stock moves.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19087748

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading

BY JERRY ADLER 08.03.12

“For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

FILMED JUL 2011 • POSTED JUL 2011 • TEDGlobal 2011

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

go figure:
"Government is too inefficient to make the costs come down to make another Moon landing economic. It will be an entrepreneurial effort” -Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 Astronaut

Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings
Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 6 December 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20540172

Technological Complexity as a Function of Latitude

More complex technological units are needed (or have been invented) by historical hunter-gatherer tribes the higher the latitude of their homes.

(p25)
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

Mass Production

Mass production was unthinkable to the classical mind, and not just for technological reasons.
Anything made was a work of solitary genius.

-Historian Carl Mitcham, in
What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly
2010

DSM RIP

(DSM) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

If this were to happen (the 'death' of DSM and a favoring of a cognitive science approach to understanding mental illness), I wonder what would be the effects on Juan Enriquez suggestion that Autism could be a form of cognitive evolution.
Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species? TEDxSummit, Jun2012

A fresh look at mental illness: Researcher points toward a new way to classify disorders

Peter Reuell, Jul 31, Harvard Gazette

clipped article:

Ask Assistant Professor of Psychology Joshua Buckholtz to explain his research into mental disorders, and he’ll likely start with a question that’s got more to do with basic medicine: When is the flu appendicitis?

The answer, of course, is never. Each is associated with a very specific — and nonoverlapping — set of biological causes and effects. Understanding what these are, Buckholtz explained, allows doctors to discriminate between the two with near-perfect accuracy. 

Unfortunately, Buckholtz said, the same cannot be said for mental disorders. 

According to Buckholtz, meeting the diagnostic criteria for multiple psychiatric disorders is the rule, rather the exception. 

“This tells us that there are either a lot of people who are unlucky enough to be afflicted with multiple distinct, unique disorders at the same time, or that something is very wrong with our method for classifying psychological disorders.” 

In a June 21 paper published in Neuron, Buckholtz and co-author Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a researcher from the Central Institute of Mental Health and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, identify a biological reason for that disconnect. Extrapolating from what we know about the genetic causes of mental illness and their effects on the brain, they propose that many mental disorders appear to share symptoms because genes for mental illness cause changes in key brain circuits that affect a wide range of cognitive processes. 

“Individual genetic differences cause variability in the way that brain circuits function,” he continued. “These differences in brain circuit function lead to the wide range of variation in cognitive, emotional, motivation, and social function that we see in people all around us. The specific genes that are involved, and the way that these genes interact with the environments to which we are exposed, determine how specific brain circuits behave. When those circuits don’t function well, this is expressed as a deficit in whatever domain of cognition is supported by the ‘sick’ circuit. When these deficits cause dysfunction in everyday life, we call it a symptom. When those symptoms become impairing enough, someone comes to the clinic and receives a diagnosis.” 

“What we can say is that genetic and environmental risk factors for mental illness produce graded changes in the function of one or more brain circuits, producing graded changes in cognitive processes supported by those circuits,” Buckholtz said. “The changes in those cognitive processes will produce varying expression of symptoms that are shared across multiple disorders.” 

One possible impact of the paper’s findings, Buckholtz said, could come as researchers work to design a new way to classify mental disorders. 

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/07/a-fresh-look-at-mental-illness/

POST SCRIPT:

Brain change link to anti-social behaviour in girls
Caroline Parkinson, 21 October 2012, BBC

The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry study of 40 girls revealed brains of teenage girls with behavioural disorders are different to those of their peers.

The team found part of the brain called the amygdala was smaller in the brains of male and female teenagers with conduct disorder than in their peers.

Girls with conduct disorder also had less grey matter in an area of the brain called the insula - linked to emotion and understanding your own emotions.

"In the US, people are already using brain scans to argue diminished responsibility. I think we're too early in our understanding to really do that, but it is happening.
-Dr Graeme Fairchild, of the University of Cambridge 

"It suggests that at least a component of this has a biological basis - and there are people who don't believe there is one."
-Dr Michael Craig of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20002093

Uncovering secrets of how intellect and behavior emerge during childhood

November 8, 2012 in Medical Xpress, Genetics

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have shown that a single protein plays an oversized role in intellectual and behavioral development. The scientists found that mutations in a single gene, which is known to cause intellectual disability and increase the risk of developing autism spectrum disorder, severely disrupts the organization of developing brain circuits during early childhood. This study helps explain how genetic mutations can cause profound cognitive and behavioral problems.

The study focused on a critical synaptic protein known as SynGAP1.

"There are a few genes that can't be altered without affecting normal cognitive abilities," Rumbaugh said. "SynGAP1 is one of the most important genes in cognition—so far, every time a mutation that disrupts the function of SynGAP1 has been found, that individual's brain simply could not develop correctly. It regulates the development of synaptic function like no other gene I've seen."

Interestingly, inducing these mutations after the critical development period was complete had virtually no impact on normal synapse function and repairing these pathogenic mutations in adulthood did not improve behavior or cognition.

"A key finding is we were able to remove the mutation and restore SynGAP protein levels in adult mice with obvious cognitive and behavioral problems, but this intervention did not benefit the animals," Rumbaugh said. These results imply that very early intervention is essential in neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly for cognitive problems. The team is now aggressively searching for the optimal period during development in which repairing these mutations is most beneficial.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-uncovering-secrets-intellect-behavior-emerge.html

Novel studies of gene regulation in brain development may mean new treatment of mental disorders

December 2, 2012 in Medical Xpress, Genetics

modified

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the Institut Pasteur, Paris identified the hierarchical tree of CGG–TF networks that determine the patterns of genes expressed during brain development and found that some "master transcription factors" at the top level of the hierarchy regulated the expression of a significant number of gene groups.

Instead of a taking the approach that a single gene creates a single response, researchers used contemporary methods of data analysis, along with the Gordon supercomputer at the university's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), to identify CGGs responsible for brain development which can be affected for treatment of mental disorders. The team found that these groups of genes act in concert to send signals at various levels of the hierarchy to other groups of genes, which control the general and more specific (depending of the level) events in brain structure development.

"We have proposed a novel, though still hypothetical, strategy of drug design based on this hierarchical network of TFs that could pave the way for a new category of pharmacological agents that could be used to block a pathway at a critical time during brain development as an effective way to treat and even prevent mental disorders such as ASD and schizophrenia," said lead author Igor Tsigelny, a research scientist with SDSC, as well as the university's Moores Cancer Center and Department of Neurosciences. "On a broader scale, these findings have the potential to change the paradigm of drug design."

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-gene-brain-treatment-mental-disorders.html

A Hierarchical Coherent-Gene-Group Model for Brain Development

Tsigelny IF, Kouznetsova VL, Baitaluk M, Changeux JP

Genes, Brain and Behavior - Nov 22, 2012 [Epub ahead of print]

Computers are better at diagnosing and treating patients than doctors
http://io9.com/5983991/computers-are-better-at-diagnosing-and-treating-patients-than-doctors


Mental Health Researchers Reject Psychiatry’s New Diagnostic ‘Bible’
Maia Szalavitz May 07, 2013

A Revolution in Mental Health

Paul Voosen, in the Chronicle of Higher Education

September 9, 2013

…most likely candidate for a revolution in mental health research: the National Institute of Mental Health’s RDoC or Research Domain Criteria project

My Brain Made Me Do It:

US courts see rise in defendants blaming their brains for criminal acts

The Guardian, Nov 2013