In Between of Science and Democracy
About economics networks, knowledge networks, knowledge discovery and governance of technology
Part 1 — Inspiration
“Dog-eat-dog, every day” was an amazing song by Offspring, and Smash was the soundtrack of a whole July when I was a teen “educator” at summer camps (“tutoring” and playing with “kids” who were just three years below my age, and engaging with “the grown-ups” who were just two years above my age — ah, what a time).
Yesterday, I was exploring a blockchain channel on slack, and got sad when I read a thread that was going like — it is normal to scam people, since we live in a dog-eat-dog world: even better, it is smart to exploit system vulnerabilities, so that you improve systems.
Actually, sad is not exactly how I felt, maybe I was more concerned, surely I was raising questions in my head: on a façade of “innovation for good things” and “democratising” this and that, many — maybe majority — of messages on Telegram channels I am subscribed are about making profit.
And if you look at the advisors who are paid to influence community, you’ll discover there are rings — who is in the back of several conferences, ICOs, teams, it is a ring of a relatively few people knowing each other, and I think there is not yet much of a distributed governance over technology born to distribute access to information and distribute access to assets — and therefore, in my opinion, access to capitals in form of assets (definition of capital).
Maybe me too — I m feeling the fierce competition of the world we constructed upon return of capital (making X-Time profit) and utility models (which by definition does not take into account input costs and externality costs in computing a price associated to value). And so, I may be also emotionally embarked in a constant challenge to ameliorate, improve, turn the bright lights on. But, and I don’t know actually why, I am more interested in thinking in eco-systems (put in connections systems with the environmental stock that regulate the system) instead of scamming each other by exploiting system failure.
I feel that thinking in eco-systems allows to improve systems and their externalities, with a total gain, while hacking over systems vulnerabilities allows to maximise personal gain, but it is not said that that will translate into a benefit for the eco-system.
A bit like, there is a forest, people can mine free-axes, and if too many individuals are chopping trees beyond eco-system resilience there will be a few with big wood assets (especially, the traders VS the producers), and flock of individuals with nothing much left; but, above all, there will be a threat for the forest.
Now, if it is true that it is a dog-eat-dog world, for the forest is that one and the space is limited, and you fuck up someone else to maximise benefit so that “the system” will improve, someone else will pay for the consequences; but if the system is closed (like a forest, a Company, your startup, or the connected Global Economy depending on your model) the total externality cost may start to erode the system equilibrium, and it will be detrimental for everyone. Detrimental, for the amount of information that the network of interaction between people and organisations (the economic system) could actually process, because a dog-eat-dog model undermine trust.
In other words: the resilience of eco-systems is at risk when players only maximise own utility, without a feedback mechanism between the utility they gain and costs they discharged on their physical / social environment.
That is why I look at blockchain as an opportunity to track interactions in a community (transactions of assets), and embed a feedback mechanism between the return of owned capital (how exchanged assets are processed) and capital stocks (availability of assets). Actually, banning cash and only using digital money offers already the possibility to track capital flows and capital stocks, and actually the platform is already in place no need of blockchain; however, blockchain technology allows to deploy economic networks as controlled experiments, also at low scale (e.g. the economics network of a corporation, instead of the economics networks of a whole Country, or the whole Planet), opening interesting scenarios to understand better how complexity of economic structures evolve in time. Imagine if, by regulating capital stocks and capital flows, you could predict the rate of innovation a society could yield as output and tune feedback mechanisms between return of capital and externalities over natural stocks and other in-kind assets, so to manage sustainability and resilience of the ecosystem.
I am elaborating these concepts — modelling economics as the technology of self-organisation — on an internal draft. Meanwhile, if you are interested how the role of Capital affects the negotiation power over the value of your LifeTime, you can read this article.
With this spirit, still this evening I found myself enquiring on dynamics of economics networks, and exploring tests to generalise knowledge discovery upon structures created by economics networks.
Among structures created by economics networks, there are knowledge networks.
Here below, knowledge networks of factual knowledge.
Part 2— Background
In my previous company I co-authored a topological model of knowledge graph, and led design thinking processes over learn and discovery experiences in knowledge discovery, and led product design of edutainment apps.
Among my sources of inspiration, there were the research area of my former co-founder, renormalisation group models (RG); the research area and outstanding curiosity and capability of my former histrionic advisor, capable to match deep tech, story telling and entrepreneurship; the works of Mark Newman, Albert Lazlo Barabasi and Cezar Hidalgo on economics networks and work of Thomas Piketty on the distribution of Capital in the last two hundred-of-years.
My hypothesis is that the dynamics of economics networks, that is, information structures (created by capital, in its monetary and assets forms), reflects on knowledge networks. Like: when industrial domains merges, you should see the process reflected on the knowledge they produce, and viceversa, as indeed a feedback mechanism between capital and processed information.
I am keeping alive my curiosity in exploring the “connectome of Human Knowledge” in my side-project— a knowledge network to search for suggestions in between of two topics, as toy model to then search for connections in between of two industrial domains, and eventually predict when new knowledge will be produced.
In this latter experiment, I want to publish some tests performed over an old companion: a knowledge graph of ~5M topics and 100M correlations I’ve been using also in my previous commercial products, to provide brainstorming experiences about one topic.
Here, I tried to ask my connectome of factual knowledge — “hey, humanity, what one should know to underpin “Democracy” with “Science” ?
While the response is more about insights over political science and philosophy of science, and I am intrigued to explore how research on predicting suggestions in between of generalised knowledge networks may provide a tool functional to balance a dog-eat-dog world.
Part 3— In between of “Science” and “Democracy”
(While I am writing https://youtu.be/BZmVE6NaWVo?t=1m29s is rocking on).
I run some tests to evaluate and play against topological properties of my knowledge graph: centrality measures; optimal K-Means clustering (explored “elbow” method and Baysian Information Criterion to select optimal K); salesman problem and Markov states; entropy measures; activation-modelling and some custom algorithms to navigate them.
Here’s some graphic results. There is no specific order for “meaningfulness”: it is the one of my folders, inspired by music — this time https://youtu.be/94dY-QxjDiE.
Again: DUDE, what’s in between of “Science” and “Democracy” ?
Comment about the role of protestantism in Science and Capital structures underpinning western democracies. Historically, protestantism succeeded to “escape” the Counter-Reformation — the Time when many people were burnt alive or forced to abjure own discoveries.
While in Italy and Continental Europe the Scientific progress of Galileo, “father” of modern scientific method, was getting obfuscated for about three hundred years, protestantism stemmed in France, UK, Switzerland, Germany and carried the cultural possibility of critique and raising doubts. At the same time of encouraging a relatively higher spiritual freedom to inquire on things, respect to believers in “centralised” systems — like in Catholic ethics, where there is one Pope — the protestantism encouraged “hard work” and return of profit from it. Time is value. A cultural meme still alive in modern Capitalism.
Indeed, the fabric of USA carried such memes — from Dutch, German and Great Britain families (2010 USA census reports~49M people identifying with German ancestry).
Aside of the dispute if religion is causal or not to the order in nature, it surely is important the dispute if we should organise a society over systems of believes that reject empiricism and evidence: a wrong choice may cost hundreds years of obscurantism.
An important lesson to keep in mind for the present, when political strategies aims to counter scientific evidence on economics externalities to maximise utility of some specific sectors (e.g. Creationism VS Evolution; Climate Change VS mining and cattle industry; Environmental Resilience VS Economic Growth).
Also, an important lesson to keep in mind in social dynamics of influencers in capitalistic systems — while science stands for the possibility to raise doubts; marketing strategy stands for ensuring customers not to doubt and funnel their certainty in purchasing (a product, an opinion); policy-making stands for taking actions upon some facts, and some facts that are still not proofed but you must anticipate; here again, a scientific method and scientific thinking will help in governance of large complex systems, like economics networks are.
Part 4 — Insights and discussion for Human Centred Design
(Music — https://youtu.be/UDVtMYqUAyw)
Please see above for captions to the images and notes about the topics mentioned in the map.
Who are these insights functional for?
Well, first of all, me :) But maybe also you.
You are a student, and your assignment is to write an essay. Maybe you wanna get some inspiration.
You are an educator, and your assignment is to engage in discussions that integrate and debate over multiple points of view; your role may be guiding the freedom to raise questions and doubts with skills to observe, put things in perspective and build arguments.
You are, actually, both. In modern citizenship it is impossible to be one xor the other, to have complete authority on absolute truth or the duty to abide with absolute faith.
This knowledge maps offer a base to beef your opinions up, and be completed with your notes, verbal, visual and written explanations in making sense of the world and spinning novel interpretations off.
Part 5 — Going wild
Let me go wild now, and wrap up concepts about Decentralisation, Economics Networks, Capital, Dog-eat-Dog competition and how they affect Democratic organisations.
The challenge of specialising competences and anticipate multi-disciplinary fields in labour market: negotiating the value of Time
The scientific and tech progress are increasingly connecting diverse disciplines.
On one side, masses of individuals are getting more and more specialised to cope with competition in working activities (work as a self-expression in the democratic principles), but in a long-term strategy, they also need to anticipate forking of new competences required in economics structures: they need to go multi-disciplinary. This can already be observed in millenials and generation-z, who are diversifying their background at colleges and universities with courses that may sound, to a baby-boomer who still cast own vote in democratic elections, so too much different to become “inconsistent” or “naif”.
Aside with the hard work to specialise for the present, and diversify to anticipate for the future, there is also the need to invest on civic engagement (I don’t have time for you now! I need to work! ). Not only for balance in own intimacy and personal life, but also because investing in emotional intelligence is strategic. Emotional intelligence is the thing that allows people to give and get attention from others, and ultimately, to shape organisations.
If you are intrigued by the extension of emotional intelligence as a form a sexual capital that does matters in competitive systems with not well defined rules on how people interact, you know there is indeed literature on the relevance of Erotic Capital and Sexual Capital in business and labour. Also, you can pay attention to the keywords used to tell successful stories in leadership and entrepreneurship. The word “hottest”, “beautiful”, “natural”, “sexy” may pop up aside one-line brags as “leader, author, scientist, investor, entrepreneur”, they are cultural memes adapting to communication transformed by social engines tech.
The Emotional Intelligence sphere applied in business (the interaction of people shaping economics networks) and pertains to a cultural management of power (not in a deceptive way, although it certainly happens, but also for the capability to interact with people having a diverse background then yours and therefore using a different language or a different attitude to problems).
My interest is in how an economics system can shape a culture, instead of the culture or education transforming economics — based on the negotiation power that individuals holds on own Time (a form of in-kind Capital).
Is it possible to model capital flows and stocks in economics networks, so to maximise innovation rate of a societal organisation and concurrently reduce externalities on “commoditisation” of own Time ?
Here, science of economics networks can provide deep insights on policy-making for shaping democratic organisations and for balancing the feedback mechanisms of ecosystem — how to use capital in monetary forms and assets, as natural resources stocks are.
If interested in Negotiation Power over own Life Time and Wealth Inequality — read further at: https://medium.com/@luigiassom/can-decentralisation-enforce-human-rights-c1fa3ffbe90
Slavery as an externality of wealth-inequality (power law distribution): the
Referring to the queries above, and making a link with Negotiation Power over own Life Time and Democratic organisations, I note that Slavery is also connected with the foundation of modern democracy; African Americans is prompted as a topic.
From a point of view of the role of Capital in shaping Democracy, Slavery was indeed a form where the utility of disposing of the Life Time of many individuals for an extremely cheap price, was causal of a massive externality: the value of Life Time of millions of individuals, (Afro Americans, during the foundation of the United States of America), was traded for utility price that actually eroded the potential of their own Life Time — the value of their most precious asset, that is, a form of Capital.
Imagine if millions of individuals, all of a sudden, could actually increase the returning value for employing own Time to process valuable information structures and better well-being, instead of being idle. Land-owners would report a loss respect to their utility, in short term (in short term may mean their life-span); the society would have a net gain (slavery and racism memes are still alive after 300 years, and always will be active in areas with too wide gape of relative poverty, with direct consequences on elections, decisions, policies).
In history, Slavery also allowed to create “structures” but actually democratic organisation usually allow to process structures much much faster.
That’s why is important to balance return of Capital with network externalities; said with other words, balance Capital stocks with Capital flows in economics networks. Opposition to slavery at the foundation of modern democracies was to weaken power of land-owners; as an effect, industries emerged over plantations and estates.
Wrapping up with the introduction, blockchain networks could provide a big opportunity — for they allow to track and compute value based on the topology of an economic network (like in a controlled experiment), and so, an opportunity to regulate return of Capital in function of information gain and information losses (externalities) — for a slide deck about this concept, see — https://goo.gl/BLGbPi (I feel awkward to quote myself but I m putting pieces together :).
About fascism, capital distribution in economics networks and modern democracies
In the queries above, I noted that in between of “Science” and “Democracy”, thinkers who live in the era of “Fascism” were displayed; also, in a result (not published here) there were “Revolutions of 1848”.
To interpret how much wealth-inequality could impact on a societal organisation, and allow transitioning from state-nations to first democracies, then from social-democracies to totalitarian organisations, and then from totalitarian organisations to modern democracies, I invite you to read two books, one of which at least made history.
Both authors underwent severe long-term unemployment. Both they lived in a time when Science and Tech were facing unprecedented booming, with first trans-oceanic flights, first discovery of antibiotics, first global crash of financial networks coincidentally in the same years. Both they reasoned on the role of Capital, the impact of massive inequality onto the societal organisation, and the pivots of a modern society — they indeed lived in the same historical period, with very different conclusions over the societal organisation called Democracy. They were Orwell and Hitler. Have a quick read of pleasure to Down & Up Paris and London, and the Mein Kampf (first chapters where the young Hitler is telling about his considerations over Socialism and Marxism, from which he was initially horrified for his experiences as a worker, and was starting to infer quite debatable conclusions on the culprit of societal decadence, exasperated by the struggling he faced). On the other side, Orwell also witnessed the effects of poverty — people who are poor are not stupid, it is prolonged starvation that consume their intellectual and physical ability — yet, he was able to provide some insights to ameliorate societies that, with the jargon of today, it may be called design thinking.
Orwell going on “design thinking”: how to improve societal organisation respect to societal outcasts ?
At the end of his book, instead of condemning being hard up as a failure of own intellect or doom for God’s design, or reversely to celebrate success as a condition for own capacity, he poses fundamental questions; records key observations for needs of people and system failures (externalities) — which also Hitler observed; offers some possible solutions to test.
To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road.
As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster will survive inquiry. Take the generally accepted idea that tramps are dangerous characters. Quite apart from experience, one can say a priori that very few tramps are dangerous, because if they were dangerous they would be treated accordingly. A casual ward will often admit a hundred tramps in one night, and these are handled by a staff of at most three porters.
It will be seen from these figures that at the charity level men outnumber women by something like ten to one. The cause is presumably that unemployment affects women less than men; also that any presentable woman can, in the last resort, attach herself to some man. The result, for a tramp, is that he is condemned to perpetual celibacy.
It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. […] No humiliation could do more damage to a man’s self-respect.
The other great evil of a tramp’s life is enforced idleness. By our vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he is not walking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the intervals, lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward to open. It is obvious that this is a dismal, demoralizing way of life, especially for an uneducated man.
But the important point is that a tramp’s sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever. One could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walking from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road.
Granting the futility of a tramp’s life, the question is whether anything could be done to improve it.
Obviously it would be possible, for instance, to make the casual wards a little more habitable, and this is actually being done in some cases.
The problem is how to turn the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into a self-respecting human being. […] A mere increase of comfort cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became positively luxurious (they never will)* a tramp’s life would still be wasted.
Yet there is a fairly obvious way of making them useful, namely this: Each workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made to do a sound day’s work. The produce of the farm or garden could be used for feeding the tramps, and at the worst it would be better than the filthy diet of bread and margarine and tea. Of course, the casual wards could never be quite self-supporting, but they could go a long way towards it, and the rates would probably benefit in the long run. [Note: Food Security; Employing own Time; prototypes of Circular Economics; prosumers networks]
It must be remembered that under the present system tramps are as dead a loss to the country as they could possibly be, for they do not only do no work, but they live on a diet that is bound to undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses lives as well as money.
I invite you think and ponder well how the societal organisation changed respect to 1920s, and see if you observe any analogy in the observations he made and the observation you can do over beggars, immigrants, unemployment and, in general, total human capital losses in 2020s.
Now, your turn to think over the link between Science and Democracy.
Other Sources
News related to the role of capital ownership inequality in shaping democracy and human rights; role of network science as opportunity to improve democratic systems
In Sicily, Italy, criminal networks abused of relative poverty conditions of people affected by mental issues, alcohol addiction, drug addiction: in agreement with a worker in public hospital and a worker in insurance industry, they mutilated arts of victims, under “consensual agreement”, and pretended victims underwent car accidents. The perpetrators obtained, per victim, about 100–150K euros; they compensated victims of about 400€.
According to journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, @economichardship , reporting of inequality in America: “A recent study by University of California researchers and the Coalition on Homelessness surveyed 351 homeless people in San Francisco, finding that 46 percent had had things confiscated, and 38 percent had had their belongings destroyed by the city”. Considering belongings of homeless as their own assets, that is, capital, more than 1/3 of weakest capital owners underwent confiscation of their own assets — apparently, to prevent the negative externality of a “bad sight” in the city neighbourhoods, full of tents.
