My mother wrote me an email on Christmas, and since it's been awhile since talking about I've been working on I decided to explain, captured below:
Hmmm what about myself. Well, I'm working on this lofty thesis of how people come to define 'value.' The direction I'm taking begins with an understanding of fundamental human limitations, and using those to help illuminate why one thing might be more valuable [in some cases] than another thing.
So an easy example is: why are data visualizations suddenly so popular? Well, we now have lots and lots of data available thanks to people sharing information of all sorts online - it makes sense that it's more valuable to us as charts as opposed to numbers, because 25% of our brain is occipital lobe dealing specifically with vison, and significantly less of our brain is devoted to dealing with more abstract things like numbers.
(That said, I like this one project I ran into recently, a team a MIT that made a prototype machine that takes in weather data from the internet, and depending on the change in temperature from the day before, mixes and dispenses different flavors of toothpaste. The idea is that if your toothpaste is minty as you brush in the morning, you'll know it's colder than the day before. If it's cinnamon, you'll know to dress for warmer weather. I call this 'data tasteualization.')
So the limitation is that biologically we're built to navigate the world in certain ways; a natural extension of that reality is that we find certain things useful/meaningful/valuable and other things less so. Ultimately my hypothesis is "limitation is meaning." Basically in the way rules create meaning. Do you remember Second Life? It was a virtual world circa 2002 or so (still is, actually), where the premise was that you create a digital second self.... and then you can do anything in that world. As you might imagine, the problem is that if you tell people they can do anything...they do nothing. No one knew what to do.
This is why games are fun, and Second Life was not fun: games come with rules that limit you to doing a certain number of things. And from that limitation comes meaning, and value. Hmmm, in fact, sometimes I think about that button Dad made when we had the button-making machine, it said "no keys, no lock; no rules, no game."
It's all started with trying to understand decision-making, which lead me to this notion that humans are notoriously and consistently bad at thinking about time. That got me thinking about our capacity for thinking about time as a natural limitation on the way we make decisions. The quintessential example is illustrated by the following:
1) Which would you rather: $50 now or $300 now? (easy)
2) Which would your rather: $50 now or $50 in one year? (easy)
3) Which would you rather: $50 now or $300 in one year (difficult)
So that limitation got me thinking about what some loosely call "feedback loops." That is the notion that in order to feel like you're impacting the world, you need to intuitively see some kind of feedback from your actions. That's easy enough with turning on a light switch, or putting your hand on a stove (or deciding to take the money now), but not as intuitive when it comes to eating less and losing weight later, or translating the value of reading a book into future wisdom.
So "intuitive feedback" has become a kind of value to me, because of our limitations in the way we interpret causality. $50 seems like a causal agent when I put it into a bank and get interest 5 years later (money is intuitive because it easily translates into numbers), but it doesn't *seem* like a causal agent when I use that $50 to buy a smart book (even if 5 years later I have an intelligent and meaningful discussion with someone important because of it).
Obviously, *seeming* is the critical term here. Lately I'm fond of saying "reality is just reality, and it doesn't really care if you understand it or not." Aldous Huxley said something similar, although somewhat pessimistically toned: "facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored." So because of that I've grown to really like illusions and paradoxes (I consider all paradoxes to be illusions). That's why I put "[in some cases]" in brackets up there in the first paragraph; the interesting thing about studying value is that you find all sorts of seeming paradoxes.
So an example: why is Katy Perry so popular? Well, because she sings about things everyone can relate to. If "popular" is valuable, it's because there is value in accessibility. But then think about a deeply complex work of art, a literary masterpiece. These things are valuable in the esoteric complexity, their ability to be accessed only by a few. Put more simply: scarcity is value.
So, scarcity and accessibility are at odds. This is a paradox, but I suspect it's just an illusion.
To get a bit more complicated, that thesis is actually just kind of a starting point for thinking about how the universe has solved complex problems. Something like "how nature, humans, and technology have been working over time to solve different kinds of the world's complex problems - almost in a passing of the torch sort of way, like relay racers." It's pretty rough thinking right now, but I think about how we only have to solve problems like cancer, because evolution already took care of the simpler problems like basic diseases. Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired) recently wrote "What Technology Wants," and has been talking about he doesn't worry about what some might call "the rise of technology" because maybe the world needs other kinds of minds, maybe kind of like how different kinds of human cultures enrich the world.
The notion seems somewhat lofty on its face, sure, but then I think about things like the Eureka Machine. It was first most known for being able to watch a swinging pendulum, and from studying the movement mathematically, it was able to determine the fundamental laws of classical Newtonian physics.
They then put it in front of one of our mathematically toughest current challenges: the double pendulum problem. That is, attach a pendulum to another pendulum, and the motion that results is - for all human purposes - chaos. There was a point where the Eureka Machine was studying the double pendulum problem and defined it mathematically. I don't think any human had done the same to that point. Although I might have that confused with another example, one concerning cell biology. As you know, cell biology is *astronomically* complex. We're talking sub-atomic complexity, the preciseness of which determines exactly how cells and cell parts function. The Eureka Machine had at some point predicted the behavior of cell development or replication or something to that effect, to such a degree that the researchers observing it ran into a critical problem: they knew the end formula, but they themselves couldn't explain the formula. Thus they couldn't publish it; it'd be like writing a dissertation and when asked to show your data responding with "it was magic."
Last I remember, I think the researchers are still struggling with that problem. And it makes me think: someday a problem much more complicated than cancer is going to present itself to the world, and it seems plausible that our natural limitations inhibit us from solving them as humans. That's not such a bad thing; after all, even the force of evolution is limited as well, primarily by time. But if you take a step back and think of evolution as just one part of reality, and humans as just another (that evolution created), then it's not such a "scary" prospect to think of technology as just yet another part of reality (that humans created). It might be that this problem is in fact the *result* of human limitation/biases/shortsightedness - climate change and the upcoming challenge of food production come to mind, but I'm sure reality can think of many other things that I can't.
Long story short, I'm thinking of putting this all into a book at some point as it brews in my head. I expect to do lots of research on this that will sometimes validate but more often challenge my thinking, and I expect the results to point me in an entirely new direction. I'm collecting all the cognitive pieces at
http://www.howtobreakanything.com. Or maybe I'll nurture some relationships at Columbia while I'm here and maybe do a nice formal thesis/dissertation or something. I don't know, I'll figure it out as I go along - I'm not very good at thinking about time ;)
