The author's “big idea” is called “Radical Transparency,” what the rest of us have been calling “Open Books for decades. I like it, and in the context of his elegant story-telling, I buy in. This book also goes to a five because it is an Information Operations (IO) books, ably focused on data, information, and information-sharing as well as collective sense-making. He author anticipates most of us becoming “active agents” for change, armed with information as Thomas Jefferson understood so well.
CORE NUGGET: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is not done for most things, but when done right, it is mainly data and it tracks impacts on human health, ecosystems, climate change, and resource draw-down, for every single component and every single process including transport, packaging, etcetera. Toward the end of the book when the author talks about how an LCA commons is emerging, and quotes Andy Ruben of normally ultra-evil Wal-Mart as saying that LCA innovation “is the largest strategic opportunity companies will see for the next fifty years,” I am seriously impressed.
7 Stars–Nobel Prize (Of Old, Before Devalued) – Life Transformative Insights
November 28, 2009
Robert Wright
QUOTE: “Non-zero-sumness is a kind of potential–a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss, depending on how the game is played.”
This book is one of the most sophisticated, deep, documented, and influential I have ever read, right up there with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Published in 2000, this book has NOT received the marketing promotion or the public attention it merits.
THIS BOOK HAS SUBSTANTIALLY ALTERED MY PERCEPTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE.
This book does something I was not expecting: it directly relates, in a tight DNA-like spiral, the use of open space technology (process is really a better word) to the practice of peace. This is not a book on Quakerism–the author has made an original contribution that has moved me further down the road toward Evolutionary Activism (focus on connecting all humans to all information, not on arriving as specific answers)-but I better understand the value of such books as Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition as a result of this reading.
ALSO unexpected, I found this book to be a handbook for a “Whole Systems” approach to peace and prosperity. The author writes of “Multi-Factorial Development” attempting to do that, but i have the margin notation that putting a bunch of singular discipline experts (one from each discipline) in a room together does not create in any of them the ability to *do* systems thinking (or sustainable design). See Critical Path and The Philosophy of Sustainable Design.
I received this book in pre-publication form so as to offer a blurb for the jacket. Below is my take on this book.This book will simultaneously tease your brain, arouse your emotions, and motivate you as it probes deeply into the soul of man, society, and capitalism as the engine of Western civilization.
The author gifts us with a counter-culture manifesto that resurrects the goodness of capitalism while also connecting to the roots of humanity, of the human soul as a microcosm of the soul of society.
Be patient, the first third of this book will amuse, enlighten, & provoke, at which point it will grab you by the throat and shake your fundamental perceptions of life. The author is compelling in both a scientific sense, weaving psychology, biology, economics, and sociology together; and in an artistic sense, delivering theater of the mind, new visions, poetic turns of phrase page after page, and a massive amount of purpose-laden provocative minutia, all of which culminates in blinding flashes of insight that explain the mind-expanding role of circuses, the failure of religion, and the natural cycles of fission and fusion, splintering apart and coming together.
Tom Atlee's research and thought innovations span from the conscious evolution of social systems to collaborative dynamics to a host of other ideas centering on group, social and political dynamics. He has worked with a number of leading authors on their books including ‘Awakening: The Upside of Y2K'. More recently Tom Atlee has been exploring and writing about collective dynamics.
Tom is one of the 8 US Collective Intelligence leaders, one of 25 (or more) global leaders of collective intelligence and bottom-up deliberative dialog democracy. He received the Golden Candle Award at OSS'04.
OSS '04: To Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, for his sustained leadership in the vanguard of an informed democracy.His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Worlds for All is in the best traditions of Thomas Jefferson, who said “A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.”
It can safely be said that he has had more influence than any other person on the migration of the original Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement away from serving governments and toward achieving its righteous role as public intelligence in the public interest.
With a tip of the hat the University of British Columbia and Professor John Meech of the Faculty of Advanced Engineering, this is the latest briefing. As with most of my briefings, planned words for brevity can be found in the Notes.
Exquisite in Every Respect, Two-Fifths Equations & Charts, April 3, 2008
Martin A. Nowak
I don't do math, so I must disclose right away that the math was lost on me, except in the context of this equisitely presented book, I am compelled to recognize that mathematics as well as computation science is going to be a major player is the EarthGame, in modeling alternative outcomes for social and cultural complexity, and in cross-fertilizing disciplines by creating a common language.
I tend to be hard on publishers, so in this instance I want to say right away that the Belknap Press of Harvard University has done an absolutely phenomenal job with this book. The paper, the use of color and white space, every aspect of this book is exquisitly presented, and at an affordable price. I therefore recommend this book for content as well as for its artistic context, for both those who love mathematics, and those who do not, but want to understand the promise of mathematics for the future of life.
The text across the book is elegant, clear, easy to understand, and coherent. The summaries at the end of each chapter are in English, and for me at least, obviate the fact that I am mathematically-challenged.
I have a number of notes that merit sharing as encouragement to buy and read this book, one of just two that I found in the right context and price range as I venture into the intersection of modeling social complexity and doing real-time science in the context of an EarthGame where everyone plays themselves. The other book I bought and will read shortly is Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Too many otherwise worthwhile books are grotesquely over-priced, and the authors should release free PDFs online in protest and to have effect on this exciting emergent inter-disciplinary endeavor.
The author stresses early on that Information is what evolves–errors are mutations, mutation plus selection in a noisy (i.e. natural) environment is evolution. I like that idea, and point the reader to Hans Swegen's “The Global Mind: The Ultimate Information Process” (Minerva UK, 1995)which first made the connection for be from DNA to World Brain.
The author inspires with his view that the field of evolutionary dynamics is “on brink of unprecedented theoretical expansion.” I must say, as one who is focused on connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time, I have been slow to understand that while that is a wonderful baseline, only models can project alternative scenarios into the future, and hence, the modeling of the past is but a prelude to the shaping of the future by displaying compelling alternative paths.
The author sees mathematics as a common language that can help disciplines interact, and when they do so, progress occurs. He speaks specifically of disciplinary “cultures” that must understand each other.
Early on he delimits the book, and in the process notes that mathematical biology includes:
+ Reproduction
+ Mutation
+ Selection
+ Random Drift
+ Spatial Movement
Terms of interest (all explained in English not just mathematics):
+ Sequential space
+ Fitness landscape
+ Error threshold
+ Neutral versus random drift
Thoughts that grabbed me across the book (all from the author):
+ Evolutionary game theory is the most comprehensive way to look at the world.
+ Natural selection favors the defectors over the cooperators BUT if there are repeated interactions, cooperation is not assured, but is made possible.
+ Models show alternative scenarios–inclulding coexistence of all.
+ Evolutionary graph theory yields a remarkably simple rule for the evolution of cooperation.
+ Under natural selection the average fitness of the population continuously declines [we're there!]
+ Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation (the collective intelligence world has been calling for reciprocal altruism and a shift to a gift economy with open money and an end to scarcity–I see all this converging).
+ War and peace strategies CAN be modeled (as my own books suggest, the problem is the information asymmetry that Charles Perrow speaks of. Elites make decisions that have consequences for all of us, but they lie to us (935 lies leading to the war on Iraq) and they also externalize costs into the future.)
+ A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL can move an entire population from war to peace.
+ 10 cooperators in a string comprise a sustainable “walker,” and is two such cooperative walkers meet, they can induce a “big bang” in which cooperatives sweep the game away from defectors.
+ Cooperators and defectors can co-exist for near-eternity.
+ Evolutionary graph theory can plot relationships (I think to myself, not only of people to people, but costs to things, time, and space).
+ Language makes infinite use of finite media–bulk of progress in last six hundred million years has been cultural, using language, not genetic.
+ The author credits Noam Chomsky with the Chomsky hierarchy relating language to mathematics. I read most of what Chomsky publishes, and had no idea he had done original work in mathematics back in the day.
+ Learning differs from memorization in that the learner is enabled to acquire generalizations that can then be applied in novel circumstances. I strongly believe that we must radically redirect education toward team learning, project learning, learning to learn, and learning in vivo, one reason I want to map every person, every dollar, every thing, every language, every idea, in Fairfax County.
+ Mathematical analysis of language must combine three fields (at least):
– Formal language theory
– Learning theory
– Evolutionary theory
The author concludes that mathematics is a way to think clearly. I cannot disagree, but as I put the book down, VERY PLEASED with the complete package of such very high quality, I was not convinced that mathematics can do intangible value and cultural nuance is multi-cultural context under stress and with time limitations.
The author provides both a bibliographic essay and a superb extensive bibliography, but if I could change one thing and one thing only in this book, it is that I would integrate the two. I have neither the time nor the inclination to look up each cryptic (Bloom, 1997) in the longer list. I would have preferred to see the actual bibliography organized by chapter, with all books on, for example, “Evolution of Virulence” listed there after the explicatory section. This is a nit.
I learned enough from this book to budget for and demand the full inclusion of evolutionary dynamics in all that the Earth Intelligence Network will strive to accomplish in the next twenty years.
Kudos again to the publisher. Nothing gives me more pleasure, apart from intelligent content, than very high-quality materials, thoughtful editing and lay-out, and honorable pricing. This book is a gem in all respects. BRAVO.
I did not appreciate Stephen Wolfam's A New Kind of Science but treasure the book (another enormous gift to mankind at an affordable price) and urge the mathematically-gifted to take a close look at that work.
I would also point the reader toward Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) as one approach to creating a universal dictionary of concepts, easily found on the Internet, and also Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS), easily found at the Bootstrap Institute.
From 4 to Five for Gifted Story and Amazon Price Cut
