Alternate Outcomes

“All men dream, but not equally.”

— T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)

But Marty, that will change the future!

“The formal purpose of social experiments is to provide knowledge about mass human behavior that will be useful in the design of policies. So the lessons for policy depend on what we read the experiments as saying about behavior.”

— Robert M. Solow (“Lessons on the Income Maintenance Experiments”, 1986)

How everything just fits nicely together in a mission-driven enterprise operating a research testbed that supports collaborative social experiments in a semi-autonomous and geographically distributed manner.

The foundational research testbed is assembled from a novel combination of 5 key elements; i.e., best-in-class for capturing a treasure trove of knowledge about mass human behavior in the context of basic income.

Study conclusions are to be drawn from analyzing a series of experiments running on this research testbed and interpreting its real-world significance, both qualitatively in the form of individual case studies, as well as statistically in the aggregate. The advantage of organizing empirical studies around such a research testbed is that a group of experimenters can now pose and study, not one, but a whole collection of interesting research questions related to basic income.

This research testbed, once fully up and running, can also be made accessible to any interested basic income researchers anywhere around the world to facilitate collaborative efforts in the field. One can thus think of this research setup as being similar in spirit to the Polymath Project, which makes massively collaborative mathematical research possible among mathematicians and math enthusiasts from far-flung places. What’s more, the research testbed itself is built upon the Ethereum platform and operates robustly as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Now, how cool is that!?

“... Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

— T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)

References:

1. Forget, Evelyn L. (2011, February). The Town with No Poverty: Using Health Administration Data to Revisit Outcomes of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment. Retrieved from: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pdf
2. Matthews, Dylan (2014, July 23). A guaranteed income for every American would eliminate poverty — and it wouldn't destroy the economy. Retrieved from: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5925041/guaranteed-income-basic-poverty-gobry-labor-supply

Working Together + Getting Along

Bertrand Russell: A Timeless Message (circa 1959).

“I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral.

“The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

“The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple: I should say, love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other; we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way — and if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Charlie Munger: A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business (circa 1994).

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

“You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You ’ ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

The Star Thrower

“Once, on ancient Earth, there was a human boy walking along a beach. There had just been a storm, and starfish had been scattered along the sands. The boy knew the fish would die, so he began to fling the fish to the sea. But every time he threw a starfish, another would wash ashore.

“An old Earth man happened along and saw what the child was doing. He called out, ‘Boy, what are you doing?’  ‘Saving the starfish!’ replied the boy.  ‘But your attempts are useless, child! Every time you save one, another one returns, often the same one! You can‘t save them all, so why bother trying? Why does it matter, anyway?’ called the old man.

“The boy thought about this for a while, a starfish in his hand; he answered, ‘Well, it matters to this one.’ And then he flung the starfish into the welcoming sea.

— Loren Eiseley (“The Star Thrower”, 1978)

Bridges and Tunnels

“Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.”

— Israel Nathan Herstein (1923-1988)

The challenge of forecasting is concisely captured in the following piece of advice: When presenting a forecast, always observe the first rule of forecasting: “Give them a number or give them a date, but never both.” Indeed, we may know that certain events (e.g., news announcements or periodic release of government statistics) will occur at a precise date and time – down to the second even – but we can never be sure how the market would react. On the other hand, we may know quite a bit about how a particular market might behave, e.g., oscillating in a range-bound fashion, but we are not able to pin down the exact time of reversal. Good forecasting, therefore, requires that we master the movement and rhythm of the market so we can be reasonably sure of the magnitude and direction of occasional big changes, while keeping track of the approximate timing of frequent small reversals.

This brings us to looking at forecasting from the perspective of building bridges and tunnels. Bridges are the plausible relationships that connect concepts together in a domain of discourse; while tunnels constrain the uncertain relationships between two concepts to within a zone of possibilities. By using a “bridges and tunnels” metaphor to understand how a conceptual map can be constructed and applied towards the business of forecasting, we hope to illuminate the somewhat murky picture of trying to discern the future. And that does not come from seeing the future through a crystal ball.

Forecasting by Bridges and Tunnels: Connect and Constrain.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

— Stephen Hawking

References:

1. Saffo, Paul (2007). Six Rules for Effective Forecasting. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
2. Walonick, David (2013). Survival Statistics. Chapter on Forecasting. Retrieved from: http://www.statpac.org/research-library/forecasting.htm

3. Cheng, Eugenia (2015). How to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics. Basic Books.