On the news that Google is planning to introduce a Google phone, Bill Gates said: "How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?. They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?"
Earlier posts talked about CG Jung (CGJ): "Solving and Outgrowing Problems", and Pema Chödrön (PC): "Tonglen Practice When Things Fall Apart", but I failed to connect the two, until a relative of mine sent me an email with a quote from PC (see recent comments).
This post try to address the similarities and differences between CGJ and PC, or between psychoanalysis and Buddhism in general.
CGJ stated that the fundamental problems in life are insoluble because they express the necessary polarity of self regulating systems.
PC said things fall apart and they come together again, only to fall apart again, and so on; there is no solution, we think that it is about solving problems, but in reality there is no solution.
Often, we think we have solved a problem, but after a short time, the problem reappears or a new problem is created by the very act of solving the first problem.
Both CGJ and PC underlined the importance of accepting change and seeing change as the natural order of all things.
CGJ mentioned Wu-Wei, letting things happen, as part of our liberation.
PC said healing is to give space for everything, space for anger, for joy, for desire, for hate, for grief, for misery, and for not-knowing.
To give space is not quite the same as just acknowledging and accepting, it is more like a meditative mindfulness of sensations, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. That is why the goal of meditation is to be as spacious as possible. When we are spacious, we are mindful of the arising of anger ("there is anger arising in me") without getting really angry.
A spacious person would "contain" even his enemies, they are there, but he would not hate them.
But where is this space? It is in the mind. The mind is not just in the brain, most importantly, it is in the heart.
A very spacious person is called a man/woman with a big heart. The Dalai Lama is said to have a very big heart.
CGJ said, when we let things happen, we let loose the forces of the unconscious and the collective unconscious.
In normal life, we are often one-sided and imbalanced. When we let go, we let both sides of the polarities or Yin and Yang, to have free expression.
It is very powerful, but can be dangerous: "One of the illustrations accompanying the book [Hui Ming Ching], shows a sage sunk in contemplation, his head surrounded by tongues of fire, out of which five human figures emerge; these five split up again into twenty-five smaller figures. This would be a schizophrenic process if it were a permanent state. Therefore the instructions, as though warning the adept, say: 'The shapes formed by spirit-fire are only empty colors and forms' ".
CGJ pointed that "empty colors and forms" runs through the whole of Buddhism, in the "Tibetan Book of the Dead", it is stated that all favorable as well as are unfavorable gods are illusions.
All the notions of good and bad, powerful and powerless, beauty and ugly, wise and unwise, etc are polarities, and CGJ mentioned that these attributes tend to be personified as gods and goddesses (e.g. Aphrodite, Zeus, Athena, Ares, etc). They are all illusions.
Here we see similarities but also differences between psychoanalysis and Buddhism. The closest equivalents of the unconscious and the collective unconsciousness levels are the seventh and the eighth levels of consciousness described in "What is the consciousness before you were born?"
The ninth level of consciousness, the amala consciousness, has no correspondence in psychoanalysis.
It is a level beyond good-and-evil, beyond cause and effect of Karma.
Without this ninth level, psychoanalysis, will try to restrict the letting go process and interprets symbolic events from the unconscious, with the help of an analyst if necessary, back to the conscious level, so that it becomes balanced again.
In Buddhism, we learn to be mindful of the polarities (without the symbolic interpretations), and go through them to reach the ninth level. And we need to do this all the time in our every day lives.
Note:
The ninth level of consciousness is not mentioned in PC, many Buddhists regard the eighth alaya consciousness as the highest, but if we study closely, they include both alaya and the amala in this level, so the difference could be just the terminology, to call this a ninth level or eighth B. The alaya is the repository of Karma, the amala is the primordial consciousness, also called Buddha-Nature.
The BuddhistChannel reported the following story about meditation for business.
What types of meditation? The article reported about the SN Goenka technique, a Burmese Vipassana method. Goenka himself is a businessman, and student of U Ba Khin, the burmese master. It is said that although Goenka was raised a Hindu, and became a Buddhist, the Goenka centers are secular. They teaches a 10 day course, during which "noble silence" must be maintained, meaning no talking, newspaper, internet, cellulars, radio, television, music are allowed, except for the occasional talk to the teacher.
The crowd of Harvard Business School alums who gathered at their reunion to hear networking expert Keith Ferrazzi speak earlier this summer might have expected to pick up strategies on how to work a room, remember people's names, or identify mentors. But tactical skills, it turns out, aren't what turned Ferrazzi into a bestselling author or sought-after speaker.
Instead Ferrazzi let his fellow alums in on a little secret. The key to connecting, he told the group, is "not being an a**hole." And the most effective path he's found? Meditation. Exercise and prayer work too, he said, but meditation has been so effective that he now spends ten days every year at a silent meditation retreat. In other words, the man whose latest book is "Never Eat Alone" credits much of his success to alone time.
Meditation devotees include:
junk-bond-king-turned-philanthropist Mike Milken; Bill George, the former Medtronic (Charts, Fortune 500) CEO; ad industry mogul Renetta McCann; and NBA coach Phil Jackson. Silicon Valley is full of meditators, such as Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com (Charts), and Larry Brilliant, head of Google's philanthropic efforts. Naturally, a crew of Google (Charts, Fortune 500) employees has organized twice-weekly open meditation hours, at which it has hosted Tibetan monks and a team of mind-science researchers.
Particularly hard-core is Bob Shapiro, the former CEO of Monsanto (Charts, Fortune 500), who has done three ten-day silent retreats and is considering a 30-day tour. He must certainly be the first person to serve simultaneously on the boards of the New York Stock Exchange and the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society.
Internet Archive, which is best-known for it's Way Back Machine (a site where you can search for old sites, even if they have vanished now) , has now launch OpenLibrary. It contains non copyrighted books.
At the moment it does not seem to have many books, by contrast Project Gutenberg has over 20000 books. Both sites allow download of books in public domain.
Here is what it says about its vision, and its alliances,
"The Open Library website was created by the Internet Archive to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online.
The vision is to create free web access to important book collections from around the world.
Books are scanned and then offered in an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers all media: text, audio, moving images, web content and even software for public use. The content ranges from fantastic to obscure. Please have a look.
Open Content Alliance
The Internet Archive is a member of the Open Content Alliance. This alliance is putting together collections that can be accessed through websites such as the Open Library.
Members of the oca are:
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Biodiversity Heritage Library Project, comprised of:
American Museum of Natural History
Harvard University Botany Libraries
Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Cooperative Zoology
Missouri Botanical Garden
Museum of Cooperative Zoology, Harvard University
Natural History Museum, London
New York Botanical Garden
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Smithsonian Institution
Columbia University
Emory University
European Archive
HP Labs
Internet Archive
Johns Hopkins University Libraries
Missouri Botanical Garden
MSN Search
National Archives (United Kingdom)
O'Reilly Media
Prelinger Archives
Research Libraries Group (RLG)
Rice University
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
University of British Columbia (NOT YET confirmed)
University of California
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Toronto
Yahoo!"
After working 18 years, Jonathan Schaeffer, who had earlier wrote a computer program to play Checkers which matched the world's best players, has now completed the proof that with best play the game is a draw.
The result is not surprising, but the proof is hailed as a milestone, since it is the most complex game ever solved by a machine. It was reported in the journal Scientific American
We know computers play Othello, Chess, Go, and other games. Playing Othello and Chess, computers have reached world class levels (see e.g.Man vs Machine: Deep Fritz beat Kramnik), sometimes better than world champions, but in Go computers have still a long way to go.
This is an indication that Go (or Weiqi in chinese) is indeed much more complex than Chess. Developing computer Go playing programs would probably need new insights and technologies, just as computer Chess has done before.
By contrast, computer Othello and Checkers do not seem to have generated many innovations.
I would venture that playing Go needs feeling of patterns and intuition. It would be interesting to see if computer programs can play Go at the level of champions, by relying on brute force only.
Is there a game more complex than Go? Artificially, one could invent games of very high complexity, but in asking the question, we should restrict ourselves to games which are widely played by people.
Poker is another genre, players having incomplete information, but it does not seem to have a great deal of complexity.
About the game Go
Researchers at the university of Leicester (Why Do People Pay Taxes? Prospect Theory Versus Expected Utility Theory ) have applied Prospect Theory to try to explain why the rate of tax evasion is lower than expected.
The statistics of tax evasion showed that using the observed audit (1% to 3%) and penalty rates (50% to 200%), the return of tax evasion, computed using the expected utility theory, is between 91% to 98.5%, which means that it is much more attractive to evade than to pay taxes. Assuming a tax rate of 15%, the comparable return is 85%.
Obviously this is seen as a problem, since everybody would "rationally" choose to evade.
The researchers then applied Prospect Theory, to show that its results are consistent with empirical data:
"For realistic magnitudes of tax evasion (approximately 30 percent) and audit probabilities (1 to 3 percent) the penalty rate predicted by Prospect theory is 0.66 to 1.21 while that predicted by expected utility theory is 31 to 98. The penalty rate predicted by Prospect theory is consistent with observed rates."
Among the reasons are that people, under the Prospect Theory, overestimated small probabilities, and are risk adverse against losses.
In addition, the authors introduced a new factor, which is stigma arising if people are caught as a tax evader. This factor is actually qualitative (social punishment), but to get the results, the authors converted it as a numerical cost of stigma.
Despite the above data fit of Prospect Theory, I think there are shortcomings in the research. The problem of tax evasion cannot and should not be considered as a pure investment problem or a gambling situation. Surely people do not decide to pay or evade taxes just by looking at the probabilities of detection, and the associated costs, without considerations of factors such as honesty, and social responsibility.
A good driver, for example would not go through a red traffic light, just because, he thinks there is a no policeman there, or there is no traffic. He stops because he thinks it is the right thing to do.
Which brings us to the Buddhist Economics we discussed in previous posts, Economy should not be considered in isolation, Economy is tied in together with Ethics and Environmental issues.
The application of Prospect Theory to the problem of tax evasion is problematic because it left out many ethical problems. In countries where corruption is rampant, people may consider not paying taxes because they fear the tax money will benefit corruptors, not the country.
By contrast, the examples in Examples of Prospect Theory Applications, are less problematic. The Deal or No-deal situation is a pure gambling situation, and the problem of selecting methods of saving people's lives from a disease, is quite clear. Both alternatives are about saving lives, the choice is only about estimation of utilities.
In the tax evasion problem, the Ethics of compliance and evasion play a significant role.
Looking for free, open source software to download?
Here is a huge collection in the following categories:
• 3D Animation Editor, Address Book, Audio Tools, Bulletin Board, Compression Utility
• Content Managers, Databases, Developer Tools
• Document Publishing, Education, Emulators
• File Transfer, Games, Instant Messaging, Mind Mapper, Mobility Tools
• Photo Tools, Remote Desktop, Security, System Administration Tools
• Video/Multi-Media Tools, Wikis, Window Manager
Here is another of my favorite sites for freebies: The 46 Best-ever Freeware UtilitiesTo answer one of the comments made to the post Bounded Rationality and Prospect Theory, here are the mathematical formulas for the function ¶() and u(), adapted from the MIT Course on Behavioral Economics and Finance.
Of course the formulas are estimates only, and they contain parameters beta and lambda, which can be varied. Since Prospect Theory is descriptive rather than normative, it is an experimental task to find approximate formulas for both functions.
The function ¶(p) has one parameter beta:
According to Doyne Farmer, there are logical and economic rationalisms. The first has to do with truth, somebody is not logically rational if his or her statements or beliefs do not conform to logic, for instance being inconsistent. The second has to do with goodness of a decision we choose among alternatives.
Just as the first is fundamental in analyzing truth, the second is fundamental in decision making. In fact, Farmer discussed it in the context of artificial intelligence, how programs or robots are to make decisions.
In the following I am dealing with economic rationalism.
Economic rationalism is usually assumed in many economic theories. Economic agents are assumed to have perfect knowledge including knowledge of all past histories, and choose the best decision based on the knowledge. This kind of rationalism is actually hyper-rationalism. The efficient market hypothesis depends on it. Markets are efficient because the agents have hyper-rationality, and all information of past histories is therefore contained in the current prices. Markets can be inefficient for a while, then the arbitrage process will take them to become efficient again. Which is why, traditional economics is said to deal mostly with equilibriums.
People have been looking for other forms of rationality. In the early days of artificial intelligence, Herbert Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality.
The boundedness is the result of three factors,
The discussion on Buddhist Economics has lead to various similar concepts with different labels. There is Namaste, Mindful, Green, Holistic, Gaian, Sustainable etc. I am not going to go into their similarities and differences here. In the following, let us assume, they are all the same, and call them tentatively, the G-Economics.
I want to address the important question, whether G-Economy is at all feasible and practicable. Of course the real test of the pudding is its realization in the real world.
If that is not yet possible at the moment, the second best test would be a computer simulation of how different Economies battle each other, and which will survive at the end.
This is the same idea as put forward in my last post Econophysics And The Theory Of Games , where a population of agents are let loose, where the agents each have (identical or different) game theoretic strategies.
I am sure you know where I am getting at, I am trying to emulate the tournament for the famous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma or IPD ( see Wikipedia , Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Robert Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)).
Axelrod invited people from all over the world to submit computer strategies for the agents to use in the IPD game.
Examples of such strategies are suckers (taken advantage of), exploiters (taking advantage from others), and TFT (Tit-For-Tit). To cut the story short, in most cases, TFT is the winner, and TFT is generous, forgiving, and never attacks first.
Hence the conclusion "nice guys finish first", contrary to the common saying "nice guys finish last". The result is also enlightening, showing how altruism could arise as an emergent property in a situation where everybody was actually looking after its own interests ("selfishly").
TFT is also a robust and stable strategy, a community of TFT's is immune against invasion by exploiters and other strategies.
Applying the above to various Economies, we need to define certain rules for this tournament.
What has Econophysics to do with the Theory of Games?
Econophysics is the study of Economics by using analogies and methodologies from Physics, particularly that of Statistical Mechanics. The latter uses probability and statistics to derive aggregate properties (Thermodynamics) from a population of interacting particles/molecules. The macro properties of the population is then related to the microscopic properties of the particles.
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Economics Nobel laureate Markowitz: "I believe that microscopic market simulations have an important role to play in economics and finance. If it takes people from outside economics and finance -- perhaps physicists -- to demonstrate this role, it won't be for the first time that outsiders have made substational contributions to these fields.''
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In a way this was inevitable, since treating the system as an N-particle system is intractable. We know that the N-body problem is impossible to solve for N>=3, let alone for N a large number.
Now apply this analogy in Economics, but replace the particles with economic agents, and we have Econophysics. The economic agents are interacting in transactions, such as order, bid, ask, buy and sell.
Of course since the interactions are quite different from the interactions of particles in Statistical Mechanics, we expect Econophysics to have very different results. Some objects to Econophysics, because physics deals mostly with equilibrium and linear systems, whereas the new Economics is nonlinear and far from equilibrium in distinction to classical Economics which deals with equilibrium conditions in close analogy with mechanical equilibriums, such as the power of supply and demand, but could not tackle the fluctuations in a stock market, which sometimes lead to chaos and crashes. This is why Econophysics is also considered as a Complexity Science studying dynamical systems.
The model of a population of agents interacting in economic transactions can be studied theoretically or experimentally.
Theoretical studies are possible with simple systems only, such as applying the Ising lattice model to a the case where agents at the lattice nodes buy or sell or stay idle randomly with some probabilities.
Experimental means studying data from the real world, or making computer simulations of models.
The study of Econophysics described overlaps greatly with social algorithms (see "Defining Social Algorithm") which deals with the algorithmic aspects of a population of agents. Social algorithms does have to do with Economics.
Game theory enters the scene as the rules of engagement of the agents. So Game Theory is the microscopic model, and Econophysics tries to derive the global properties of the population of agents. In most cases, the agents will have different behaviors, leading to a multi-agent system.
The minority game (MG) is a famous setting used in the study by Challet and Chang.
The game itself is derived from the "El-Farol Bar" game invented at Santa Fe. Players in the "El-Farol Bar" decide to go or not to go to the bar. If they decide to go, and the bar is crowded, the payoff is low.
The minority game involves agents who buy or sell. If there are more agents buying than selling, the price goes up, and if there are more agents selling, the price goes down. Thus the minority always win (just like in the "El-Farol Bar"), hence the name MG.
It is worth looking at MG's setting, partial information and bounded rationality. Agents only have memory of the last M histories, for a finite M. It does not satisfy the Efficient Market Hypothesis, one of its premises being that the whole history is reflected in the present situation (Markov property). Bounded rationality asserts that people make decisions based only on partial information, even if more complete information is available (but may be too hard to find), and does not always look for optimal solutions (uses rules of thumb instead).
About MG, Challet wrote: "Funny enough is this game known in the French speaking part of Switzerland as "Zig-Zag-Zoug" : if three children must elect a leader for their games, they put their right foot close together, say the magical words, and at the end of "Zoug", they remove their right foot or not. The child who is in the minority wins."
Other than in Economics, Game Theory is also used in social and biological sciences.
The famous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has an interesting way of explaining how ethics/altruism develops, when each are supposed to act selfishly in their own interests.
Prisoner's Dilemma is also an example where the Nash equilibrium (Nash from "Beautiful Mind" ) does not give the best for players, which is why it is called a dilemma.
The above is a very elementary introduction to Econophysics and Game Theory.
It presents only one view of Econophysics, there are other people who look at Econophysics as everything where Physics and Mathematics are applied to Economics.
Econophysics in this wider sense, include stochastic processes, power laws, fractal market hypothesis, and "Physics of Finance".
The last is a title of a book "Physics of Finance, Gauge modeling in non-equilibrium pricing" by Kirill Ilinski , a physicist now working in finance. Ilinski starts with invariant properties (symmetry groups) of Quantum Electrodynamics, and applies the analogy to Finance. Both Quantum Electrodynamics and Finance become abstract mathematical theories of fibre bundles and differential geometry. Ilinksi derived Black Scholes purely from principles of invariance albeit under certain rather strong assumptions.
Econophysics has received much attention, see the following sample list of web sites dealing with Econophysics to get some idea of it:
I came across Namaste Economics earlier today, and was pleasantly surprised that it has a lot in common with Buddhist Economics (see my posts Buddhist Economy in Practice and The traits of Buddhist Economy ).
Like Buddhist Economics, Namaste Economics is based on principles of ethics/integrity, mindfulness, holistic awareness of systemic connections to the social and physical environment, and importance of values beyond monetary quantities. Sellers are supposed to have sufficient integrity to genuinely care for the customer, sell what is really of value to the customers, and not manipulate customers to become addicted to consumerism.
Frankly speaking, after many months of staring into my blog, I grew tired of it. I needed something new.
I saw the 3 column layout, which is not standard in Blogger, and liked it. I had too many items to put into a single sidebar, two sidebars would be better.
But I didn't like the one I got from Gecko&Fly . And some of the templates available were for the classic, not the new Blogger. Then a fellow Buddhist from Awakening the Buddha in us gave me a template to try (he cautioned me that it might be buggy and slow).
First I tried it out for one of my practically unpublished blog, and it went smoothly.
The for the real thing, after saving a backup, I installed it. The warnings said that most of my widgets would disappear, so I saved all the scripts of the widgets, and proceeded.
Then I put back some of the old widgets, and everything was fine, except it was plain white. I needed to put some color into it.
I saw how CSS (cascading style sheet) was put very artistically at Zen Garden , so I copied the lotus pond image and put it in my blog.
Then I saw the navigation bar interfered with the image, and found some advice how to get rid of the nave bar: Remove the NavBar
It worked.
However reading further, someone said that removing the nav bar is against Google's term of service for Blogger. I don't know whether it is true, but decided to be on the safe side by putting back the nav bar.
Now I needed to shift the image down, which means getting into the css. I know programming but hardly write any CSS. For looking up a CSS reference I downloaded TopStyleLite from Bradsoft , because I thought I would need to know more about CSS than just for the current task. I know there are many excellent sources for CSS, but having an editor is handy.
After the image was shifted, I got worried about the image copyright, was I infringing it? Again it is best to make a new image of a lotus pond. Here I used Painter.Net I talked about in my last post No free Photoshop . I wished I had Adobe Photoshop, which is certainly much better. But then again, Painter is free and only 1.5 Megabytes.
That was all for the look and feel. Now for contents, I wanted to show comments on the page. The blog didn't have that much comments, but some of them went back to posts I wrote nine months ago, and I often overlooked them. Using email notification was not an option, since it would increase my already crowded email folder, I preferred to read it on the web. And other readers would fing reading the comments easier.
Google has provided a widget for feeds, and there is a default comments feed . I tried using the widget, but it is limited to 5 items only. So I decided to use a RSS feed to Javascript program, to convert the feed into a Javascript, and use a Javascript widget to display it. I used Cut n' Paste Javascript
If you have just made a comment, please don't expect it to appear immediately though.
Any more changes? Certainly, but that's it for the moment. After all the contents are more important than the look and feel!
