Tangentially related thoughs - cyborg simulations

This is only slightly related to the discussion on nomadic academics of the past two posts. It is related in the sense that it is about alternative ways of relating to data and data-generation. There has been a decent amount of work on virtual economies and what they can tell us about RL economies. More recently, there has been some breakthrough in AIDS research (hat tip @javiercha) coming out of a tinker-toy type game. What these situations have in common is the combination of computer simulation with human interaction. The simulation is not complete without BOTH elements. This strikes me as an especially powerful way of doing certain types of research, something that goes beyond crowdsourcing, beyond complex systems models (like Conway's Game of Life). This is also different than gamification (which is bullshit, btw), or Jane McGonigal's games to change the world stuff. This is games to study the world.

This is cyborg simulation (half-human, half-computer). The promise, to me, is to combine the things that computers do well (crunching numbers, remembering things, setting limits) and the things that humans do well (some types of pattern recognition, teamwork, "creativity"). Wow. Think about that!

The Nomadic Academic, Part 2

I've gotten some good responses on my first post, and a nice link from my old classmate Graham Webster on his blog infopolitics. He poses a very important question, one that I hope to address in more detail in a later post. Much as I may use food and energy as extended metaphors for knowledge or information, the nomadic academic does not live on books alone. How then, Graham asks, are academics to buy real food and real gas while they are off in the metaphoric steppe herding diffuse information? His answer, in short, is to combine academic and non-academic (a.k.a. "real world") employment. You should go read it in full. But how much useful work will this produce? And can it compete with the work produced by those fully in the academe?

As I said, I hope to tackle these questions at more length in a later post. But I have spent the week thinking about something else, so first this:

Part 2: The Secondary Products Revolution

In the previous post, I qualified nomadism as a strategy of mobility. Real-world nomadism as an economic-ecological adaptation required the horse and certain horse technologies (bit, stirrups) to allow people to cover more ground and control more animals than they could on foot. By analogy, certain computer technologies (full-text searching, translation software) allow the pioneer generations of nomadic academics to cover more ground their their precursors. It used to be the work of a career to read a major corpus (say, six or eight Dynastic Histories) looking for specific topics or terms (yogurt, for example). Nowadays, it is possible for a Young Turk who barely reads Chinese to write a masters thesis on yoghurt covering Sima Qian to the Northern Wei and the Southern Song (that's 14 centuries, for those keeping track at home). I know this because I wrote such a paper.

Horseback riding is only one of several critical technologies on the way to nomadism. Superior coverage of diffuse information is a new productive paradigm, for sure. It enables quicker and easier access to a broader base of information that we would otherwise have. However, the end product is the same. To extend the metaphor, the old way to write a book with broad coverage was to expend a huge number of person-hours gathering in all your sheep to sell them at market. The new alternative is to ride a horse (i.e. search engine) for fewer people to expend fewer hours bringing those same sheep to market. This still does not allow the academic nomad to range that far.

So what additional technologies are needed? In the neolithic, there was a critical second step in the domestication of animals, one of major importance to the development of nomadic pastoralism. This was the so-called Secondary Products Revolution, an idea due to Andrew Sherratt on the importance of non-meat animal products like milk, wool and labor. The importance of this to pastoralists is the ability to glean small profits from their animals during the long and expensive process of raising them to maturity. Eventually, many animals came to be raised primarily for their secondary products.

The importance of this to nomads should be obvious. Nomads use animals to gather the sparse produce of marginal zones. If they were to eat entirely from the meat of their animals or by exchanging animals for other food and goods, pure pastoralists would need truly enormous numbers of animals to survive. These animals in turn would require even more enormous pastures. The feasibility of raising large numbers of animals exclusively for meat by specialists (i.e. people who didn't also farm) is almost certainly limited to the modern CAFO, which, by the way is a density-based (not mobility-based) strategy.

Secondary products, however, allow nomads to survive off their herds for long periods of time without reducing their numbers by primarily consuming their milk and blood. In most modern nomadic societies milk and blood products - combined with grain foods obtained by trade - are their staples. Meat is a special-occasion food. This was almost certainly the case historically as well.

Essentially, secondary-products give a way of storing animal-based food energy. Meat cannot be stored without salting or refrigeration. Grain can easily be stored, but not easily transported. Storing meat on the hoof is not a great option because you have to keep feeding it. But once you can get milk from that hoofed-meat while it is in storage, it becomes a desirable option. More importantly, these milk-producing meat-storage units can move around. They're called cows.

In other words the secondary products revolution gave herders an energy storage option that was, in many ways, superior to grain. It was still impossible to store large numbers of livestock in one place (because they would eat all the grass), so grain remained the preferred "density" strategy. But it made specialized herding a plausible "mobility" strategy.

So how does this metaphor extend to academia? I would argue that standard research is a lot like growing grain - you sit in one place and plant a bunch of seeds (read other people's books), water them (attend seminar) and then you harvest them (write your own book). Other people can then take your seeds (book) and plant it in their field to grow some books of their own. Search-based research methods are more like hunting or herding - rather than working a known patch of soil, you cast a wider net (ok, it's also kinda like fishing) and pull in sparse resources from a large area. Here is where the metaphor breaks down however, because in our transitional generation we have been writing books. That's kinda like turning our meat (or fish) into grain. Or something.

The metaphor has broken, but I hope the point is made. If we, as mobility-choosing academics, want to range wider areas, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for us to keep writing books. That's like killing all our sheep to sell at the farmer's market. Our mobility strategy has only taken us a small distance beyond the pale. What we need are secondary products. So what do milk-cows and yoghurt look like in the realm of information?

In short, we need technologies that continue to produce as long as they are fed, that give us years of milk instead of days of steak. This means developing databases that integrate with the material they describe. It means machine-learning. It means transferable publishing standards for methods as well as content. It means network methods and complex systems. Again, the food analogy is entirely worthless here because the idea is of recursive rather than iterative methods. It means any type of research that produces semi-autonomous systems of generating questions (that will generate answers when fed), rather than one-off conclusions.

This made sense in my head and a mess on the screen. Tell me what you think.

The Nomadic Academic, Part 1

Part 1: Choosing Mobility

 At its largest (and smallest) scale, history (and the end of prehistory) is the story of competition for power and resources. Individuals, families, states and empires have competed with each other for ten thousand years and more. Much of that story is about the different strategies employed in this competition: hunting vs. gathering, herding vs. farming, raiding vs. trading... These strategies represent different ways of accumulating resources, and thereby power. 

Early on, the critical resource was food - enough to feed the individual and the small group. Families with better strategies for their time and place had more food, and were more likely to thrive. At the beginning of history, the neolithic revolution - domestication of plants and animals - had made food relatively plentiful; people (and to a lesser degree large animals like horses) became the critical resource. States that could control more people (and horses) could win wars, build pyramids and leave records for us to read. Arguably, this continued until the advent of modernity and the arrival of fossil fuels. Coal and oil outweigh human power by enormous factors, and have changed global dynamics - powerful states were now the ones that could control fossil fuel, and later nuclear power.

In each of these periods, there were many different strategies for accumulating food, people and oil. However, we can generally divide these into mobile strategies and sedentary strategies. Hunting requires covering more ground than gathering, and is riskier, but the reward is a big bunch of good food at once. Farming focuses on extracting as many nutrients from a limited space as possible, herding makes up for sparse natural wealth by ranging animals across greater areas. The escalation of these strategies - nomadism and irrigation further differentiate these. Nomads, by covering even more ground can survive in areas of even sparser biomass. Irrigation, as well as fertilizer, pesticides and other farming inputs enable even larger crops out of a small area. There are intermediary strategies - hybrid farming-herding, swidden farming and so on - but these represent the two basic models: stay in one place to concentrate returns, or move faster and further to cover more ground.

The empires that formed on the basis of these divergent strategies looked vastly different. On the one hand, places like China built huge population densities and stored tons of grain. They built walls to keep people in as much as to keep raiders out. They ramped up investment in agriculture, and built standing armies. On the other hand, places like Mongolia remained sparse. People, sheep and horses ranged across large areas. Armies were generally temporary and made up for their inferior numbers with superior mobility. With a horseback army, leaders like Genghis Khan could take on ground-bound forces more than ten times the size, simply by avoiding fighting them all at once. Mobility vs. density. The balance of power between these strategies went back and forth.

Having covered the basic concept of mobility, let's return to the argument that inorganic power sources have changed the game in modernity - that human power is no longer the determinant of strong states. I don't buy that premise on the grounds that food and labor are still clearly important. There are certainly states that are powerful on the basis of their energy resources - Saudi Arabia, Canada... But most of the big powers in the world are populous - China, the US... More importantly, control of money and information has clearly become a major determinant of world power: England is a financial power, Germany a technological power...

So what have been the financial and technological strategies of these powers? For much of the so-called "Information Age" (which I would argue has origins far earlier than the computer), the sedentary strategy has dominated. Learning was kept in books in libraries, and money was kept in banks. This is where computers and the internet came in. Just as nomadism came after farming, the mobility strategy of information followed the sedentary one. Information has become diffuse, and we have begun to domesticate horses that allow us to range across it.

The earliest nomad-farmer battles of the information age came from the horse-breeders - the computer scientists. Hackers were the Scythians, the earliest barbarian raiders. Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman are our Attila and Timurlane. Open-source software distributes the labor for its creation across hundreds of volunteers, just as nomadic armies were made up of thousands of part-time warriors/full time herders. Wikipedia does similar things (imperfectly) with general knowledge. In perfect irony, open-source hardware is now growing to include technology for building farm equipment. The increasing treatment of financial instruments as pure information has caused all kinds of chaos, and its hard to tell who the barbarians are...

Anyway, this is all a lead-in to what I hope will be an extended meditation. Academia is a largely feudal/bureaucratic institution built to house and control the distribution of knowledge. When the Universities of Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca and Paris, and for that matter the Hanlin Academy and the Library of Alexandria were founded, hand-copied books were the best we had. Knowledge beyond what a single person could create and remember had to be housed in sedentary locations, and it made sense to collect it. But for scholars, the printing press was our wheel, movable type our chariot, the computer our saddle and the internet our stirrup. So I ask, in the middle of our nomadic revolution, what would it look like for an academic to choose mobility?


Reading List
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Own Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China
David Christian, "Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History"