Humanity 4.0

Been thinking a bit about the winds of change that are racing through the social media speedway. I have to say, for the most part the perspectives seem misguided to me. Well-intentioned maybe. But from where I’ve seen the world in my crazy travels we need to think out of the ol’ box way more than that.

A lot of people are seeing this pandemic as both a sign and an opportunity. A sign that we need to stop-and-think differently. An opportunity to change the broken systems that were and still are plaguing us. So far so good. 

But then inevitably the recurring theme I read and hear is that capitalism is evil, and that we are slaves to it. And therein lies the trap: that’s where those perspectives are setting themselves up for failure. 

Capitalism as the predominant “ism” did not come about just last century. To be clear it was not born even two hundred years ago. It goes back at least to the Phoenician merchants of millenniums ago, never mind a couple of centuries. 

What we DID do sometime in the last couple of centuries was give capital-driven systems their very own “ism”. We spanked it from birth and watched it usher in Humanity 3.0. 

It was very well intentioned at the time, given that we were trying very hard to wean ourselves away from totalitarian monarchies and despotic empires. No self-respecting future historian is going to ding capitalism for that. So far so good.

Enter abuse and greed, stage right. Yes, we couldn’t help ourselves, and the fucked-up human tendency to want to “have it all” comes every-damn-time at the expense of too many. A mere handful at first, but soon enough it spirals down to hundreds, thousands, and invariably millions of fellow humans. And THAT’S were the system begins to act like a runaway freight train.

Some societies shut the doors to capitalism early on. China and Russia among the most obvious. Didn’t work out very well for Russia, China is probably not too far from its own implosive fireworks. Others embraced capitalism, but after two horrific back-to-back wars they fell to their knees and suffered through a shock-based change. That was Europe. America on the other hand, not so much. 

Just about the biggest suffering that the US has ever endured on its own soil was not 9/11. Or Pearl Harbor. Or the great Depression. Or even this pandemic - knock on wood. No, it was the Civil war. 

It’s not just the raw number of deaths mind you: 620,000 is as close as it gets to genocide. The US population at the time was around 31 million. So about 2% of the population died in that war. Two percent of today’s US population would make it 6.6 million. Chew on that for a bit.

So the fact that the US has not embraced a socialist democracy most definitely comes from a lack of extreme suffering, like the one Europe felt since the fall of their monarchies. Over one hundred million deaths from two world wars alone. ONE HUNDRED MILLION. And we’re worried about a quaint virus? Bitch please. It is Covid-19 that fears humans, not the other way around. Animals fear humans. Life itself fears us.

It hasn’t been paradise for European socialist democracy, no doubt. Most US conservatives make a very good living poking holes through the Swiss cheese of European socialist democracies. The lesser intelligent among these conservative pundits point to the likes of Venezuela, but hey. Those Americans are their own worst enemy, so there’s not much we can do to save them. 

Which brings us back to those who are heralding a new post-capitalist era. A brave new social order. That’s great, except for one minor detail: they don’t have a plan. Go back and re-read where they spend most of their energy in their premise. It’s a brutal critique of capitalism, in all its worstness. You can’t build anything out of sheer criticism. Well, not anything of value or sustainable. 

That’s not how isms work, so fail they will - unless they change their tune. From the get-go capitalism was way too busy looking to capitalize on productivity. It was too busy to be whining about the dark side of humanity. It had a plan. A vision. A mission. Strategies, and deliverables. To quote from one of my favorite Don Henley lyrics, “and Jesus people bought them...” (yes, I know. They were ugly boxes.)

You want this Covid-19 experience to change the world? Focus on a positive force for humanity. Leave capitalism alone, it’s just an “ism” we created to get us to the next level two centuries ago. Humanity 4.0 awaits. But we’re not going to find it in the holes of capitalist Swiss cheese. There’s nothing there to begin with, that’s why it’s called a hole. Either fix it or create something better, but we’re beating a dead horse by pointing out how toxic it has become. Yes, in many ways it has become toxic. And yet it’s still the only ism we have. Personally I neither hate it nor am I in love with it. It’s just a system, a tool. To me it’s like a car: it got us from point A to point B. We’re at point B. Kicking the old car is not going to launch us on our next journey. 

Guys like Bernie Sanders were proposing we join our European brothers and sisters on that next journey. Love him or hate him he was proposing something positive. He had a plan. You don’t think it will work? Find something better. Or get in the old beat up car and keep driving it until the wheels fall off. That’s it, no other options. Kicking it is a dumb option, please stop doing that. It is just as dumb as poking through the holes of European socialist capitalism. It’s Swiss cheese, stop poking through something that’s not there. Take a sad song, and make it better. Otherwise let it be. Words of wisdom indeed. 

Hello Humanity 4.0... my god, it’s full of stars...

...

Death By Data

The first thing you learn in the training and/or practice of Quantitative Methods (aka statistics) is to be highly suspect of raw data. You know, like gas station sushi. Generally speaking you need to be highly mindful of the behavior of data, including variables such as the size of the data sample vs. total population, correlation, extrapolation, deviation, etc. Because, as my favorite professor of QM would be fond of reminding us, “garbage in, garbage out”. 

Some of you may have heard of a statistics term called Standard Deviation (SD). I won’t get into its excruciating details, but just be aware that many statistical analyses thrown your way deviate more than two data points away from their respective assumptions. Why two? Because one is the loneliest number, duh. But stay with me: standard deviations technically make the base assumptions mildly contaminated, if you will. Yes, I use “contaminated” very consciously here, in these times of pandemic. Assumption contamination, the inevitable erosion of a hypothesis, is something I’m sure you’ve heard footnoted as “margin of error”. Most of you have experienced this dissonance in political polling, aka The Art of Manipulation (with all due respect to good guys like Nate Silver).

THAT BEING SAID. If there was ever a time to be BOTH tuned into AND guarded of statistics in the same breath, the day has finally arrived. Let’s just say that 2020 will most likely be known as the year we all became a little wiser. Whether you’re predisposed to look at the glass... nay, at the DATA half-full or half-empty, we will all be a little smarter at the other end of the curve. When all else fails, apparently suffering is that overload trigger that switches on a brave new forced behavior in life. I would have gone for pleasure as that trigger, but hey. Nobody asked me. Perhaps in THAT parallel universe, evolution was completed in about a WEEK (insert eye roll emoji here).

Whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, there are two exponential forces at this moment shaping your destiny: one is SCIENCE, and the other... no, it’s not love. It’s not family, religion, or politics either, as powerful as those forces are. Those forces are constants in life, not exponential. That second exponential force forging your destiny at this moment is a crazy little thing called SOCIAL MEDIA. 

If you don’t believe Social Media is an ever-increasing force in your life, you might want to reconsider. Consider what it has done to what we used to call the Fourth Estate - aka The Press, or Journalism. Down to its knees the once-mighty Fourth Estate went. Suddenly arch-enemied as the MAINSTREAM Media, its Goliath-like relevance is now pitied against any David with a laptop, WiFi, and a clever slingshot of manipulated data.

Which of course brings us to that curious little word that is changing your life like a magnitude 9 earthquake. You might have heard it very recently referred to as Big Data or Data Mining, by the Captains of Industry and their army of merchants. Nothing wrong in principle that it was capitalism which brought the power of data to the forefront, even more so than science. Whatever it takes, evolution doesn’t care. But, alas, what do we have here: between capitalism and science, guess which one is not on its knees at this moment...

In SCIENCE, most researchers report the STANDARD DEVIATION of experimental data. By scientific convention, only data points that are more than two standard deviations away from a “NULL” expectation (the base assumption) are considered “significant”. Mind you, that null point is still a hypothesis. Think of it as the presumed innocent in a trial, until otherwise proven guilty.

SOCIAL MEDIA for its part works with an equal but opposite force: most posters report based on highly emotional triggers and bias confirmation binges. By social media convention, only data points with zero standard deviation from an assumption are considered (period, never mind “significant”). At the end of the evening, when all smart phones go down on that night stand... If the data don’t fit, you must acquit.

A deadly virus, not love, is in the air. I mean, some may argue that love will kill you sooner rather than later as well, but I digress. A killer pathogen is in your neighborhood, one that floats like an invisible butterfly, stings like the motherfucking grim reaper. So it is  unequivocally a great thing that we have a sufficiently developed science at this stage in the game of evolution. Science, as we speak, is looking at the data objectively. It is desperately seeking standard deviations above and beyond that second loneliest number. Relentlessly, until the hypothesis is either discarded or PROVEN. Then and only then will science set you free. 

Until then, enjoy Social Media - aka the New Mainstream. Share data if you must. But if you do, please understand what a null expectation is, and what standard deviation means. If you don’t that’s OK, but please, please-please: until we DO understand those things better, let’s all stick to the comic section of that last-man-standing newspaper we call The Daily Facebook.