New webpage: Low-carbon leaders -Beyond carbon, is live and show the way for collaborative work

The page for Low-carbon leaders: Beyond carbon that focus on 21st Century Clusters with transformative solutions is now live. I just wanted to say that I’m really happy with the graphic solution, the "curtain", that allows users to look at the main part of the predecessor (the cases with small entrepreneurs and their transformative solutions).

Low-carbon leaders: Beyond carbon is a totally new project, but instead of just leaving the old work and move on, the "curtain" helps to provide a background and context to the new work. This is particular interesting as there where multiple stakeholders involved developing the cases. For the future I could envision that different groups that collaborate to use similar solutions like the one used on the page when they build on earlier joint work.

It might never happen, but if this graphic solution helps collaborative efforts in any way I’m very happy.

With regards to the actual project things are moving forward at a good phase and I look forward to an intensive fall with transformative clusters.

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

Anger undermines a very important message about enlightenment I can really recommend this book, The Moral Landscape – How Science can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris, but you might want to skip the first three chapter or so (I was close to stop reading).

These first chapters are not well written as they both misunderstand a lot of philosophy (even basic concepts like “Humes law”) and have a tone that is mainly oscillating between bitterness and anger.

It is really sad that Sam have not spent more time reading philosophy, not the postmodern, but the classics. I’m not sure why he ignores a field where thinkers have reflected over the challenges he’s done for thousands of years. Staring from zero is fine, but it gives the book a bit of a teenage character.

Why he does not read philosophy is explained in a footnote that sounds like something you hear, not even from a teenager, but 12 year old ("can do it myself...")

“I did no arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the science of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism, ” etc., directly increase the amount of boredom in the universe.”

The fact that the book has a teenage character is also something positive. It is an energy and frustration in the book that is refreshing in a time when most people don’t seem to think about how thin the culture of enlightenment and science is. Still it is about science so some more reflection would not hurt. Maybe he thinks that the tone is what is needed in the US/global media climate?

Still, it would have been nice if he did not simplify things quite as much, e.g. he compares “water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” with “cruelty is wrong” and say “To really believe either proposition is also to believe that you have accepted it for legitimate reasons”. It is easy to understand his frustration, but this kind of oversimplification does not help.

To compare a chemical formula, based in science with well defined concepts (although even these could be challenged is we go down a level and make the definition of hydrogen and oxygen more complicated, and also when it is actually water and when it is something else), with concepts like "well-being" and "cruelty" is not very helpful. As a student these are the kind of things you play around with, but Sam is not a student, but perhaps he want a niche in mass media.

Further he writes that “concern for well-being is the only intelligible basis for morality and values”. This is another example of the kind of statement that does not mean anything. I think it partly based on a belief that things can be simplified and isolated. Further down on the same page (if pages make sense in the age of e-readers when you can chose the size of the text) he writes “would it be better to spend our next billion dollars eradicating racism or malaria?... Such questions may seem impossible to get answer to get a hold of this moment, but they may not stay this way forever”. That you can’t isolate one from the other, and that the way to calculate things in this way will also influence “well-being” is nothing Sam seems to think about. If he did, he might have a slightly different approach.

These weak points are frustrating as I think it will result in people ignoring his important message about people trying to bridge things that can not be bridged.

I think his discussion about Francis Collins, the former head of the human genome project, was refreshing to read. I need to read Collins book as I can’t believe that he is as irrational as Sam portrays him.

Maybe most interesting part of the book is when he discusses how his friends, that agree that science should guide society not religion, are afraid that criticism of religion will make people chose religion and not science. So it is better to tell lies to the public in order to ensure a future for science. The fact that people call him a fundamentalist and that he is dangerous is scary to me. I don’t think Sam is a very pleasant person and there are positions in society where I think he would do a bad job, but from what I have read I can trust him to listen to an argument and not dismiss anything I say without having using facts that are true to the best of his knowledge.

Spending much of my time in international processes, where religion doesn’t play a very important role, I see an even more disturbing feature that I hope he can discuss in his next book. The fact that there is a growing lack of respect for science among many professionals.

Right now for example, I’m involved in a process with a group of consultants that are as bad as the religious fundamentalists when it comes to respect for science. They seem to do that because they have adopted a short-term and narrow time perspective where things are very simplified and intellectual honesty is not important. In this case they have a client, they think they know what the client wants and they present a result based on these assumptions.

The scary thing is that these people don’t care about the consequences of their action, nor have any respect/knowledge about science. It is a weird economic approach without knowledge about economics, let alone social science.

These people show a few slides with some will known theories/approaches on a PPT and then jump to value based and sloppy conclusions. These conclusions are then meant to guide actions among multibillion companies that affect what products and services that are available as well as the values in society as they sit on very large PR budgets.

How these people can be encouraged to think about the ethical implications of their actions and understand the long-term consequences of undermining science is a challenges I hope Sam will address. When it comes to killing the planet and ignoring the poor these people are the ones I think are the biggest problem. To be honest, compared with these "sloppy" people I think a lot of religious people have a lot to contribute to. This is especially true when it comes to actual action. Lab scientists like Sam are great, but when we look around the world there are people, such as another Sam (Sam Childers) that actually go out and try to make the world a better place instead of sitting on panels and writing articles…

Still, with all the weak parts in the book it is well worth a read. I can also recommend his web-page where you can be inspired by his (angry) quest for enlightenment. http://www.samharris.org/

PS

The book had two other areas that I think are worth mentioning, one because I think it is fundamentally wrong, the other because I think it is one of the most important questions.

The first is under the very interesting heading of "which self should we satisfy?", but instead of an understanding of how complex humans are and the different preference conflict that emerge all the time, Sam presents a simplistic form of the already flawed idea of Utilitarianism. Not only does Sam want to add up the experiences, he wants to categorize the reflected experiences as flawed. He gives the example of a trip to Rome and say that if a person during this trip at every point did not feel good and later a "remembering self" claims to have had a wonderful time the "remembering self"is simply wrong. The attempt to divide a person in this way is first of all a very strange thing to do, but two things should be included in any approach like this:

1. No one has "simplistic feelings". When I'm in Rome I might have an aching back home that make me suffer, at the same time as I enjoy a very interesting conversation with a friend, while I realize that I'm in a restaurant that serve meat that make animals suffer, and by paying the bill I will help them continue to promote this business, but at the same time I got a great idea for a future project, then I also realize that the conversation I have at the restaurant is part of a pattern where I look for distraction rather than deeper understanding, etc, etc... Layer upon layers that makes us humans, but frustrate neoclassical economists and apparently people like Sam.

2. We constantly change, the transcendence of the ego, as Sartre called it, is what defines us as humans. We might not agree with everything Sartre wrote about the ego, but the fact that we constantly can change is something that anyone who say they believe in enlightenment should consider (and if not explain how they approach humans). So when we look back we might see things different compared with how I experienced them at the time. Much of what people do when they try to improve things include things that might not be pleasant when it is done, but reflecting on it brings pleasant memories. Education and physical training are probably the two most obvious examples.

The Dark Side of Creativity by David H. Cropley, Arthur J. Cropley, James C. Kaufman and Mark A. Runco

This is almost a must read for anyone engaged in the sustainable innovation discussion. The material is a bit uneven and a few of the contributions should have been left out (low academic level and nothing really relevant to contribute), but overall it covers many interesting aspects of creativity.

The discussions about the consequences of creativity should have included more about large scale problems outside the military (Climate Change, endocrine disruptors, economic policy’s resulting in poverty are just a few that would have been interesting to discuss). But the one major area that I would like to have seen included is current marketing/PR and the consequences on creativity in society. The fact that many are wasting their creativity selling things that are bad (for ourselves, other people, other living beings and the planet) is

Still the book is filled with short chapters that cover interesting fields, such as:

1. What happens when successful creativity that delivers something good becomes a cage that makes it difficult to continue to be creative?
2. How can the educational system talk so much about creativity and do so much to kill it?
3. How close is creativity to madness?

There are also very interesting gems about the development of the nuclear industry (and the end of it) where the unwillingness to take sound decisions is explained from a perspective where companies become overconfident at the same time as they are under market pressure resulting in a situation where “new technologies were being developed without objective assessments”. James Jasper, who wrote the chapter that included the nuclear power discussion made me interested in his idea about “players or prizes?”

Liane Gabora and Nancy Holmes short chapter “Dangeling from a Tassel on Fabric of Socially Constructed Reality” is as poetic as it sounds. It makes me happy to see such a chapter included as this kind of texts are not often found outside the more “arty” fields.

I would have seen a longer version of Arthur Cropley’s chapter “Creativity in the Classroom” where he developed more concrete ideas, and did this in relation to a situation where students will be connected and have access to ideas/input that no generation before have.

In the chapter “The Dark Side of Creativity and How to Combat it” Robert Sternberg discuss what I think is the most important aspect, wisdom. It does not really say anything new, but the things we already know are sometimes the most important.

I’m not sure why, but I think the chapter “Neurosis: The dark side of emotional creativity” by James Averill and Elma Nunley is my favourite. The way they use Dostoevsky, William James and Otto Rank to discuss creativity reminded me of Marsel Burman’s “All that is solid melts into air” and in all its lack of focus also brought back “Ideology” from Otto Rank that I have not been thinking about in a very long time.

It is a joy to read books where the authors actually have spend time to think about the issue they write about. I hope that I can stay away from the “airplane literature” that is written by journalists as entertainment and with more focus on short nuggets that people can quote over the dinner table than any actual knowledge. I wonder if the “airport literature” are spread due to the fact that other journalists (with similar lack of deep knowledge) like them as these books are the kind of books they potentially could write (good in style but without much depth in knowledge). Are they the books equivalent of Fox-News/The daily show, entertaining at best and oversimplifying mainly? Hopefully the future will have more of these books where people with knowledge explore issues in depth.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World by David Deutsch

This is a really interesting book to read, more as a phenomenon than the content. I can’t find a better way to describe the book than the feeling of listen to a drunken rant by a really brilliant person, and I mean that in a good way. It is like listening to a really upset person during a dinner who spins out of control. A lot does not really make sense, even more is just driven by anger and makes him lose focus. Particularly frustrating is that the anger makes him invent straw men of important issues like the precautionary principle (a very difficult and important issue) and then engage in emotional battles with them. But don’t let this scare you off.

You will have to suffer through the first two chapters and listen to an upset voice that is so frustrated with the religious fanatics in he US that he lost the ability to see nuances. At the same time it is easy to feel sympathy for David as he tries to fight the religious fanatics that arguably been the source of the most suffering though human history. At the same time I was hoping though the book that he should take a step back and say: “see how I now turned into the thing that I criticized, letting anger and frustration drive you will not create the open society we need. The fact that I don’t agree with someone is not a reason to simplify things.”.

After the two initial chapters discussing different kinds of ways of philosophy and ways to approach science (without much nuance as I said, but still important) he all of a sudden starts discussing Star trek. He almost lost me there as it felt bizarre to read someone, who was criticizing a lot of people in very important areas, all of a sudden take transporters in Star trek very serious. The funny thing is that it leads to the best description of quantum computing I have ever read. Only this part make the book worth reading.

It highlights that people who are not really capable of coherent thinking in many important areas can help move the knowledge in society forward. How can we allow these people to work, while at the same time keep an open and wise society where questions about education, environmental degradation, energy systems, democracy, etc can be discussed in an educated way?

After the chapter about quantum computing, where he demonstrate that he knows something really well and can describe it in a way that indicates many lectures and discussions in the filed, he falls back to the ranting again. This time however it is easier to read as it becomes that this is not a book that should be read as a contribution to any larger issues in society. This is a book that should be read to understand how really good scientists feel when their innovation and right to do what they want.

David is a smart guy, but not as smart as he thinks he is. He is like a more angry and less brilliant version of Richard Feynman, a person who also thought he was more clever than he was, but fun and while he could be arrogant he never came across as this angry to me. Beside the very good quantum computer description I think the book is best read as a call for a more humble approach for scientists. Scientists should take on the challenges in society, but I think it would help if those thought about the need for a dialogue and clearly state what their focus is.

Taking a step back I’m happy that David was published as so many of the books today are written by journalists/entertainers that don’t know the subject they write about (beyond google searches) and treat their audience as if they can’t read a sentence with more than ten words.

As he is so personal it would be interesting to know next time what he is doing to help reduce global poverty, develop solutions that 9-10 billion people can use, reduce natural resource consumption, increase dialogue between different cultures, address the threat of pandemics, demographic changes, etc. Is he a vegetarian, what car does he drive, what energy does he use? What are the choices he thinks are important?

Full letter from Greg Maxwell + some thoughts about access to knowledge and media

The 21st century connectivity and the opportunities we have, e.g. to create a global digital Alexandria with free access to all the important knowledge in the world, require us to discuss some very difficult questions. Unfortunately most of these discussions, that will define freedom/equity/knowledge in the 21st century, are happening without many policy makers or mainstream media seem to understand what’s going on…

Now the actions by Aaron Swartz (you can read more about the case at Demand Progress) and Greg Maxwell have triggered an interesting discussion that hopefully can spread outside the small group that discuss this issue on a regular basis.

I have discussed these issues before so I’ll just post the letter from “Greg” below and before that a few headings from different media. These are either interesting articles and/or interesting headlines.

Beside the more fundamental questions, I think some researchers should do is look into the language used by media and policy makers in cases such as Aaron Swartz/Greg Maxwell and their actions in relation to JSTOR. Do they simply call it a CRIME and say that old rules apply. Do they put words, like STOLE, between quotation marks to indicate that things are a bit complicated? Or do they just state things, like THOUSANDS OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS UPLOADED TO THE PIRATE PAY, that are more neutral (but actually factual incorrect as it is a torrent file that is uploaded, something that is key when discussing P2P/file sharing). Do they provide links to people can find the documents (is this encouraging crime or basic service to the reader)? Do we refer to the people as criminals, activists or ethical students?

Interestingly a number of media do not seem to have a problem to download material and support the general idea that information should be free. The idea that an economic entity or a person can “own” information/knowledge will hopefully give way to a society where people/companies are compensated when they contribute to knowledge, but the basic principle is that knowledge is for everyone.

Some examples of headings:

> “More knowledge 'stolen' for the good of science” msnbc.com - Nidhi Subbaraman
> “Huge Trove of Academic Docs Posted Online in Response to Activist Arrest” Wired News (blog) - Ryan Singel
> “Swartz supporter dumps 18592 JSTOR docs on the Pirate Bay” Ars Technica - Timothy B. Lee
> “Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay” GigaOm - Janko Roettgers
>

Below is the full letter from Greg Maxwell

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements
suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAk4nlfwACgkQrIWTYrBBO/pK4QCfV/voN6IdZRU36Vy3xAedUMfz
rJcAoNF4/QTdxYscvF2nklJdMzXFDwtF
=YlVR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----