Independent Thinking

Nice that you made a stop at my personal homepage. If you have been searching for an independent thinker - here I am. I like to have fundamental thoughts about who we are, what kind of world we live in and how to create good decisions and judgements. My training is to make autopsies without blame. Just plain logic. No emotions. Growing existing knowledge and accumulating empiric evidence. The basic question is: what should we do - when we only have incomplete information and do not precisely know what is going on?

The Future

It is difficult to foresee the past and even more difficult to predict the future.

There are two main reasons why we live in a partially observable world: firstly, we have limited information processing capacities and we will never know everything what is going on around us which might influence our position. Worse, the world is not static but constantly growing and generating new information. Secondly, we live in a system which you could call a dynamic hyper-dimensional multi-body-ensemble. Even if there would be no quantum mechanical properties these dynamic, large scale systems are a deterministic chaos (what is also called the curse of dimensionality). We can predict the weather for a few days at most, but never more than two weeks from now. This limitation will not go away even if we increase today’s computing power by many magnitudes.

No surprise, the book I like most is Fooled by Randomness. We are wired to extrapolate linearly into the future for the sake of our short-term survival. This tendency fools us to also see faces in clouds and to see causation where nothing is but randomness. Research in machine learning and artificial intelligence has seen a big revival since about 2010. It is not clear why. The underlying methods are relatively old and were known for many years. What has changed is the widespread availability of open-source tools, mountains of digital data, cheap storage and computing power. If the current capabilities are sufficient to create really useful intelligent agents will be seen. There are many warnings that machines might soon rival human intelligence. This is pure speculation. It is equally likely that we are only witnessing background noise.

Who I am?

Many people want to know: who I am?

This is a difficult question because I do not know. And as we will see later, there are many good reasons not to attempt to answer this question. The desire to classify someone is a fallacy. Humans like to categorize and enjoy black-and-white painting. We are all a complex mix of our history, of our environment, of our education, of our emotions, desires and goals. All these variables interact with each other and change as a function of time. A famous investor called it the market’s reflexivity. Some belief in a free will - but it is much more likely that a good deal of randomness and external influences are as big a factor in who we are.

Some modern philosophers see Kant as a root cause of the black and white painting obsession: Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice ... We may have taken universalism two or three steps to far - conflating the micro with the macro. The problem is that by the process of Platonification we may miss some small but essential details in the transformation from the specific to the abstract construct.

My Vision

I am a physicist and my nature likes more exploration than exploitation. I want to do things and explore fields which have rarely seen a visitor before. So, my motto has always been not to be a special specialist for a specific problem. Studying physics and obtaining a PhD had a main motivation: to be able to understand and solve any kind of problem which comes along in the future. This is not the kind of challenge most companies offer. They most often look for a special tool to solve a specific problem - fast. It is pure exploitation. I need more time than a specialist to understand the state of knowledge for a certain project – this is compensated by working harder and searching for solutions much longer until most specialists have already given up. If the laws of physics do not prevent a solution I can find one.

Innovation

The dominant culture in many developed nations currently sets a very unfavorable background for innovation and exploration. First, there is an obsession about “responsibility”. When you have worked hard and have success, it is overlooked that luck probably played a big part in your achievement too. When you fail, your qualities, your decisions et cetera are “responsible” - without acknowledging that very likely some unfavorable circumstances also contributed to the outcome. In the deterministic chaos in which we live it is fair to expect that 50% of your success is due to luck. Some scientists may claim that their achievements were due to systematic planning – but in reality all big innovations and discoveries have come unexpected, a kind of side-product of other activities.

I only can promise that I work as hard as my capacities allow and that I make use of all my education, experience and ingenuity to solve your problem. There is no silver bullet to achieve success. History does not move smoothly forwards. It makes jumps. Culture demands steady payoffs. Reality is a series of long, uneventful episodes with occasional excitement.

Hume versus Leibnitz

In many parts of life there is currently an obsession about the right and the wrong way of doing things. Our social rules have a bias towards the belief that we have already achieved the end of history: the naïve belief that we have all the necessary information to solve our problems. Decision makers are not allowed to say "I do not know". The world is seeing many challenges at the time of writing in 2016: Brexit, Trumpism, Salafism, global migrant flows and economic imbalances, high atmospheric CO2 levels. Not to mention a lot of unsolved, benign problems: cancer, Alzheimer, aging population, health care costs, underfunded retirement funds. Instead of trying to practically solve these issues by experimentation most discussions are a kind of “my principles are the right way to do it and your approach is wrong”. Flexibility seems to be a stranger. Decision makers do not dare to say: "Okay, let us go left and if that doesn't work we go back and try the right route".

Leibnitz was the ultimate rationalist. Given a set of suitable axioms we can control our destiny. This is essentially a static world view. Many people assume that our old fashioned democratic principles (i.e. majority votes) miraculously will lead to a solution of our problems. Like the invisible hand. Empirical evidence tells a different story. With the Leibnitz style many problems in pure math can be solved. Nevertheless blindly believing in Newton’s laws would never have given us Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Leibnitz people are like ideologists: hating change. Hume was the ultimate empiricist. Only our experience tells us what works and what doesn’t. Somehow many things in our society are not working and to fix them we need to start experimentation.There exists no closed set of axioms from which we can deduce a solution. Blindly believing in an oldfashioned strategy is foolish.