Tag Archives: technology

Enlightened Business, Musings & Adventures, Uncategorized

Thomas W Malone on Collective Intelligence, with interesting findings about Gender and Intelligence

Head to edge.org  to watch this  video of Thomas W Malone speaking about Collective Intelligence.  Among his many interesting findings, he discloses a significant gem about gender and intelligence of groups.  Malone teaches at MIT Sloan School of Management.

at 9:05:

“we found that the collective intelligence of the group was significantly correlated with the percentage of women in the group… it looks like it’s a more or less linear trend where more women are better all the way up to all women.  Now, Also important to realize that the gender effect is largely statistically mediated by the social perceptiveness effect.”

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Meditatation, Musings & Adventures, Random

Loving Kindness, Compassion, Mass Destruction and the Singularity

These are some of my thoughts on what tantric meditation traditions have to tell us about how to pro-actively deal with situations where technology triggers culture-wide crises of identity and ethics. It’s all about training the mind.

In 2001 Dr. Vladimir Chaloupka at University of Washington invited me to participate in a graduate seminar on “Knowledge Enabled Mass Destruction” whose purpose was to foster interdisciplinary discourse about the feasibility of, and possible responses to, the kind of global threats posed by Eric Drexler’s Grey Goo Problem and Bill Joy’s related essay Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. In short, if you measure the progress of civilization in terms of the amount of damage that could be wrought by five determined people acting on their own, what does it mean when you reach a point where those five people could wipe out civilization completely, or make the planet uninhabitable? Is that even possible? Have we already reached that point? What can/should we do in response? As discourse and speculation about the so-called singularity continues to build, this topic seems more relevant than ever.

I think Dr Chaloupka’s reason for hosting the seminar sheds useful light on the subject. He said that the nuclear bomb led Physicists to talk about ethics for the first time in a field that is designed to be entirely focused on observable facts, explicitly excluding any deference to normativity. He painted a picture of this high-minded pursuit of pure science being stopped in its tracks by that single moment where the hubris of scientific progress led to holocaust on a previously unimaginable scale. He said the discipline of Physics was forever changed by the burden of knowing that their work had produced nuclear bombs, and thus indirectly made nuclear proliferation possible. This has led Physicists to tackle issues of global ethics in ways that most other traditions haven’t. As other fields have now taken on a pace & tone of innovation that almost promises the invention of new horrific dangers, he wondered if the contrite inventors of the atom bomb might offer some guidance or preemptive inspiration towards caution.

Dr Chaloupka asked each participant in the seminar to present some contribution from zir own field of expertise. For example, a virologist addressed questions about weaponized superbugs and an engineer described the nuances of nanotech. I, an undergrad pursuing a Bachelors in Comparative Religion, spoke about Tantric Sex. My presentation focused on the fact that tantric traditions include meditation practices that are dangerous if you engage in them if you’re not adequately prepared.

Though the idea of a meditation practice being dangerous may seem strange, there’s ample evidence floating around these days. Some people definitely get really messed up when they do this stuff. Even with carefully maintained traditions, things get seriously colorful at moments. For this reason, before teaching these meditation techniques, authentic lineages are extremely careful to ensure that practitioners have first completed the appropriate foundational practices to stabilize their minds.

There is a wild and colorful variety of tantric traditions. Most of their practices do not involve sex at all. I chose to focus on tantric sex for this presentation because it’s something appealing and potent that has come to be taught outside the original traditions. I drew the parallel that tinkering with potent technologies in pursuit of exciting innovations is like going to some snazzy weekend course on tantric sex and then tinkering with the techniques in pursuit of better orgasms.

In the end, I was happy with my choice of subject matter, but I wasn’t satisfied with my presentation. When I finished my slides, the other participants asked questions to the effect of “Ok. So these traditions say you should be careful to prepare before you let the cat out of the bag, but what does that tell us about how to deal with a situation where the cat (technologies allowing determined people to do global harm) was never in a bag?” I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer, despite being convinced that there was something to be gleaned from this parallel. I simply didn’t know enough about the subject.

For years afterward, I’ve periodically sought to formulate a more complete presentation of the idea I was trying to get across. Now finally, I think I might have put my finger on it. I’m not going to speak about tantric sex, though it’s such a compelling idea. Instead, I’m going to look at the traditional purpose of initiation and secrecy in tantric traditions and how that applies to the contemporary crisis of ethics that Dr. Chaloupka challenged us to address. This analysis definitely applies to the idea that humanity is approaching a technological singularity, but it also applies to run-of-the-mill crises of ethics triggered by technological advancement.

Tantric meditation traditions carry thousands of years worth of repeatable observations, drawn from trial and error, about the potential and limitations of the human mind. They also carry myriad praxes/technologies for fulfilling that potential. What does that tell us about super viruses and murderous nanobots? Actually, it tells us a lot. Remember that technology is created and used by humans. To understand technology, you must look at the human mind. In that sense, these tantric traditions are particularly useful because they’re all about skillfully working with the mind when it’s at its most potent, when it’s overwhelmed by its own energy.

Why do tantric meditation traditions have structures of secrecy and initiation? Within these traditions, the few practices that are kept secret are ones that are particularly potent. They’re designed to dismantle the ego and obliterate our ordinary, confused ways of seeing things so that the practitioner can perform the profoundly simple act of nakedly seeing mind as it is. In a way, these practices are invoking a deep crisis of identity that cuts straight down to your fundamental concepts about reality. If you encounter practices like this outside the context of the tradition in which they were developed, there are four main dangers:

1) You could pose a danger to yourself.
2) You could pose a danger to others.
3) You just might miss the point, or get the wrong point. In other words, for pragmatic pedagogical reasons, things are presented in a particular order.
4) You could pose a danger to the tradition.

What does that mean, and what does it mean to be adequately prepared? Of course the details will be unique to every tradition, practice, and teacher, but there are some basic patterns that apply consistently.

1) Without mental stability you could pose a danger to yourself.
2) Without loving kindness and compassion, you could pose a danger to others.
3) Without precise understanding of what you are/aren’t doing, what’s being communicated, and why you’re doing it, you might not get any benefit from the practice or might harm the tradition by developing an incorrect understanding of the practices being transmitted.

So the reasons for this secrecy are actually very practical, and the fundamental requirements for doing these tantric practices are the same key things that all Buddhist traditions emphasize: mental stability (shamatha), loving kindness & compassion (bodhicitta), and precise understanding (prajna) combied with insight (vipassana).

We can apply this directly to the crisis of ethics posed by technological advancement, which actually comes down to a crisis of psyche and a crisis of society triggered by the fact that technology is outpacing our psychic and social capacities. Specifically, this manifests as

1) Crisis of mental stability
2) Crisis of ethics & normative decisions
3) Crisis of realizing that we lack understanding, lack connection with reality, and lack insight into what we’re doing or why we’re doing it

As you can see, it’s the same issues. We’re encountering a crisis of identity — one that could challenge our fundamental concepts about reality — and what we lack are mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight. It’s the same situation, with the same solution.

Say you did take that snazzy weekend course and instead of groovy orgasms you got a tantra-style psychological crisis and totally freaked out. Now your mind’s been blown and it keeps re-blowing and you can’t cope at all. What do you do? If you’re lucky, it occurs to you to go find an authentic master and ask zir for help. While the advice you get from that master could end up being almost anything, we can be certain that the remedy is going to eventually focus on those same ingredients that I keep repeating — mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight.

Solution: Training the Mind

Here’s the good news. Absolutely every moment is a crisis of the sort we’re talking about, and always has been, because our confused way of seeing the world doesn’t line up with reality. Our ordinary way of thinking assumes that reality is made up of finite truly existent things experienced by a finite truly existent self, but we know that’s not true. That friction manifests as constant dissatisfaction, which Buddha called dukkha (suffering). The Buddha spent a lot of time cutting to the heart of the matter of suffering and he found that it has a cause — confusion/ignorance — which can be cut. What methodology did he use to cut that cause of suffering? Mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight. [This paragraph is paraphrasing the Four Noble Truths, which is the first thing the Buddha taught and comprises the most essential Buddhist tenets.]

The mind is plastic. You can cultivate these things. These are the authentic, tested means. Test them. Until you do cultivate them, the crisis will continue and you will continue to harm yourself and others over and over and over and over. Grey goo is just the latest turn.

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Creative Culture, Enlightened Business, Musings & Adventures

We wanted world peace. Instead we got viral videos.

06 January 2013
Mumbai,  Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport (BOM), International Terminal

On last night’s flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam, along the way to Kathmandu via Mumbai,  I found myself sitting next to a woman who works with the Aspen Institute. She’s a former Fellow of the institute who continues to participate in their activities by serving as an occasional organizer and mentor.  Impulsively, I asked what the Aspen Institute thinks of B Corps.  She informed me that B Corps were actually created by an Aspen Institute fellow, a friend of hers, who worked on creating the B-Corp structure as part of his fellowship.  How exciting!  We spoke briefly about it but she seemed tired and not particularly excited about the prospect of spending a transatlantic flight getting her brain picked by a strangely enthusiastic hacker who wants to talk about about corporate structures.

Etiquette constrained what I could say, and how much of her attention I could presume to demand.  She was, after all, trapped in her seat between me and the airplane chassis.  She was at a disadvantage; basic manners dictated that I should not commandeer her headspace.  What I really wanted to tell her was that I was sitting on that plane right then, escaping to a monastery in Nepal, because I’ve had a crisis of orientation & resolve.  Fundamentally, I believe that the only way to make life meaningful is to cherish benefit for others and to bend one’s life and opportunities towards creating that benefit. How does one translate this conviction into action?  For nearly a decade my path has been to explore what it takes to build technologies and companies that create benefit through dissemination of information, preservation of human knowledge, and celebration of craft.  I intend to continue that work because many things about it ring true but, in part, I’m reeling from a lack of camaraderie because, more broadly, I find myself grappling with unsolved, contentious questions about the structure, function, and limitations of the modern capitalist economy.

I think that corporate culture and startup culture are biased against thinking seriously about social benefit because we all believe, to some extent, that capitalism is fundamentally cold, selfish and skewed in favor of exploiting the poor while rewarding those who are already well off.  Part and parcel with that belief is the assumption that the primary ways of explicitly achieving benefit  are through charity and/or government welfare rather than commerce.  However, when I look at my personal  experiences in business while scrutinizing the mechanisms of suffering, injustice & welfare and considering the past 40 years of research into topics like game theory & behavioral economics, I see a remarkable amount of graceful skill in the patterns of modern capitalism.  I find myself suspecting that free market advocates might be right -that capitalism itself can and does serve as a great tool for achieving benefit, and the things that make capitalism harmful are mistakes of distortion.  This is only a suspicion; I remain skeptical while intrigued.  If my goal was to merely achieve benefit for myself while telling a good story about why my actions are actually beneficial for everyone, I could glean convenient satisfaction from the existing free market argument.  Alas, my goal is the opposite; my goal is to act for the benefit of everyone while telling a good story about why that’s even possible.  This leaves me inclined to proceed with caution.

I’ve personally witnessed how embarrassingly easy it is for a bright individual to raise giant sums of money in order to build technologies and companies whose focus is relentless financial profit.  More importantly, with that money comes brilliant, skillful, well informed guidance from mentors who know how technologies work and  how companies grow.  In contrast, it’s remarkably difficult to find shrewd guidance, funding, or even encouragement when attempting to create technologies and companies whose primary purpose is benefit rather than profit.  In that domain, there is very little support infrastructure that a person like myself can readily access, and there’s even less community.  I’m not saying that this support infrastructure and community are nonexistent, rather that they are difficult to access and insufficiently prominent in the flow of civil discourse.  Organizations like the Aspen Institute are out there drumming up discussions, but we need to see a lot more of it.  For example, If you were to toss around cocktails at almost any bar in San Francisco you would be able to find a chorus of silicon valley devotees proffering intense, opinionated, well informed conversation about topics like profit models for tech startups or equity strategies for stakeholders.  Some of those devotees will be schmucks, but others will turn out to be genuinely talented and insightful individuals who are ready and willing to act as sounding boards for new ideas and new perspectives, as long as your ideas fit within the established paradigm of software startup culture.  Where can I find that same kind of sounding board when I need to have a serious, pragmatic conversation about finding the balance between idealistic vision and sustainability?  Where do I turn when I need to discern between a shrewd business decision and a good one?  Why does it feel like I lose connection with the people asking these types of questions when I assert that market forces and modest profit models are preferable to relying on government funding, charitable organizations and grant cycles?

Venture Capitalists like the Founders Fund challenge us to be strident and visionary — they complain that “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”.  They have a great point, but they call for a bland, technocratic type of visionary thinking. What about asking whether flying cars will do any meaningful good in a culture that lacks compassion, and what about acknowledging that in the pursuit of flying cars we will run a high risk of inventing new forms of weapons while potentially giving rise to new flavors of coercion, conflict, environmental ailment and strife? Progress is a deceptive thing, and the relationship between technology & happiness is fraught with complexities.

I am a strident technologist, inventor, creator and futuristic dreamer, but I have no interest in merely pushing technology (or art) forward.  That type of so-called forward motion is a thinly veiled illusion.

I know that I’m not alone in harboring these sentiments, and I’m hopeful that the world is secretly bedazzled with a network of pragmatic dreamers who get it. I see their sentiments reverberating in the ideas of those around me, but these ideas are beseiged by skepticism and they grind against the presumption that kindness, generosity and concern for human happiness are incompatible with successful business.

Where is the chorus of benefit-driven ventures?  Why isn’t it the dominant voice in our culture and economy? How can I participate in that chorus? Who will help me steer true?  Where are you?

It’s thoughts like these that are driving me to Pullahari.  I have built plenty of momentum in my work, but that is not enough to ensure it will be benefitial to others.  On a fundamental level, I’m convinced that the adjustment I need to make is mental.  After all, our mental habits and views dictate our actions. Our actions, in turn, create our world.  Hence, a sabbatical on a mountaintop in Nepal, spent translating & meditating on Shantideva‘s Bodhicaryāvatāra, is exactly what I need right now.

I guess the other reason why I held my tongue with my fellow airline passenger from the Aspen Institute is that I don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions or innovations yet.  I don’t even have a coherent critique of what I see as the current state of things.  All I have are open-ended questions, some experience,  a bit of lonely frustration, and a strange long-shot hunch that my next steps have something to do with storytelling.  We will see where this goes.

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Uncategorized

Training Wheels & Neuroscience-based Meditation Tools

As a kid, I had a hard time learning to ride a bike.  Try as I might, I simply couldn’t make it work.  Eventually, after I had become resigned to never getting the knack, a neighbor named Elsa pressed me to try one more time.  After watching me try, she said “I know what’s wrong.” and removed the training wheels from the bike.  “Now try”, she said.  Skeptical but willing, I climbed onto the bike and rode — up the block, down the block, no problem.  We both hooted with delight as I took a victory lap.  All along, the training wheels had been the obstacle.  Thinking that the wheels were supposed to function like a tricycle, I had tried to keep at least one wheel on the ground at all times, which obviously prevented me from ever finding my balance.  The training tool had fundamentally distorted my understanding of what I was supposed to be learning.

I worry that the same thing will happen when people try to learn meditation using neuroscience-based tools — biofeedback devices, brainwave training tools, and especially pharmaceuticals.  In the case of bicycles and training wheels, I was the anomaly; most kids don’t encounter the confusion that I had.  By contrast, with meditation I think theres a much higher risk of misunderstanding.  First of all, the basic science of neruophysiology & meditation remains alarmingly incomplete and fraught with serious confusion, meaning that any of these tools that crop up are building on fuzzy science.  Second, mind-training skills are more complicated to acquire than riding a bike, meaning that oversimplification of the learning process is a serious risk.  Third, as a culture, we are much more adept at understanding & manipulating external, physical things like bicycles than we are at understanding or even scrutinizing our own minds.  

Next time you see me shrug my shoulders at the topic of these new neuroscience-based meditation “tools”, think of a little freckled redheaded kid frustratedly trying and failing to ride a bike with one training wheel firmly planted on the ground.

Meditation isn’t just a skill that you can acquire and keep in your pocket, nor is it a state that you can cook up and then repeatedly return to.  Meditation is an ongoing process or a way of relating with your mind, and all of the value of meditation comes from repeatedly working with your own mind through sustained effort & observation.  This doesn’t mean that we will be unable to use neuroscience to craft tools that do truly help people to learn meditation, but it does mean that we should be very skeptical of each attempt and patient along the way.

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