Phase Transition

While I was studying subjects on analytics, calculus my side-reading was what one could call "grand explanation" books, on subjects ranging from history, strategy and the future. First book I picked was written by a Thomas Barnett, a strategist, where he talks about his "the core and the gap" theory. The gap? Basically what this guy did was plotting all trouble spots in the world and coming up with a huge "gap" on his map:

The sophistication of this analysis was sadly at the level of "bro - there is like a hole in there maaan! juust looook!", so I quickly moved on to other theories.  

The Tipping Point, Black Swan, Critical Mass were next. Critical Mass was interesting, written by Peter Ball, an ex-physicist, he looks (and finds) a lot of power laws in society, events that cannot be neatly explained by bell curves, linear correlations. A for effort, many anectodes, was a nice read. Same with TTP.

In whichever level of complexity however, all of these books had a theme in common -- they were all trying to find this unexpected "thing" that was causing the mayhem / causing a chain reaction. Why did they look for this unexpectedness? Because the world is messed up right? We look around and a lot of unexpected things are taking place. Well, and heere is the intellectual cavalry trying to explain it all. Did they succeed?

Partly.

Maybe the better idea would be to see the changes in society as a phase transition, and, focus on the phases, not the transition. Let me try to explain.

Let's take water turning into ice - below a certain temparature water will become ice. There is only a brief moment while the temparature is falling the water comes to a certain temparature when icicles start forming, and IMO that threshold is what books like Black Swan, The Tipping Point, Critical Mass keep focusing on. There is water, as it cools down a crystal appears, and another, and another, it spreads rapidly, and then all becomes ice. Wow! So awesome! Did you see that? One crystal appearing "out of nowhere", it spreads like "wildfire", totally unexpected.

However for all questions that matter, the when, the why of the transitionary points, the crystals forming is irrelevant.

What we can and should focus on, giving us better stronger analytical results and a more resillient model is looking at the "states", the phases in which water will stay in for a long time, or the old state it came from which it stayed for a long time.

Now subsitute technology for temparature, society for water. This is exactly what the 2nd Wave / 3rd Wave explanation tries to accomplish. As technology spreads, it forces a phase shift - we were all once living in agrarian societies, then industrialization arrived, before and after situation in such societies became radically different. Same kinds of people (sometimes exactly the same people) started living one way, as opposed to another.

More recent example:

Situation in the Middle East. Street vendor in Tunisia sets himself on fire, and we have dictators falling in the region. A tipping point? Did that minor (though sad) event truly cause everything else that followed? When we look at phases, instead of transitions, we see this: Wikileaks (technology) had arrived, ubiquituous use of cell phones, the Net (technology) had been increasing. Plus there is the backdrop of illegitimate Arab rulers (decaying old rule based on old technology), what do we have? Temparature (tech) comes in, first we see one crystal (guy sets himself on fire), and another, then another, at the end there is a different kind of society.

To sum up: we need to focus on the phases that are long lasting and distinctly seperate from eachother and treat freak events as occurences / projections of the transition in a brief moment. Icicles form, seeming randomly, unexpectedly, which point turns into ice first? Who cares? After a few degrees of change it will all become ice. It might seem one icicle is causing another, that is an illusion, or at best, irrelevant. Any part of the ice would do as a starting point, what matters is the end state, not the temporary, the transitional.

Let's continue further.. So I read about these "big" explanations it seemed like a lot of people like to borrow ideas from Quantum Mechanics, to support some life philosophy about unpredictability, all-life-choices-being-tried-out angle, "everything that can be tried is happening in some universe". That's what the famous QM double-slit experiment is all about right? An electron is shot towards two slits, it seemingly goes through both of them at the same time. Whatzup!

Scifi uses this idea to death - in any regular show they'll take one of the main recurring characters, send him to a parallel world, and in this other place dude is "different" - dressed in leather, has a goat tee maybe, has one of those pants with a butt cut-out.. He is superbad. QM in this form provides much fodder for this fairy tale of wonderous possibilities, adventures. Surprise! Wow! Dude! Where is my car?!!!

Newsflash: New findings suggest QM may actually be deterministic after all. God does not play dice with the universe (1stein was right). At the famous  Solvay meeting they told him to shut the hell up, Hawking would later then say "not only does God play dice, he is a degenerate gambler". I personally suspected something like this, oddly enough, I did not dabble in QM math much, but I studied Nonlinear Dynamics and Simulation (of which pseudorandom number generation is a big part -and also deterministic-). In ND, also known as Chaos Theory, the equations are nonlinear, but, at their core they are deterministic. Starting from a = 0.0001 you compute the next state, then again, and 100 step later totally depends on step 1.

Here is the catch however, make the starting condition 0.0002, 100 steps later looks radically different. Small changes build-up. That's where the so-called "unpredictability" comes from -- we cannot predict because we can never measure the initial condition precisely enough to give us an accurate 100-step-ahead prediction. Why not? Well, tools suck, whatever's being measured is too small etc.

But this is very different from saying "duude, the particle is everywheeere and nowheeere... until is measured, then like, it's there. The universe... is so vast [stoner accent]". 

Now - this "it's all crazy shit and all f**ed up", or "world of wonderous possibilities" is responsible for much of the new wave in the popular literature these days from Black Swan to Critical Mass to Tipping Point. These authors, it seems, have long given up on trying to understand anything, they are merely giving their readers the means to be awed by it, and telegram their awesome awednesses to others. This dont-explain-be-awed approach may actually be a new form of fatalism -not in a good way kind of fatalism, some forms of going with the flow can be good-. You can go to any direction with it, and still sound somewhat intelligible. Take any world event, the Syrian civil war for example, event X will happen and now you, the intelligent reader with a wine glass in hand can say "well.. yes X happened and blah was the tipping point". These critical points of course can never be predicted, they can only be feared, and talked about after the fact. Shit happens. We only rejoice about shit. We cant do anything else.

Obviously noone who is someone who decides anything thinks this way. Pros think in terms of end states: For Syria strategists would ponder the various end states the country can land into. And these are finite. They can be enumerated / thought about one by one. Syria with Assad, or Syria without Assad. Syria with Assad and some power sharing aggreement, or Syria with Assad and without a power sharing aggreement. On and on it goes.. These states are finite in number because most states are unlikely or next to impossible. There is no end-state where Assad marries his gay cousin and runs away to Idaho, settling down and baking cookies all day. Not gonna happen. Then these pros, once they flesh out these finite end-states, look at which ones are viable, and through which actions which can be reached. They dont twiddle their thumbs and await the "critical mass".

So what is deterministic? What is [pseudo] random? Going down to smaller scale and predicting smaller things - near random, hard due to measuring problem. At this scale things could well be random. Planets: big, easier to predict. Electron: small, hard to predict (and measure). Single person among millions: hard, too small. But measuring that single person many times forming larger patterns out the "many": easier [1]. Groups of people: easier. Groups of people in restricted systems (i.e. politicians): much, much easier.

Free will: it's there, but guided by character attributes, they define likes and dislikes. These likes, which are at emotional level, are very strong.

Our profiling also shows (we shared examples of this many times) people are on a development path, stuff that is not accomplished in this path comes back to the person over and over again in different forms. This repeat can be entertainingly varied, in an adventure game kind of way. I remember playing a game called Deus Ex once (the only adventure game I ever played until the end) and in one level I remember I had done everything possible, talked to the street corner guy, took a pack from the shady dude at a cafe, gave a student a pen, but I had not found [important item ___ ] that'd allow me to go the next level, so I am walking around in this huge city, back and forth, nothing is happening. You are sort of stuck in this minimal variation. Good times.