Stewart Brand's Blog, page 36

Growing a forest of 5000 year trees

This month, your contributions to The Long Now Foundation support the creation of the Fund of the Long Now. We will leverage this fund, through centuries of interest and investments, to help make Long Now a truly long-term institution.

Supporters of the fund are receiving a limited edition Bristlecone Pine Tree Kit (pictured above) in honor of their substantive contribution. Our goal is to get kits out to as many donors as possible, but there are only a  limited number.  Bristlecone pine trees are considered the oldest living organisms in the world, known to last up to 5,000 years, and are a living symbol of our commitment to ensuring Long Now extends into the deep future.

We are happy to report that as of this morning, we’ve shipped more than 180 Bristlecone Kits to our supporters. To those who have contributed, thank you.

We need to reach $500,000 in order to put this fund into active management, and to generate good returns to support our activities and programming.

There is still time to join this year’s group of visionary donors in creating a truly long-term future through Long Now.

The Interval honored as one of “coolest businesses in San Francisco”

Long Now’s Bar & Cafe, The Interval, is honored to be included on Business Insider’s list of the 19 “coolest new businesses in San Francisco”. Thank you to our team and supporters who have made this project possible and created a new platform to engage the public with long-term thinking.

Sweden’s Minister of the Future

Sweden’s Minister of the Future, Kristina Persson, has been tasked with expanding the temporal horizons of government plans and “constantly remind others to include the long-term in the decision making process.”

The idea behind the creation of such a ministry was a simple one: for Sweden to remain competitive tomorrow, it might, unfortunately, have to take unpopular steps today—and since politics and politicians, given elections and interests, tend to focus on the short-term, a watchdog for the long-term was needed.

It’s easier said than done, as politics show us every day. Can you think of a politician willing to risk re-election for a better future they cannot benefit from? Most probably wouldn’t.

Read the full interview by Alberto Mucci at Vice Motherboard.

Getting Wiktionary into PanLex

If we want to achieve the miracle of translation from any language into any other language, it would be enormously helpful to have a machine that can translate any word, or word-like phrase, from any language into any other language. The PanLex project aims to build exactly that machine. It is documenting all known lexical translations among all the world’s languages and dialects. The project draws mainly on published sources rather than eliciting translations directly from native speakers. An obvious place to turn in working toward this ambitious goal is Wiktionary, an online multilingual dictionary with content curated by thousands of users. Wiktionary contains millions of translations in thousands of languages, and in fact was one of the first sources mined for PanLex in 02006. However, this was done as a rough one-off procedure that could not take advantage of the regular growth of Wiktionary over time. Over the past several months, the PanLex team has been developing a better procedure for incorporating most of Wiktionary’s translations into the PanLex database. This has turned out to be an intricate process.

Wiktionary is in fact many resources, not just one. There are more than 150 editions of Wiktionary, each based on a particular language. Each edition contains entries mainly in that language; many entries include translations into other languages. For example, the English Wiktionary contains an entry for the verb go, whose primary sense “to move through space” is translated into German as either gehen (“to walk”) or fahren (“to go by vehicle”). The German Wiktionary contains separate entries for gehen and fahren, each of which is translated into English as go. Entries among different Wiktionaries must be manually linked, as there is no reliable automatic way to do this.

Several factors make it very difficult to treat different Wiktionaries as a single, uniform, computer-readable resource. Each Wiktionary contains different editorial standards for the standard structure of an entry, and these standards are not perfectly followed by all editors. Furthermore, the wiki markup in which entries are written is designed to be easy for editors to learn, not easy for computers to parse.

The DBnary project, created by Gilles Sérasset at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, is an effort to convert some of the largest Wiktionaries (currently 13 editions) into linked online data. This means that the data are computer-readable and made to conform to existing standards for lexical data, language codes, parts of speech, and so on. DBnary is a valuable contribution to making Wiktionaries tractable for PanLex, without which our task would have been much more difficult. However, much additional work has been necessary to make use of DBnary.

DBary translation map of “cat”One major challenge in interpreting DBnary for PanLex is language variety identification. DBnary uses three-letter codes, drawn from the ISO 639-3 standard that identifies more than 7,000 languages. PanLex uses codes from this and other ISO 639 standards, but additionally recognizes varieties of each language, which generally correspond to dialects or to different script standards for writing the language. Given a language code and a text string in that language, it is no simple matter to identify the PanLex variety code. Many cases can be resolved with a heuristic that detects the string’s Unicode script (e.g., Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Han) and then looks for a variety of the appropriate language which is written in that script. For about a hundred more difficult cases, we have had to create custom mappings and (in a small number of cases) custom code.

Another major challenge in making use of DBnary is lemmatization. PanLex records only the lemma of any given word or phrase, which generally corresponds to a dictionary headword, also known as a citation form. For example, most English nouns are recorded in the singular (table, not tables), and verbs are recorded in the infinitive (go, not goes or went). Wiktionaries generally record lemmas as their translations, but there is significant messiness in the data. We use a variety of heuristics to detect whether a string is likely to be lemmatic. For example, we remove most parenthesized material from strings, so that “divan (old-fashioned)” is converted to “divan”; the complete original string is preserved as a definition. Strings that contain certain characters, such as commas or semicolons, are likely to be lists of translations rather than single translations and are also converted to definitions.

We have written extensive custom code to convert all 13 available DBnary editions into a format that can be ingested into the PanLex database. The resulting files contain over 4 million translations. We are still in the process of perfecting the code and expect to have the ingestion completed in 02015. This will represent a substantial contribution to PanLex, which currently contains about 57 million translations. Once the new DBnary-provided Wiktionary data are ingested, we will retire the out-of-date PanLex Wiktionary sources. We will also be able to periodically update PanLex with the latest data from DBnary, thereby incorporating new crowd-sourced Wiktionary translations.

The PanLex project is always looking for skilled help in analyzing sources such as Wiktionary. Other sources, though typically much smaller, present similar challenges. We currently hope to hire a small number of source analysts to process our ever-growing backlog of sources. If this sort of work would interest you, please contact info@panlex.org.

The Fund of the Long Now

June 02016 marks Long Now’s twentieth anniversary. In terms of a new nonprofit, it is a pretty good run. But for Long Now it means that we still have at least 9,980 years left to go…

So we decided to build a fund to better ensure our future, and at the same moment put deep time in your hands. We have created The Fund of the Long Now, a donor fund that we will invest in to help make Long Now a truly long-term institution.

The Bristlecone Pine Kit that includes its own tiny greenhouse tube.

As a thank you to those who provide tangible support to The Fund, we have made a limited edition set of Bristlecone Pine Tree Kits. These kits will be sent to everyone who can make a substantive donation.

The bristlecone is one of the longest living species on earth, and a living symbol of our shared commitment to the deep future, whether we measure that in centuries or millennia. The Fund of the Long Now is being built to back up our promise to that future, and to support the operating budget of a truly long-term cultural institution.

Once we reach $500,000, The Fund of the Long Now will go into active management that is specifically designed around long-term thinking. We have been testing the principles of the fund with our financial advisors for several years, and will continue to tune it as we move forward.

What your bristlecone tree will look like after about 5,000 years. Individual results may vary.

The idea behind the Fund originates from one of our core principles, to leverage longevity, and was best illustrated in Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now. So as you consider making a contribution we leave you with his quote:

The slow stuff is the serious stuff, but it is invisible to us quick learners. Our senses and our thinking habits are tuned to what is sudden, and oblivious to anything gradual. Between the near-impossible win of a lottery and the certain win of earning compound interest, we choose the lottery because it is sudden. The difference between fast news and slow nonnews is what makes gambling addictive. Winning is an event that we notice and base our behavior on, while the relentless losing, losing, losing is a nonevent, inspiring no particular behavior, and so we miss the real event, which is that to gamble is to lose.

What happens fast is illusion, what happens slow is reality. The job of the long view is to penetrate illusion.

Philip Tetlock Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Superforecasting

Monday November 23, 02015 – San Francisco

Audio is up on the Tetlock Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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All it takes to improve forecasting is KEEP SCORE – a summary by Stewart Brand

Will Syria’s President Assad still be in power at the end of next year? Will Russia and China hold joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean in the next six months? Will the Oil Volatility Index fall below 25 in 2016? Will the Arctic sea ice mass be lower next summer than it was last summer?

Five hundred such questions of geopolitical import were posed in tournament mode to thousands of amateur forecasters by IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity–between 2011 and 2015. (Tetlock mentioned that senior US intelligence officials opposed the project, but younger-generation staff were able to push it through.) Extremely careful score was kept, and before long the most adept amateur “superforecasters” were doing 30 percent better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information. They were also better than prediction markets and drastically better than famous pundits and politicians, who Tetlock described as engaging in deliberately vague “ideological kabuki dance.”

What made the amateurs so powerful was Tetlock’s insistence that they score geopolitical predictions the way meteorologists score weather predictions and then learn how to improve their scores accordingly. Meteorologists predict in percentages—“there is a 70 percent chance of rain on Thursday.” It takes time and statistics to find out how good a particular meteorologist is. If 7 out of 10 such times it in fact rained, the meteorologist gets a high score for calibration (the right percentage) and for resolution (it mostly did rain). Superforecasters, remarkably, assigned probability estimates of 72-76 percent to things that happened and 24-28 percent to things that didn’t.

How did they do that? They learned, Tetlock said, to avoid falling for the “gambler’s fallacy”—detecting nonexistent patterns. They learned objectivity—the aggressive open-mindedness it takes to set aside personal theories of public events. They learned to not overcompensate for previous mistakes—the way American intelligence professionals overcompensated for the false negative of 9/11 with the false positive of mass weapons in Saddam’s Iraq. They learned to analyze from the outside in—Assad is a dictator; most dictators stay in office a very long time; consider any current news out of Syria in that light. And they learned to balance between over-adjustment to new evidence (“This changes everything”) and under-adjustment (“This is just a blip”), and between overconfidence (“100 percent!”) and over-timidity (“Um, 50 percent”). “You only win a forecasting tournament,” Tetlock said, “by being decisive—justifiably decisive.”

Much of the best forecasting came from teams that learned to collaborate adroitly. Diversity on the teams helped. One important trick was to give extra weight to the best individual forecasters. Another was to “extremize” to compensate for the conservatism of aggregate forecasts—if everyone says the chances are around 66 percent, then the real chances are probably higher.

In the Q & A following his talk Tetlock was asked if the US intelligence community would incorporate the lessons of its forecasting tournament. He said he is cautiously optimistic. Pressed for a number, he declared, “Ten years from now I would offer the probability of .7 that there will be ten times more numerical probability estimates in national intelligence estimates than there were in 2005.”

Asked about long-term forecasting, he replied, “Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Support Long Now while you shop Amazon this Holiday Season

This holiday season you can support Long Now while you shop on Amazon by listing us as your charity of choice for “AmazonSmile.” When you list us as your charity, .5% of the price of eligible products will be donated to us when you purchase them on Amazon.

To list us as your charity, follow our AmazonSmile link.

Thank you for all your support.

Why build a 10,000 Year Clock?

Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum of Public Record released this short video about The Clock of The Long Now this week at the New York Documentary Film Festival and it can also be seen at The Atlantic.

The Artangel Longplayer Letters: Manuel Arriaga writes to Giles Fraser

In May, John Burnside  wrote a letter to Manuel Arriga as part of the Artangel Longplayer Letters series. The series is a relay-style correspondence: The first letter was written by Brian Eno to Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb then wrote to Stewart Brand, and Stewart wrote to Esther Dyson, who wrote to Carne Ross, who wrote to John Burnside, who wrote to Manuel Arriaga. Manuel’s response is now addressed to Giles Fraser, a priest, professor, and journalist who studies contemporary ethics, who will respond with a letter to a recipient of his choosing.

The discussion thus far has focused on the extent and ways government and technology can foster long-term thinking. You can find the previous correspondences here.

From: Manuel Arriaga, New York

To: Giles Fraser, London

16 November 2015

Dear Giles,

Reading the earlier letters in this exchange, it strikes me that the issue of long-term thinking is twofold. Its challenges make themselves felt at two very different levels: the individual and the collective.

As individuals we are notoriously prone to myopic decision-making. The work of cognitive psychologists such as Tversky and Kahneman, whom Stewart Brand quoted in his letter, abundantly documents the biases that plague each of us as we try to act “rationally”. When the temporal horizon expands and making a good decision today depends on properly weighing benefits and costs that are far into the future, we do a particularly poor job. It doesn’t help that, when we look into the more distant future, such consequences are probabilistic rather than certain.

A second, distinct problem has to do with collective decision making. How can we, as a society, adequately handle issues that have long-term consequences? Obviously, different people will list different concerns, but there is a widespread perception that our political life is too caught up in the ephemeral, all the while neglecting to pay proper attention to a number of looming structural challenges.

Why does this distinction between the individual and the collective matter? Because the pathologies that afflict us as a society are not simply the sum – nor the inevitable consequence – of our limitations as individuals. Instead, we have put in place specific procedures and collective decision-making mechanisms that ensure that our individual-level myopia will be amplified when we collectively make decisions. (It is in this sense that, as Esther Dyson wrote, “long-term thinking and collective action are two sides of the same coin.”) Our political system(s) almost seems designed to take our innate biases and ensure that, as a society, we act in a way that would make the most foolhardy and impulsive teenager seem wise by comparison.

Consider elections, perhaps one of the most celebrated institutions of modern times – the only widely-accepted way for the public to delegate power into the hands of a small number of politicians. This provides a way to hold those we elect accountable and gives (some measure of) protection against authoritarian abuses of power.

However, as is painfully evident in 2015, elections also foster shortsightedness in a myriad of ways. Politicians are immersed in the media and electoral cycles, unable to extend their vision beyond the dual horizons of the day’s media coverage and the forthcoming election. Citizens are invited to pick representatives (and occasionally to vote on ballot measures) with little to no serious reflection and on the basis of a wholly inadequate information diet. Finally, journalists find themselves working in an ever-accelerating environment, where they often feel that careful, in-depth coverage of policy issues no longer has a place and must be sacrificed at the altar of sensationalism, high ratings and social media buzz. To borrow Brian Eno’s phrase, the whole system seems geared towards “increasingly short nows”.

Needless to say, we should be doing the opposite. We should be devising collective governance mechanisms that bring out the best in our thinking, creating ways to make decisions that will help us, as a society, overcome our innate myopia and the biases that plague our reasoning. The good news is that I sincerely believe that we have at our disposal a concrete, albeit little known, way to do just that. Its wider adoption promises to make the collective more, rather than less, intelligent than the individual – in short, the kind of change of method that would, as Carne Ross put it, be “tantamount to changing the outcome” in matters of policy that require deep long-term political thinking.

One way to achieve this is through a practice known as citizen deliberation: the use of large panels of randomly selected people to carefully reflect and decide on complex policy matters. Unlike professional politicians, such a representative sample of ordinary citizens has all the incentives – and close to none of the disincentives – to properly think through the long-term consequences of different policy choices. Furthermore, if the deliberation process were rigorously conducted, these citizen panels would be able to see through the “ideology and ghost stories,” as Stewart Brand puts it, that typically plague such decisions.

Greater use of citizen deliberation in policy making could be a powerful antidote to many of the ills we have been identifying. However, in my short book Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics, a specific concern over our difficulty in making reasoned long-term choices prompted me to suggest a blueprint for a particular kind of institution. A “Long Now Citizens’ Assembly” (the name was meant as a not-so-subtle nod to the inspiring work of the Long Now Foundation) would be a large citizen panel that would convene every ten years. These citizens would be tasked with defining a collective political vision, thereby setting out some key choices in terms of the direction their nation, region or city should take, subject to approval in a referendum. The decade between meetings would make it unambiguously clear that the panel existed in a different temporal plane from that of electoral party politics.

Although citizen deliberation dates back to ancient Greece, the idea of involving ordinary citizens in real-world policy making invariably comes as a shock to many. However, skepticism dissipates as people come to understand how citizen deliberation works in practice. The citizen panel carries out an in-depth study and analysis of the issue(s) at hand, including consultations with policy makers, interest groups, scientific experts and others. They deliberate, at length and with the assistance of skilled facilitators, about the available policy choices and their possible impact. The process has nothing in common with the rowdy scenes and uninformed shouting matches that characterized, for example, the town hall meetings on healthcare reform in the United States back in 2009.

A commonly-voiced concern is whether ordinary citizens have what it takes – are they intelligent enough to address complex policy issues? Here, too, doubts prove unfounded. Stanford Professor James Fishkin, one of the world’s foremost experts on citizen deliberation, writes that “the public is very smart if you give them a chance. If people think their voice actually matters, they’ll do the hard work, really study, … ask the experts smart questions and then make tough decisions. When they hear the experts disagreeing, they’re forced to think for themselves. About 70% change their minds in the process.” He assures us that “citizens can become better informed and master the most complex issues of state government if they are given the chance.”

The promise of citizen deliberation is that it could free policy making from the well-known biases that plague professional politicians. Ordinary citizens, chosen at random and for a single, non-renewable term, can act – just like a jury in court – in what they perceive to be the true long-term public interest, free from the pressures of facing reelection. They don’t have to worry about how necessary-but-unpopular measures will adversely impact their popularity ratings.

But perhaps the most exciting aspect is that none of this is idle, academic speculation. Recent experiences show how well citizen deliberation works in practice. In 2004, a randomly-chosen panel of 160 citizens was tasked by the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia with reforming the province’s electoral system. After drawing on the input of a wide variety of experts, consulting the public, and deliberating at length, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform ended up suggesting a type of electoral system that, in the words of Professor David Farrell, a renowned expert on electoral systems, “politicians, given a choice, would probably least like to see introduced but which voters, given a choice, should choose.” The assembly’s proposal was later approved by 58% of the popular vote in a referendum, yet regrettably failed to meet the strict requirements imposed by the provincial government for its results to be considered binding, and therefore has yet to be implemented.

Similarly encouraging results are reported from the U.S. state of Oregon. Since 2010, citizen deliberation has been used to assist Oregon voters in state-wide ballot initiatives. In a process known as the “Citizen Initiative Review,” a panel of about twenty-five randomly chosen Oregonians is tasked with carefully researching and deliberating on the ballot measure up for a vote. At the end of this process, an accessible and highly informative set of “key findings”, as well as an indication of how many panelists ultimately supported and opposed the proposed measure, are presented as a “citizens’ statement” in the pamphlet that voters receive in the mail before a ballot. Research confirms that this citizens’ statement not only makes voters better informed, but also has a substantial influence on the voting behavior of those who read it.

In his letter, John Burnside rightly wonders if – in light of the substantial social change that would be required just to bring rampant environmental destruction under control – it might be too optimistic to place that much faith in the abilities of our fellow citizens. When one pauses to consider what is at stake and how far we are from attaining that goal, it is impossible not to share his concern. Yet, I can think of no other collective decision making system better equipped to handle such a challenge. After all, the kind of major lifestyle changes that seem necessary are utterly indefensible by professional politicians seeking (re)election. We can also hope for the success of NGOs and other groups in civil society trying to promote greater environmental awareness, yet their odds of effecting major changes seem awfully limited as long as our so-called democracies remain deaf to voices other than those stemming from powerful economic interests (or, perhaps just as depressingly, focus groups). Our best hope perhaps lies in the abilities of ordinary citizens to collectively engage with these difficult issues and then share their findings with the broader public.

Giles, in this letter I deliberately adopted an “engineering” perspective – that of a self-confessed geek who asks himself how we might reform a system so that it can generate what I consider to be better outcomes. I did so aware of the violent oversimplification entailed in this process, any hopes of true change ultimately depending on our values and how they come to evolve over time.

As argued above, I believe that citizen deliberation offers us a powerful way to cut through the everyday froth, to reflect on and articulate what our values truly are and which reforms are needed so that, together, we can build a future that is true to those values. Yet, this is at best a tiny piece of the puzzle. I very much look forward to seeing where you will choose to take this conversation next.

All my best,

Manuel.

Manuel Arriaga is a visiting research professor at New York University and a fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2014, he published Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics, which, by the end of the same year, had become the #1 best-selling book on democracy on Amazon UK. He is currently working on a film project on democratic innovations. More information about his work can be found at  http://www.rebootdemocracy.org.

Giles Fraser is a priest of the Church of England and a journalist. He is currently the parish priest at St Mary’s, Newington, near the Elephant and Castle, London, and writes a weekly Saturday column Loose Canon for The Guardian, as well as appearing frequently on BBC Radio 4. He is a regular contributor on Thought for the Day and a panellist on The Moral Maze. He is visiting professor in the anthropology department at the London School of Economics. He was previously Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral and director of the St Paul’s Institute from 2009 until his resignation in October 2011. As Canon Chancellor, Fraser was a residentiary canon with special responsibility for contemporary ethics and engagement with the City of London as a financial centre.

Andy Weir Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Red Planet for Real

Tuesday October 27, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Weir Seminar page.

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Audio is up on the Weir Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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