thinkfetti

Many things that are interesting to think about are also discouraging, at least initially. The “tragedy of the commons” is one such subject. The commons is communal property - imagine a square of pasture where everyone can graze their livestock. Each individual is allowed to add another animal to graze, because the commons belongs to everyone. Of course, it’s in the public’s best interest not to overgraze the pasture, but at the same time, individuals aren’t punished or fined by incrementally adding to the number of animals grazing. The tragedy of the commons reflects the tendency of individual, or local incentive, to trump global concerns: it seems that the commons generally tends to lose out, to the extent that there aren’t protective provisions in place.

In countries where taxes are collected, some of the revenues support public benefits. But in no such country is it optional to pay taxes, because the group of individual potential taxpayers would succumb to the tragedy of the commons.

As a department chairman, most of my work is in a supporting role for my department. I do some required tasks (reports and such) so that others in the department don’t have to. (Other department chairs choose to delegate this kind of work to other department members - that doesn’t really matter to my point.) But I am also the go-to person for faculty requests - everything from preferential consideration on course assignments to course release time, travel funding, student or colleague-related problem solving, or other special requests.

I do what I can to help the department as a whole function effectively and efficiently, and I also do what I can to help individual faculty members succeed in their careers. But I am the commons. I serve all, but each has some incentive to try to get something from me, and once I have been overgrazed, I will have no resources left to help the community.

I can see that I must generate my own protections in this type of service role, because no one else has acted to create them.

This past week, D. Eric Smith, a resident researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, spoke at my university about the beginning of life on Earth. His talk was compelling, and although his talk was directed at a scientifically-literate general audience including undergraduates and faculty, his background and work betray extensive breadth and depth of thought.

I had an opportunity to talk with Eric earlier in the day about my potential interest in developing an introductory undergraduate course on complexity theory or self-organization. He suggested Jaynes’ book on probability theory as a good starting point for the course, a way to efficiently clear up some misconceptions about design, causality, reductionist approaches in science, and statistical mechanics. It’s been awhile since I have really done math; my undergraduate physics degree from Harvey Mudd and my graduate physics coursework at UC Berkeley were relatively math-intensive, but since 1993 my work has been primarily in qualitative-study-leaning subjects such as music (the quadrivium notwithstanding). So I knew I was going to be in for a challenge.

I checked out Jaynes’ book from our library, and it remains to be seen how far I will be able to work my way through it, but to this point, the effort required is certainly worth it. (I’ll probably end up buying my own copy, so I can write in it…)

The book explores logic and probability theory and connects them (or will connect them) to how we as people work with plausibility. In other words, this book seems to be a bridge between core aspects of science and several important pieces of philosophy and psychology.

The text also is already helping me refine and expand my thinking in other areas, such as in the course I’m teaching on TRIZ, a problem-solving methodology. For example, in formal logic, if A is a proposition, the consequences of the mutual exclusivity of A and not-A are the starting point for a vast exposition and development of powerful tools. In TRIZ by contrast, one of the methods for catalyzing problem solutions is to formulate a so-called “physical contradiction.” Here is an example of a physical contradiction: an object in a particular design situation must be heavy and it must not be heavy. Or a chemical in a particular context must be soluble and it must not be soluble. In other words, the categorical avoidance of contradiction is a starting point for formal logic, but the focusing of a conflict into a contradiction is a starting point for the problem solving heuristics of TRIZ. In Taoism, the idea of contradiction may also be seen to be generative, this time in still another way.