Power of One

Washington Enquirer, April 20, 2020

 

When almost a decade ago an obscure government funding agency added the word "One" to its name the concept quickly turned viral.  Soon enough unification became the word of the day. In hindsight, the leading cause for the movement was the collapse of the economy and the paralysis of the political system - one that persists until today.    Additionally, in times of austerity measures and budget cuts being "One" offers a minimum of protection by creating an illusion of indivisibility.  Whatever the reasons,  the forces of unification affected every aspect of life. Here, we will concentrate on science and education, topics that are dear to our readers and areas where our vigilance paid off  on numerous occasions.  

Unification is a uniquely human ability to counter evolutionary trends. Nature tends to mindlessly duplicate and diversify but we can move forward in a more organized fashion. For that reason the first initiative was OneTooMany. It was a gigantic program devoted to tracking unnecessary duplication. In science, it is responsible for the pruning of many branches of the Tree of Knowledge. At first we stopped investing in scientific facilities when it became obvious that others will build them anyway, and that they will report the findings. In early 2013 a french pastry chef from Detroit completed a long standing program of the classification of algebraic varieties, and similar examples of this kind followed. While these discoveries still wait for validation from mathematicians, it became obvious that relying on a single community for making discoveries in any specific area is a fatal mistake.  With scientific disciplines being  like thin fibers in a giant quilt,  research became massively interdisciplinary. The synergy and comraderie of interactions between experts none of which has a full grasp of what are they talking about had a transformative effect on scientific communities.   Under the program "Ask an Engineer" it became mandatory to include engineers and computer scientists in every scientific venture. These turned out to be nice and friendly chaps who could answer every conceivable question using simple simulations, modeling, or, in the case of older folks, a slide rule. In the end, all these initiatives started to converge to the present OneScience program. However, it  soon became obvious that the OneScience  program requires a new type of training. This is how the OneEducation program was born. Both OneScience and One Education are based on the ideas of multidisciplinary work. The premise is very simple: instead of focusing on specifics - a depth-first search that century after century turned out to be frustrating and inefficient, they focus on width-first search - looking for nothing in particular, or trying to learn a little bit of everything. Both programs turned out immensely popular, attracting a wide segment of the population to higher education and scientific research and virtually eliminating unemployment. Indeed, rather than struggling with Calculus, one can be more successful with Icelandic Mythology or Salmon Farming 101, without ruining  the chances of joining the scientific workforce. Depth-first and width-first searches are equivalent, and  there is the additional  bonus of finding more important things first when one uses width-first search. To wit, rather than the commercially useless Higgs boson, we need a faster router or a more competitive passenger car, and OneScience will certainly get there first. 

OneScience and OneEducation programs excel in inclusiveness. With a small slowdown in scientific advances, OneScience projects provide a number of secondary goals that guarantee that the project will be successful under most circumstances. Let us illustrate this with an example. Suppose that we would like to develop methods to predict where the next big earthquake is going to be, an important and timely task if one remembers the events of 2015. However, this is probably quite tricky. OneEarthquake Team  ought to involve a geologist, a mathematician, a chemist, a mandatory engineer, and for a good measure, a social scientist and a psychologist.  Still, as everybody knows,  OneEarthquake Team is unlikely to fully succeed because the task is too concrete and quite difficult. Furthermore, the fact that they all matriculated from OneEducation program may have further eroded the chances for success, since their attention span is greatly diminished. So rather than frustrate the OneEarthquake Team with the unreasonable expectation that they will accomplish their primary objective, OneScience imposes a  set of intermediate and more realistic goals. Membership in OneScience stipulates  that  all members  publish the same number of papers in appropriate journals,  participate equally in community outreach and recruitment of minorities, and that they all plant trees in a local park.  

In spite of unquestionable success in the decade long unification program, there are still lingering questions that remain unresolved. Historically, scientific research was for many centuries in the front line to improve the life of entire societies by  bringing unexpected goods by a way of discovery and furthering understanding. However, sometime in the early XX century we started running an intellectual deficit. This is when we began slipping behind the curve and dealing with questions that should have been solved ahead of time. Similarly to the budget deficit, the intellectual deficit was initially growing slowly but after nearly a century we developed huge blind spots when dealing with climate, internet security, environment, nuclear energy and scads of other issues.

In the end, the very same obscure government agency that gave us the idea of unification a decade ago was asked to maintain the balance of intellectual deficit and periodically request that the ceiling on intellectual deficit be raised accordingly. Luckily, unlike in the case of budget deficits, politicians are willing to go the extra mile to accommodate the growing intellectual deficit. 

Within the maintaining organization, this new assignment is nicknamed OneBigMess program, although it really is not a program in the same sense as OneScience or OneEducation. This is a long and sad laundry list of intellectual challenges that we failed to meet and that are left to future generations to deal with. Unlike the budget deficit, the intellectual deficit is difficult to price but there is a clear indication that non-knowledge can be very costly.  Furthermore, the intellectual deficit accrues interest and is immune to ordinary inflation. On the bright side, Wall Street lately introduced synthetic financial instruments that allow one to buy insurance  from the results of scientific ignorance (CSO - a Collateralized Stupidity Obligation), and this budding financial market seems to be on track to grow in volume.